Dining With Developers, Vol. 2: Haden Blackman, Part 1
4/16/2009 7:17 PM | 7 Comments | Page 3 of 8
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Blackman: No, but we have really good relationships with them. We were exclusive with Pixel Lux and Digital Micromatter, and semi-exclusive with Euphoria. And I would say Havok is the other one. They were a really good partner. Maybe because it wasn't brand-new stuff, but I think people underestimate how much Havok influenced the game. We had to build the whole game around Havok, and figure out how to work these two systems into Havok. And that was, in many ways, the hardest part. We talk about this in some of our Web docs, getting DMM and Euphoria and Havok all to talk to one another. It was a huge challenge. It was the most fun and the most terrifying thing, from a bug standpoint, of any game I've worked on. A designer goes in and makes some seemingly innocent tweak where he alters the speed of Force Push minimally, and suddenly every single Stormtrooper you Force Push goes flying out of the world.
[We order. Haden orders the filet, medium-rare, with fingerling potatoes. Mmm.]
Blackman: I think, in a way -- and this is going to make me sound like a moron, I think -- but in a way we were almost too young -- wait, that's not the right word.
Narcisse: Too eager?
Blackman and Sam Witwer
Yes, we were eager, and we were going onto a new platform cycle and we didn't know what couldn't be done. And I think, in a way, that was a good thing, because we did reach for the moon. We didn't get all the way there maybe, but we got far enough.
Kahn: If you had a time machine, and you could go back and tell yourself what you know now...
Blackman: If I could go back knowing what I know now, it would obviously make a lot of things easier. This was our first internally developed title in a really long time. We were going onto a new platform, and we really wanted to make a big splash.
Lucas: You've licked a lot of the challenges. You've learned a lot. Hypothetically, that puts you in a great position for the next installment. How much better prepared are you now?
Blackman: [to Kahn] Can I talk about things I would like to do if we were to do a sequel? Hypothetically?
Kahn: OK.
Blackman: I think it makes us tremendously prepared to do other games using this technology. The hardest thing with
The Force Unleashed is, though I'm happy with the end result, I don't think that we leveraged the three technologies to their fullest extent. The integration between the three of them came online so late, and wasn't bug-free until so late, that the designers had a lot of the levels already built out, and we'd designed a lot of the characters. If we were to do it all over again, with some of the technologies already integrated, I think we would have made some different decisions about level layouts. We would have had more playground elements, and turned the levels into funhouses. And I would have included more fun Achievements. One of my favorite things to do in the game is see how many Stormtroopers I can string together with Force Lightning. There's no reason to do that in the game, and nobody really even knows that you can do it, but Force Lightning channels through characters.
