Friday 24-Oct-2003 10:47 AM Jordan Mechner, the brain behind the original Price of Persia games and consultant on The Sands of Time, gasses about the Prince's latest escapade. "Making Of" trailer also inside While the world goes bonkers over action-adventure Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and everyone gives Ubisoft a pat on the back for its creation, let us not forget Jordan Mechner, the person behind the original titles,who also works as creative consultant on The Sands of Time.
Mechner recently answered a Ubisoft call to arms and agreed to subject himself to a live web chat to answer a slew of questions about the Prince of Persia series as a whole and the latest addition to the franchise...
What were some of the challenges of transitioning the series from 2D to 3D?
Mechner: The biggest challenge was to achieve the kind of rhythmic game play that you can have in a 2D game, like the run-jump-grab. In a lot of 3D games you have to spend so much time orienting yourself and aiming in exactly the right direction, you lose that feeling of split second timing.
How do you feel Prince of Persia pays homage to its early console routes?
Mechner: Well there are a few secret homages in the game that you will have to play to discover. Some are more obvious... like the spikes.
Are there any appearances of characters of the previous two games (it is obvious that we don't count 3D) and if there are any please describe some?
Mechner: Actually Sands of Time is a prequel to the first games. The Prince is the only character who appears.
What will be all the uses of the Sand of Time?
Mechner: There are several powers... The most important is that you can use it to turn back time (Rewind) and avoid dying. There are additional powers which you can gain including the ability to stop time, slow it down, and see visions of the future.
Could you provide some details on the many unique controls and movements that you're able to pull off in the game?
Mechner: You can run along walls - that is pretty cool. Also you can grab onto columns, swing on ropes walk along narrow beams, and swing on bars like an Olympic gymnast. What is really cool is to combine movements. For example say you're wall-running to cross a deadly pit then just as you reach the other side, you see spikes spring out of the floor under you.
You can press a button and instantly push off from the wall with your feet, so you jump out into the air evading the spikes, then save yourself by grabbing a column.
From your experiences testing the game, do you think the game will be as legendary as the 2D versions were?
Mechner: I guess I feel about the same way I did when the first game was finished. I've played it so much, I love it completely and I don't have any perspective on what it would be like for someone else to play... For me, it is a lot of fun to play and I wish I could have the experience of playing it for the first time again!
It sounds like you have some pretty interesting gameplay ideas there. Were there any significant influences on your ideas and choices?
Mechner: Definitely. There are a lot of big game players on the team and everyone took inspiration and ideas from their favorite games... A big one for me personally was ICO. Also sports games, the guys spend a lot of time playing hockey games on lunch hour and the fast controls of sports games are pretty inspiring compared to most 3D story-action games.
Could you give some details about the main characters and story?
Mechner: We meet a young Prince eager to fight in his first battle. He is part of his father's army as they attack an Indian palace and as a trophy of victory, they take some treasures including a giant hourglass containing the mystical Sands of Time and a dagger which the Prince takes as his own personal prize. This turns out to be a big mistake, as the Prince inadvertently unleashes the Sands of Time on the palace.
The Sands are a plague that transforms everyone they touch into terrible sand creatures... Only the Prince is spared because of the dagger, which gives him special powers of time. Also a mysterious, beautiful girl who was captured as a prisoner of war... she escapes too. And the two of them are forced to join together to survive.
Will Sands of Time focus more on platform-esque puzzles as in the first two games (how to proceed through a room or series of rooms, for instance), or more on combat? What percentages would you say either comprises of the full game?
Mechner: Roughly it is 50/50. The level designers and game designers worked really hard to make sure that the alternation is done in an interesting way... Some stretches of the game feature very intense combat, in others you do not encounter any enemies for a while as you face primarily acrobatic or puzzle challenges.
And sometimes you have to deal with both at the same time. The important thing was for the player to feel a sense of variety and that the challenges are always building or changing, not repetitive.
I got a review version of POP and it seems you've drawn some inspiration from the movie The Matrix. Is this true? Or did any other games/movies inspired you?
Mechner: All the Hong Kong action movies, also Korean and Chinese movies... Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. These movies obviously inspired The Matrix as well so there is a lot of cross-pollination going on.
Definitely, the fascination of seeing characters do things that are pushed beyond the limits of what you can do in real life - but done in such a way that it feels part of a believable universe.
How much time has the team spent on the character physics: running along walls, jumping off walls, swinging on ropes and so on - and what were the goals the team had?
Mechner: The animation and AI of the Prince is something that continued to be developed right up until the end. Alex Drouin (animator) and Richard Dumas (AI programmer) focused a lot of their attention on the Prince all the way through the project. And every other aspect of the game had to be developed with the Prince's animations and abilities in minds.
For example, the level design was always done in such a way that it would make a fun playground for the Prince to run on. Adding columns, flagpoles, other structures that in many games are purely decorative, in this game had to be added with a lot of thought in order to create paths for the player to pass through that area and build the necessary skills in a reasonable order. So: Tons of time!
Is the control scheme for Sands of Time on PC version as intuitive as that of the console versions?
Mechner: I've played it with keyboard/mouse - it takes a little getting used to compared to the PS2 but it works.
If you had enough resources and money and you could make the game of your dreams, what would this game look like?
Mechner: That is the question I am worrying about right now. I think it would be a single-player action-adventure of some sort, because that is the kind of game I like to play myself. One thing that matters to me a lot for choosing a game to play for fun is that it has to be beautiful.
If I am not drawn into the world, it is hard for me to stay interested just for the pure gameplay challenge - there are so many other alternatives, I really want all my senses to be gratified. So you can see I'm not really a hardcore gamer.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time "Making Of" movie (PC, PS2, GameCube, Xbox) Download here
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