Having thrashed out the niggly bits....
We are now in the home stretch of development and are thoroughly testing the game and tweaking the time-shifting mechanic. The game is really exceeding even our own initial expectations, and we can't wait to get it on the shelves. One of the things that we have learned is that while gamers find the concept intriguing when they hear about it, they don't really appreciate the "cool" factor until they have seen the game in action. I have also read some of the forums (yes, developers do read what the gaming public has to say about the games) and have seen comments such as "it's been done before" about time-control gameplay. There is no real way for me to respond to this, other than to say that you really have to get your hands on the game to see how different it is. We have made the time-shift mechanic more than a gimmicky add-on. It is a fully-integrated, essential element of the game. For many hardcore shooting fans, this will be an entirely new experience. While the fast-twitch shooting skills are crucial, it is also necessary to master the power to shift time and to understand how it works in the game. This makes the game similar to, but also very different than, the standard shooters. Time really does add that "fourth dimension" to the gameplay experience.
As I record these rambling thoughts to paper, I am sitting in a Starbucks in La Jolla, California, taking a break from our intensive sessions of voice-over recordings. I am just a short walk from the beach right now, and as I sit here, I wonder how the hell all these developers out here ever get any work done with so many distractions. My advice to my industry cohorts is simple: When crunch time hits, grab your visas, jump on a plane, and head to a place like Russia in the winter, a place with fewer distractions...or at least with more reasons to stay inside.
Once we had the idea, the next challenge was to convert it into a working gameplay mechanic. This is easier said than done. The first concern is always a technical one. While stop and slow were more or less straightforward, time reversal was a major challenge. How do you store and reverse gameplay data in real-time? As anyone who has ever tried to record game footage to the hard drive knows, your frame rate can really chug as you record massive amounts of data. So the challenge was to develop a highly optimized system that would let us record everything that happens in the gameworld in real-time. Then we needed to implement a system that enables the player to navigate this world while absolutely everything else in the game-from animations to explosions to particles to AI states-moves backwards around him. Luckily, we have a few very smart guys on our team who were able to resolve the issue in a surprisingly quick time frame. The concept was simple: Let's create literally hundreds of game quicksaves, ignore player-related data, and then play them in reverse.
