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Developer Diary: Creative Director Neil McEwan
Posted by Neil McEwan at 01:23PM on Tuesday, December, 06, 2011
So it’s my turn to deliver a Dev Diary. I am Neil McEwan, the Creative Director for Syndicate. We are nearing the end of the development, which is always a difficult and stressful time. This will be followed shortly by a period of extreme exhaustion, sickness and a sense of loss and bereavement as the thing that has consumed us for so long is gone and we need to fill the void with something else.
We’ve spent a lot of time designing and iterating on the core functions of the military chip implanted in the agents head (DART 6). Our goal was to combine the core weapon gameplay with chip breaching mechanics where upon the player is able to gain a combat advantage by manipulating the environment and enemy chip-to-chip hacking. Balancing AI is difficult enough but when you layer on other mechanics it becomes a completely new beast..
Our starting point for this was coming up with enemy breaching mechanics. We began by brainstorming what would give us an advantage while shooting and we decided that being able to stun, kill and set an allegiance (harping back to the original persuadertron) was a good idea (I won’t bore you with the other not such good ideas). We began prototyping these mechanics in whitebox scenarios. After much tweaking we arrived at a place where the combination felt good. These were then categorised as common breaches; Backfire, Suicide and Persuade, our primary emergent breaches that influence the moment-to-moment gameplay. Then came the difficult part, what was the currency for this ‘powers’? How would the interface for this work? What buttons would we put everything on? After solving these challenges I now think we have a unique and engaging package.
With the environmental breaching it became very obvious that ‘Dropping pianos” on enemies was not a fun experience so we opted for simple puzzles and the lowering and raising cover points.
I always wanted to try and capture an essence of the IPA system from the original games. The CHIPS inserted in the agents controlled the agents’ operational independence during the missions. From this I derived ‘DART Overlay’ for our incarnation. While in this mode; DART is able to highlight enemy positions (Intelligence), time is augmented (Perception) and the player is more powerful (Adrenaline).
"Dart 6: Experience Consciousness"
I hope you all enjoy the game.
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