Interview: Human Head plays the Dead Man's Hand

Announced back in April this year, Dead Man's Hand is a Wild West-themed first-person shooter powered by Unreal technology that's whip-cracking its way onto Xbox. Expected in March 2004, there's still some way to go yet for the title, but we thought it was high time we caught up with the developer behind the game, Human Head Studios, to find out what's in store.

Answering questions is Tim Gerritsen, chairman and CEO of Human Head.

Can you outline Dead Man's Hand's plot for us, and tell us about the main character and their ultimate objective in the game?

Gerritsen: The game's story mode centres around El Tejon, a Mexican-American gunslinger who spent his youth riding with The Nine, a notorious gang of outlaws. Eventually he wanted out, but the gang turned on him, shot him and left him to die. But he survives, and gets thrown in a Mexican prison to rot.

The game opens with El Tejon getting his chance to escape and take revenge on the gang that betrayed him. Tejon's an anti-hero. He's a gunslinger because he wants to be the best there is, and as such he's fairly amoral as a protagonist. He's not evil or good - just a bad-ass.

Throughout the game you go hunting for clues as to where the gang ran off to while you were spending all those years in jail. You discover what they've been up to and track them down one by one.

What are you plans/designs for Dead Man's Hand - what sort of experiencing are you aiming to deliver?

Gerritsen: We want Dead Man's Hand to be an action experience combining some old-school ideas like score and variation to score with the visual style possible with modern hardware.

It's not a twitch-type shooter in the sense that you don't just run through battles; instead, the action itself keeps coming fast in the form of highly volatile environments with lots of shooting action. We hope that it both reminds people of old style play and presents a fresh face to the first person genre.

You're building the game on Unreal technology. How is this technology helping you realise your vision for the game?

Gerritsen: Having done Rune previously, we're old hands at the Unreal engine. We know the technology quite well and felt that the Unreal technology provided us with the kind of wide-open environments and ability to pull off the tight control set-ups that we're known for.

From the off we scaled the game to the Xbox, and we build our environments to the strengths of the engine, allowing us to pull off quite detailed environments while keeping a high frame rate throughout.

From the practical sense, using the Unreal engine allowed us to get to the business of creating the game, rather than worrying about the underlying technology.

Our prior experience with the engine allowed us to get into prototyping quite quickly, and we knew how to best come at things from a visual perspective as well.

The addition of the Karma physics engine to Unreal also allowed us to create the kind of shooting gallery environment we went for in our designs.

In what ways will Dead Man's Hand reflect life in the Wild West? For example, bar fights, shootouts and stagecoach chases have been mentioned. What else are we going to see?

Gerritsen: The real Wild West was hardly fun. Between lawlessness, disease and bandits, the people of the West did all they could just to survive. Like most periods later idolised in popular fiction, it was, for the people who lived there, a difficult, dirty experience.

As an entertainment company, it's our job to capture the flavour of what made the West great and deliver that in a game experience. Our game is about the mythos of the West - the legend of the gunfighter, the adventure of the open plain, and the kind of kill-or-be-killed moment-to-moment excitement of a gunfight.

To that end, we've tried hard to create several set-piece experiences that combine the best elements of the Western legend. Each level is both a combat arena for all out gunfights, a shooting gallery where lots of varied elements exist for players to shoot and a visual re-creation of a wide variety of locales from bars, to whore houses, water front docks, mountain forests, wooden forts, pueblo dwellings and Old West towns.

There's horse riding, a train to fight over and an old silver mine to boot.

What else can you tell us about environments? Where will we be adventuring? And will there be stuff like sandstorms and tumbleweed, shops signs creaking in the wind, that sort of thing?

Gerritsen: We'll include all you list and more. The game is broken up into three distinct zones: the Southwest, with desert spaces, canyons and a sprawling hacienda; the Northwest, with the aforementioned silver mine, a wooden fort and a hardscrabble boomtown; and the Eastern Riverfront City with a more urban experience of the Eastern US at that time.

Within each zone, there are myriad styles and elements to keep the game visually interesting and provide new challenges for the players.

