Digital Express was nice enough to sit down answer a few questions about their upcoming release Dark Sector.
Our own ATC 1982 did the questioning, producer Sheldon Carter did the answering, and we put it all in a nice little story for you to check out.
First off we want to thank you for taking the time to sit down with us and answer a few questions about your upcoming release. I have been following the development rather closely, and looking forward to getting a glimpse into what’s going on behind the scenes at Digital Extremes.
How many people make up the Dark Sector team and where have they been harvested from, i.e. what are their backgrounds?
Our team started at around 25 people back in 2005 and has expanded to 60 over the course of 2.5 years of development.
We have an extremely talented group of people from the old-timers that go back to the development of the original Unreal to new hires that we’ve recruited from all over the world.
The experience from the newer recruits is vast: Rainbow Six Vegas, Splinter Cell, Jade Empire, Battlefield, The Movies, King Kong (the movie), Ratatouille (the movie), etc.
How did the idea come to your team to use a glaive as the main weapon? Also who came up with the concepts that saturate the game play?
Steve Sinclair has been our project visionary from the start, not only from a Dark Sector perspective but also our technology, as he has been programming on titles ranging back to our Unreal Tournament days.
The Glaive was a bit of a fluke actually (most fun concepts in games usually are). The original weapon started out as a twist on a grappling gun. The blade was designed and we were initially using it to grab things to use in combat but we were having so much fun whacking enemies with it in addition to grabbing things that it slowly transformed into an actual weapon itself. Only after some focus testing did we realize how much people wanted to use it for serious brutal destruction and that’s where the glaive stands today.
What’s going on with the multiplayer part of this game? Give us a little taste of what’s to come when this game makes it into our consoles.
We’re keeping a lid on the details for multiplayer right now because we’re focusing our efforts on the single player portion of the game. We want players to have an incredible experience with Dark Sector and our plan from the start was to focus on the single-player experience.
From post’s that our out there all ready you can use your experience and stats from single-player and cross it over to multi-player. What other things make Dark Sectors multiplayer unique, what does this game have that others don’t?
Nosy, Nosy, tsk, tsk
While we are talking about the Multiplayer will there be more than one player that you can choose from when we jump online? If there will be can you give a small preview of one of the differences between characters?
You may be talking about Multiplayer, but we’re not…just yet. ;)
During the time the beta is available, how and what information are you tracking?
We’ll be releasing a demo later this year (probably in December) for both the 360 and PS3 and will be looking forward to the feedback it receives. Currently we’re doing closed focus testing on-site in our office to gauge what is going right and what is going wrong with gameplay and the fun factor.
If you can tell us a little bit about possible download content that you have in the works for Dark Sector?
To be honest, we haven’t thought about downloadable content yet but I’m sure those ideas will start churning once we see how people like the game.
Even though this game is still in development, have you thought about releasing a collector’s edition along with a standard edition?
We would love to release a collector’s edition of Dark Sector but that really is up to our publisher. I know we have loads of cool stuff that we could add to a collector’s edition so if one isn’t done we could always just release it online when the time is right.
What engines are you using for this game and why did you choose it/them specifically?
We are using our internally developed Evolution Engine. We started developing it after wrapping up development on Unreal Championship back in 2001.
At that point there wasn’t any middleware technology out for next-gen or that many details on what the next-gen technology would hold but we knew we wanted to be ready for it so we took every tidbit of info we could get our hands on and started developing our own engine.
It was a tough decision to make but when we got the engine simultaneously compiling on both the 360 and PS3, we knew we made the right decision. That feature alone has saved us a tremendous amount of development time.
Any plans as of right now for a sequel?
That will depend on how well the original sells
What’s up next after Dark Sector hits the shelves January 22, 2008?
As you can imagine, things have to keep rolling even before Dark Sector hits shelves in January. For our team, Dark Sector will be done by November and they’ll need something to do.
We have a small group of developers who, for the past 6 months, has been refining ideas for our next game so the team can hit the ground running after finishing Dark Sector and a nice vacation.
What are some of the most memorable/crazy moments that have been had around the office while developing Dark Sector?
Hmmm…we tried to get a handlebar moustache contest going but even with our expert reclusive social skills no one was willing to walk around town looking like Jesse James for longer than a day.
So we stuck with a standard daily push-up contest instead. The tally was kept on a whiteboard in one of the artist’s office. Anytime you entered, you had to do as many push-ups as you could. The artist got fairly lonely after about a week.
The contest that went the full mile though was the Pool Tournament and we all readily had our asses handed to us by our internal QA tester. I guess if you play games for a living, you must be good at all of them!
