Posted by Jereme Puik

Game Plasma's own Jereme Puik got the chance to have a chat with High Voltage Software's Chief Creative Officer, Eric Nofsinger, and CEO/Founder of High Voltage, Kerry Ganofsky at the New York Comic Con.

Has the Wii provided any challenges in development? 

Eric: Absolutely, it’s been very challenging but at the same time incredibly rewarding. The system itself has strengths and it has weakness, some of the harder things to do on the system are to get the graphical splendor that has come to be known as the status quo in most modern games. So it takes quite a bit of engineering acrobatics in order to get that same level of production. The parts of the system that we find incredibly advanced far more so than the 360 and PS3 is the IR interface. To be able to directly have a very one to one response kind of quality as opposed to trying to interface a first person shooter with two analog sticks.

 

The Wii seems to be lacking the one definitive experience for the core gamer, is The Conduit finally the game that proves the Wii is more then just a party system?
 

Eric: We sure hope so. We banked a lot on it; we believe this is that game. We’ve put a lot of effort into it in the last year and a half and we’ve got a few more months left to go before we hit the shelves. With the fan feedback and press feedback, folks like you who come in and played it and given their two cents about it. Throughout development, we’ve put all of that back into it and we listened to what folks had to say. We really feel like as much as this is our game this is their game too. The game while made by us, but it’s for the core.

 

Kerry: Like Eric said, High Voltage is comprised of a lot of talented passionate gamers that created this game for the fans of the Wii; there are what, 50 million Wii’s out there? It’s been screaming for a title like this. We believe the control mechanism, greatly designed and full customizable allows everyone to custom tailor the product for their particular gaming needs whether you’re a very twitchy gamer; we’ve got a lot of loosy goosy type of gameplay. I come from a PC first person shooter background and I always had trouble with the dual analog sticks. I adapted to it, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily like using them. With the Wii remote, like we talked about earlier about the challenges for developing, that is one of the challenges. How do you create game specifically tailored with the Wiimote in the first person shooter genre and execute on it? If you take a few minutes to spend with the game, I think we pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Are there any finishing touches you have to put the game before release?

 

Eric: Oh, everyday. Everyday we raise the bar from the day before. Most of our content we feel very solid with and this is our beta and we’re really excited about that. Now, it’s a matter of optimization and hitting out frame rates and making sure that multiplayer is lag free and is a solid experience. Across the board it’s a matter of tweak, tweak, and tweak.

 

With the Quantum 3 Engine, what was the development process like since you were starting from scratch?

 

Eric: It’s been a living hell, (laughs). Seriously, it’s been wonderful, it’s one of those things where it’s very challenging, and we’ve got some incredibly bright people working on this, very talented people. We sort of surprised ourselves throughout the development, each time we worked on something and we asked ourselves, can the Wii do normal mapping? You know, we put a lot of effort into it, tried it and we said ‘yea it can’. Can it do material based effects? Put a lot of effort into it and tried it and lode and behold, it can do it. Each thing that we added, we said ‘oh we need a better dynamic lighting system’. The fans said we needed better texturing in some places and we listened to that and we developed a whole detailed mapping system that required us to go back through it and retexture our entire game, but we listened to what folks had to say and that second past texturing on it really makes it look crisp. You can get right up on a wall and it looks really nice and tight and other Wii games don’t have that. With each thing, yea, it was tough but it it’s so rewarding to have all the stuff going on and with all that you have to juggle it out with performance. Because, with each of these features, there’s obviously, it’s asking a lot of the hardware to do that. We’re doing all these things and a whole lot more and running at 30 fps and having a whole lot of enemies come at you. It’s not a small task but, it’s certainly one that if the developer like ourselves or any developer really, if you really put the muscle and the elbow grease into this, these are the kind of games the Wii deserves.

 

Kerry: Technology marvel aside, the gameplay is also a really critical factor in the development process. Our engineers are absolutely brilliant. I don’t want to sell them short; every time Eric has asked them to do something they’ve completely stepped up to the plate and delivered on any number of features in the technology. This is just the same for our design staff and the game team. They actually stepped up to create the experience that you see with the technology that we developed. Kudos to them as well.

 

What kind of thought process went into the art direction?

 

Eric: Our Art Director, Matt Coroso and Wii Artist on the project, Joe Hammel, definitely had a vision of wanting to do a Hollywood realism. They wanted to capture the feel of a Hollywood blockbuster movie. Sort of perceptually, what you have is that aesthetic inside your head. So, not so much about wanting to do a something looked exactly like a Hollywood film but that felt like it. It’s sort of an amped up realism throughout. A lot of the color theory they used, they used a lot of rich painterly colors, very warm pallets. With the aliens, it tends to be far more striking in its color pallets to have a really strong contrast off it. These guys gave a lot of thought process into how color and contrast guides and direct your eyes. We’ve got a great system that, again even with that art direction it hooks back into the game design that Kerry’s referring too. Because even things like our color curve system, we have a system that allows for the full screen effects that are modulating off our gameplay effects, so as your health wanes, your colors desaturate, but it’s not just a uniform desaturation, it desaturates off most of the screen and certain key color components still retain their intensity and that was intentional to give a certain emotional response that those artists wanted to relay. 

 

Where did the inspiration for the All Seeing Eye come from? 

Eric: Well, actually it stems all the way back to a game we worked on called Hunter: The Reckoning. This was a game that was a cult favorite and a game that we’re very proud of. We really liked working with those White Wolf guys and they have a concept in there called Second Sight. Which allows the hunters to see things that weren’t normally there; with The Conduit we always liked that idea but never really felt like there was a good visual representation of that. This is sort of taking that idea of that visualization and amping it up ten fold.  

The AI seems to have a mind of its own, what can you tell us about that?

 

Eric: The AI does definitely have a mind of its own. It’s come a long way, it’s important to have Ai that gives the illusion of a lot of intensity and intelligence going on there. We have a lot of behaviors where, not only enemies pop in and out, but they’ll seek cover, if they’re out gunned, they’ll actually fall back, run and hide. When they’ve got you pinned down, enemies will outflank you, and they’ll act in formation. There are a lot of intelligent behaviors and also, the various enemies will interact with each other in scenarios with you. A lot of thought went into our artificial intelligence to make sure that as the player was playing, it doesn’t feel like cardboard cutouts popping up in a rail shooter. We really wanted this to feel like it’s a living world. 

Will The Conduit spark a new change for the Wii? 

Kerry: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We’d be happy to lead the charge there. Looking at the landscape, every time we go into a Gamestop, we’ve got party this game, party game that. I would love to go into the Gamestop and see other triple A, high quality games built for the Wii. 

Eric: I’m awful tired of seeing ports and poor quality products. It’s why we made The Conduit. Kerry and I loved the hardware of the Wii and we were just disgusted at the amount of low quality products. It’s wonderful that it’s opened up a whole new market of casual gamers and folks that weren’t normally buying games. What about us? What about you, what about more then half of the people here. It really feels like those folks were left out in the cold. That’s the void that we’re hoping to fill.

 

Kerry: We’d love for you to message to your readers that this product is for them.

 

Are there any plans for future content additions to the game? 

Eric: We can’t comment on that yet, but keep your eyes peeled. 

Kerry: E3’s right around the corner.