Also as mentioned, each area is set up as a shooting gallery. There are signs and lanterns swinging in the wind, critters scurrying in the dust, pictures and skulls hanging on the wall, chandeliers swinging overhead, powder kegs and wagons strewn about to name just a few.

And of course all of it is shootable. In addition, there are dust storms in the desert, rain in the forest and other variables to the environment to keep the visuals interesting.

Do we get to challenge people to one-on-one duels? If so, how will this work?

Gerritsen: While the classic showdown is a very dramatic and interesting moment in movies, we did some tests with one-on-one duels in the game and it just wasn't that much fun. In order to pull it off, you either have to restrict player control or movement which ends up being a fairly tedious affair after a few kills.

Instead, players will be able to play, should they so desire, with one-on-one instant kill death matches (amongst several other modes and variables). This is more of a showdown-in-motion than the traditional twenty paces standoff.

Could you go into more detail about the Legend feature in Dead Man's Hand, explaining how it works and how it influences gameplay?

Gerritsen: Sure. Simply put, Legend is a running score that is tallied as you play. However, it is broken up into three components that affect gameplay - score, power and chain fire. First, as a measure of score, you gain points for shooting nearly all shootable objects. The points you score are based on the difficulty of the shot. This score is cumulative from the point you start the game until the end.

In addition, for each object hit, you gain a measure of Legend power, also based on the difficulty of the shot. This power can be used to pull off alternate fire modes - essentially trick shots.

These vary from being able to zoom in on a target to gaining a stun shot, to fanning your revolver Clint Eastwood-style to power shots and more.

Finally, we have a chain shot timer that counts down from the moment you hit something. If you hit another target before the timer counts down, you gain a modifier to the score and power you receive.

The timer, however, accelerates with each new target hit, making the chain harder and harder to maintain, but allowing the modifier to grow and grow.

We created this system to take advantage of the types of weapons we could have in the game. Everything is basically a hit-scan weapon, meaning you don't have any area effect or 'machine gun' type weapons where you can just spray down an area.

So instead of trying to turn a Western into a run-and-spray futuristic type of game, we decided to go the other direction and create a game that gives you direct rewards and benefits for how you shoot, rather than just how often. We hope that it will make the game unique from the myriad of first-person shooters out there that follow the same old model.

Dead Man's Hand will come with Xbox Live support - what can we expect from online multiplayer?

Gerritsen: The game features a variety of modes including deathmatch and team deathmatch, but also modes such as Bounty and Posse. Bounty is where one player is basically the bounty, and each of the other players tries to hunt him or her down. When a bounty is killed, a new player becomes the bounty and everyone hunts that person down.

Posse is our "Remember the Alamo" mode where several players play co-operatively to defend a spot while wave after wave of progressively harder bad guys try to shoot you all down.

Similarly, what plans do you have for offline multiplayer?

Gerritsen: All of the modes will be playable either with two-player split-screen or with direct-connect play between Xboxes. In addition, single players will be able to try the multiplayer modes with a number of computer-controlled bots.

What other "cool" features do you have planned or have already implemented into the game that you haven't mentioned above?

Gerritsen: There are a myriad of other features that stand out as cool. The game ultimately features nine different base weapons, with three each of pistols, shotguns and rifles - each coming with unique characteristics for speed, firepower and reload times as well as a unique alt-fire that you gain access to through using your Legend power.

However you also have a variety of other weapons at your disposal - dynamite, whiskey bombs and knives, with obvious effects for each. There are also mounted weapons, including Gatling Guns, cannons and early machine guns.

However, the bad guys get access to each of these weapons as well, so be careful, or one of the guys hiding around the corner will rush to the machine gun you thought you cleared.

Then there's horse riding, trains, poker and very detailed boss battles. The list goes on and on...

Finally - personally, what's your favourite thing about, or part of, Dead Man's Hand's, and why?

Gerritsen: It's hard to say, as there is a lot in the game, but I'd guess it would be fun with dynamite. It is great fun to toss dynamite into a room filled with objects and just watch what happens. Of course, then there's whiskey bombs...

Stuart Bishop