SCIFI.COM | Farscape: Game Developers' Diary

Brainstorming

In January 2001, Nigel Kennington, the game's lead designer, and I went to a creative meeting at The Jim Henson Studios in Los Angeles, Calif. Also at the meeting were Liz Braswell, the senior producer from the publisher, Simon & Schuster Interactive; representatives from Jim Henson Interactive (including Noah Dudley, the creative director, and Craig Allen, the general manager), and Rockne S. O' Bannon, the creator of the show Farscape.

Everyone brainstormed our proposed design for the game. We got a lot of support for it and everyone was excited by the concept art we had created.

Rockne's enthusiasm at this meeting was great. He encouraged Red Lemon to "do things that they couldn't do in the show" and to push the boundaries of the character designs and settings. Quite a responsibility!

Over the following months of development, Liz and I met regularly to discuss the development's progress. Bret Nelson, a producer at Henson, also gives us valuable support and advice from his company's perspective.

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Design Beginnings

The game really began when we started to draft the Game Design document. Nigel Kennington headed this up, with input from Chris McMahon, the other designer on the team.

The Design Document is like the blueprint for the game. It describes how the game will work, as well as what the characters, settings and other details will be like.

We first designed the basic mechanics of the game, paying attention to the feedback we had gotten from that first creative meeting. We also developed the plot of the game in the first draft we presented.

Once we had the basics in place, we started on the initial mission and the first stage of designing levels. We start by drawing them on good, old-fashioned paper!

The game's design then started to take shape as we fleshed out the Game User Interface (GUI) designs and the Enemy and Non-Player Character Behaviours and Weapon statistics.

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Programming Starts

One challenge in the development of any game whose release must coincide with a current movie or TV series is to build a quality game on a tight and strict schedule. What usually determines whether we're going to pull that off successfully lies in how fast we can get the programming done (and done right).

The programming team, headed by Jonty Dawson, faced this challenge and began the daunting task of laying down the foundations of the game code. At the same time, they had to take our in-house technology and develop it further to suit the game.

We decided to use a scripting language called Lua, which is widely used by other developers for such games as Baldur's Gate and the LucasArts titles. The style of our game seemed to fit well with the capabilities of that language.

Half the programming team focused on deeloping the artificial intelligence of the Non-Player Characters (also called NPCs, the "background characters" with which the core players interact), and the control mechanisms and GUI. The other half, led by Jonty, with input from Technology Manager Ken Cropper, focused on developing the core game technology — for example, the Animation and Collision systems.

At this stage we also finalized our Level Design tool. This is the software we use to design the game levels. We quickly reached the decision that we certainly did not have time to write our own tool and instead co-opted a Quake Mod tool to block out our levels, place objects, etc.

The initial phases of development were tough because we had to get up to speed very quickly, indeed, but through the sound and fury we began to see a game emerge.

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Artwork Begins — The Game World

Gareth Hector, our lead artist, began to develop concept art for the environments in the game. He worked close to the style of the show yet still kept his designs unique and exciting.

Once we got the environment concept approved, we began serious work on creating the levels. The art team began to take the level designers' block-outs into 3D Studio Max, a professional-grade CG animation software used in video-game design, and from there started to make the 3-D environments for the game.

Click thumbnails to view larger image.

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Artwork — Critters and Characters

The game features a wide variety of new Creatures and Non-Player Characters (NPCs). We designed these as concept art before we built them as 3-D models for the game.

We built the game versions of the series' characters using style guides and reference materials supplied to us by The Jim Henson Company. Henson was really great about giving us a lot of freedom for our ideas for this game. This offered us the best of two worlds: On the one hand, we were working in the defined Farscape universe with baseline rules, which saved us a lot of development time and gave us a clear framework. At the same time, our artists were allowed to express themselves creatively within that universe.

Click thumbnails to view larger image.

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Design — The Script

After we had established the game's premise, we developed a script with input from series creator Rockne, Henson representative Bret, and Liz, our producer at Simon & Schuster Interactive.

We wil be using actual actors from the show to do the voices in the game. We're setting recording sessions for our original characters early in 2002. Recording with the main cast from the series is to follow.

Non-Player Characters (NPCs) help drive the plot along and reveal missions to the player. (Click the image at right to see some of the townsfolk.) The simple rule for the development of NPCs was that they had to look and behave as if had just jumped out of the show itself.

In the game, you, the player, representing the crew of Moya, make regular visits to a settlement to deal with various recurring characters who live there. These characters provide information, trade goods and services, and offer useful clues.

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Art - Full-Motion Video Sequences

Phil Vaughan, our principal full-motion video artist, brings his experience from many titles, including some of the recent Star Trek games. Phil's favourite character in the show is Scorpius, because he is such a great villain. (Scorpius, not Phil.)

We have various movie sequences in the game, many of which star Moya herself. The Jim Henson Co. has supplied us with the actual CGI model of the ship from the show. This model is looking fantastic in the sequences that we are starting to put together right now.

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Sound and Music

For a game based on Farscape, we really wanted to do something special with the music. To make the music respond to the events on screen (for example, dramatic music if you're under attack) the music tracks will be interactive.

We contacted Dan Selby of Indigo Music to help us with this. With him, we're making the music with several layers of track that work dynamically with the game code.

So far, we have one complete piece of interactive music and it sounds very cool!

Dan also took on the task of producing our spot sound effects. He uses raw audio from the show itself, supplied by the series' producers, and adapts it for the game. He's also generating the new Weapon and Creature effects as they become necessary.

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The Official Farscape Convention

In September 2001, Liz, Nigel and I went to the Farscape Convention in Burbank. Calif. It was amazing to be surrounded by so many Farscape fans!

We showed off some of our concept art and a short movie we'd put together, and the fans just ate it up! The press interviews went really well, too, which was very encouraging.

Ben Browder (John Crichton) is looking forward to the game but, unfortunately, I narrowly missed the opportunity to show Gigi Edgley (Chiana) the game because I had to run off to catch my flight home. Darn!

It was great to be at the show and talk with the fans, hear their ideas and also experience firsthand the buzz around Farscape. It was a reminder of just how cool it is to be making this game.

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First Playable Milestone

In August 2001, we completed our First Playable Milestone, an industry term roughly equivalent to a movie director's first "rough cut" of a film. In this case it consisted of the first fully playable mission.

It was fantastic to finally to be able to get our hands on the game and actually play part of it. This is the stage in development when you start to see the game finally come together — when you can finally experience what until that point has only been ideas on paper or programming code.

It's also where you can see which parts of the game you've been designing work and, as often happens, which parts don't work.

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Computer Games Magazine

The December 2001 issue of this major PC publication put Farscape on the cover and gave us a six-page feature previewing the game. This was excellent publicity for us!

And now … the real fun starts. We have to bring the full game together over the next few months, and the clock is ticking. Should be an interesting ride — and you'll be hearing about it as it happens in the next Dev Diary!

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