Designer Diary: Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers, certainly one of our favourite sci-fi movies of all time for its excellent visuals, visceral action and warped humour. Well as you probably know work on the game of the film has been progressing as well at the UK's Strangelite Studios where they've been busy building an FPS worthy of the movie's bug hunting mega blasting action.

We've been playing a splendid three level demo version of the game and will be bringing you a full hands-on report soon, but in the meantime we've recruited Doug Bink, Strangelite's studio head to bring you the latest from the Starship Troopers front line...

"Welcome to the first Starship Troopers developer diary. I'm Doug Binks, Head of Empire Interactive's development studio Strangelite, where we're developing Starship Troopers. I'll be kicking off this development diary and giving you an insight into what we're doing with Starship Troopers that will make it a ground breaking first-person shooter.

"Over the four parts of the diary we'll be giving you an insight into the fun parts of creating bugs, the not so fun parts of working out how to solve the interesting problems that crop up, and how the thousands of hours of designing, programming, redesigning, reprogramming and testing come together to make the ultimate game experience.

"But in this first instalment I'd like to start with when we first thought about making Starship Troopers the game, and how very quickly we realised that this would involve creating a game that would have to break down the boundaries of the FPS genre and do something that had never been done before...

"Many of you may have been puzzled, like me, as to why no one has made a first-person shooter based on Paul Verhoevan's 1997 film before. When our future products group first brought the idea of making an FPS based on the film to us, we could all see the possibilities. So I was more than just a little excited about what we were being given the chance to do. Making a game in my favourite genre with the license to one of my favourite films? "Sir, yes Sir!"

"Of course after the initial excitement and brainstorming it was soon time to get to grips with the sweaty task of making a technology demo. We needed to show that we could produce something worthy of the license which would appeal to gamers, and so we chose one of the most memorable moments from the film to reproduce - the attack on Whiskey Outpost where the troopers are overrun by bugs. It was at this point that we spotted the subtle flaw in our plans; we literally couldn't count the number of bugs swarming towards the outpost in the film. How were we going to reproduce this?

"The FPS genre is probably the most popular one for gamers and to this end there are a lot of great FPS games out there with impressive engines to keep the action high, but as good as these games engines are none of them were up to the job we needed to make Starship Troopers. If you look at all the FPS games currently out there the most enemies you will have attacking you, in view and on the screen at one time is usually between 15 to 20. With Starship Troopers we wanted hundreds. So many that in the heat of the action you simply wouldn't be able to count them all, just like us watching the film. We wanted there to be 'too many'.

"So our first objective was an obvious and simple choice: we needed to make an FPS engine that would do something never done before. And we weren't talking about push the boundaries of gaming just that little bit further- we needed to make and engine that would handle 20 times more enemies on screen that had ever been done before. And so the SWARM engine was born.

"As I mentioned above the first thing we needed to do was convince Empire that making Starship Troopers game was not only a good idea, but that it was possible. SWARM did the job perfectly. Usually trying to sell an idea to a publisher is hard work. They want to make sure the idea is a strong one, that the game will be ground-breaking and most importantly that people will enjoy it.

"It only took one showing of the technology demo to persuade Empire that this was a good idea.

"The technology demo recreated the Whiskey Outpost and showed about 400 bugs coming down from the hills and attacking the troopers at the base. This was 20 times more enemies than you've ever seen in a FPS game before and the looks on the Empire producers' faces told us that they were impressed.

"Since then we have had up to 500 bugs on screens at one time, but the feedback we've had from our play testers is that 300 is more than enough to give you that Starship Troopers experience. This is a good thing to know, as it frees up some processor power for us to play with so it won't simply be 300 warrior bugs attacking you - there'll also be a few Tankers (the 20 meter tall beetle type bugs that spew fire) in there as well to keep you busy.

"But as good as it is to having a 300-plus bug army attacking, we needed to make sure that everything else in the game lived up to that standard. In the next instalment of the diary our lead artist, Andy McCann, will be running you through how he brought the bugs from the film to life in the game."

CVG Staff