How Aliens versus Predator's Late Design Change Made It a Classic | War Stories | Ars Technica

[Music] the intro and outro videos for each campaign were pre-rendered and they were done by another company one particularly interesting one is the intro to the predator campaign which featured a predator sneaking up behind a marine and then essentially blowing up his head with this plasma cast something that was cut for the final game because it's felt to be a bit extreme my name is Tim Jones I was the lead artist and producer for aliens vs. predator our late stage decision to make all mission environments playable by all three characters created a set of immense technical and design challenges but in the end it was this endeavor that helped make the game a classic that was certainly quite a lot of pressure making a game based on a license although back then I think we probably put more pressure on ourselves than the publishers and the the license holders did we were obsessive about getting everything right because we were such huge fans of aliens and predator and the whole franchise and so it was more down to us to make sure that we were on top of things and making sure it was as true to the movies as we could make so back then most games had static baked lighting that was just essentially baked into the textures or like using light Maps that just wouldn't change as you were playing the game whereas we took a very different approach with ABP and the engine we were creating for it and so all the lighting was fully dynamic which computationally was challenging back then with the the power of the pcs had which was certainly very limited compared to what it is today but we felt it was a core part of what was so exciting about the aliens films in particular is because you know the play of light and dark that sense of atmosphere and horror and peering into the dark and aliens jumping out of the dark we played on that very very strongly I think with the Marine who would have to use flares to light his way around or uses an image intensifier to like light things up in green so they could see but soon as there was a a light around it would totally bleach out your view the aliens are all about like the fear of the dark and the unknowns and that's something we really strongly wanted to get across in the game and so dynamic lighting was very key to that the audio came from quite a lot of different places we did some Foley recording some of it we sampled off of the movies themselves it was actually quite late on that we actually got access to some of the original sound files that the audio designers on the movies used so it was a mix of things and a lot of it was a bit of make doing men just trying to make the game sound like the movies as closely as we could [Music] we went into some real obsessive detail about making sure the motion tracker and the smart gun and the pulse rifle and things to us there were really iconic sounds really nailed the the feeling of how they sounded in the movies one of the other big challenges we had when it came to setting up the gameplay in the game was the way pointing for the AI basically the information that tells the AI how they can where they can go in the environment the routes they can go up the walls around the ceilings that wasn't automatically calculated that was all created by hand by us placing little volumes and nodes and links across the environment in a painstaking fashion still occasionally at nightmares flashbacks to visions of you know vectors and cubes or linking together that I was having to painstakingly place the aesthetic art direction for the game the intent was always to make it as close to the movies and realistic as possible now you look at the game now and that seems like a little bit of a stretch to claim that it was photorealistic or something but that was certainly our aim we were trying to source from photographs real models of the characters grabbing images from the VHS tapes of the movies that we had at the time to try and match stuff as closely as we could if you remember what it's like you know trying to freeze-frame a VHS tape and then take a screen grab of that which required like a pretty dedicated video card at the time it's not like you could just put the file up on YouTube and like you know grab it from there it was really pretty involved I think the thing made aliens vs. predator unique and still does is that we tackled all three of the main species the alien the predator and the the human Marines and you were able to play as all three of those species and they all had very different perspectives on the gameplay things they could do and indeed their motivations in the game so the Marine is probably the most familiar of the species to most first-person-shooter players certainly was then and you're playing as a human being you were probably the most vulnerable of the characters and many respects in that you know an alien or a predator could kill you pretty much like you know out of nowhere almost immediately but the key advantages you had was strength of firepower so you had the really iconic weapons like the pulse rifle with the underslung grenade launcher which could tear through aliens pretty quickly motion tracking smart guns so to track your targets which was particularly useful against aliens in the dark so even if you couldn't see them it was automatically tracking them and you can just open fire and tear them to pieces basically all the things to try and make the Marine feel slightly more comfortable in all those dark spaces what things are trying to kill him the predator he probably the most powerful of the species he's a hunter he has a number of different vision modes that we based on what we're seen in the movies like the iconic thermal vision where everything kind of goes blue and you can see the humans in sort of white and yellow and red the heat sources which you didn't get much detail of the environment there but you could really see your targets of the distance we added a special vision mode which hadn't been seen in the movies that time for being able to see aliens as well and you had your cloaking so you could basically make yourself invisible so that the characters and the enemy wouldn't be able to see you and had some really exotic weaponry like the plasma caster that could blow people apart with like one shot he had a spear gun which you could you know pin body parts to walls and you had the disc which you could throw and that would track targets and tear them into at the same time the alien is actually quite quite fragile and susceptible to being you know taken down by a plasma caster or a pulse rifle from one of the other species but has the envier bull ability to be able to see in the dark wherever and to climb walls and ceilings and leap very fast and kill things in one swipe or with one tail stab or with a you know punch through the head with a jaw attack and I think we we measured the speed of it at one point if you're going full-tilt and you were leaping as well yeah I think you could actually break the speed of sound moving it moving that fast as the alien in a VP as we got further through development we were getting to the point where we had a set of levels for each of the characters there was like you know proving to be really fun and really cool but we you know we discussed amongst ourselves we you know we really like the different perspectives of the different characters and it's something that we really wanted to you know collectively we wanted to see how far we could take that and it seemed like we were missing a trick if we didn't allow you to experience each of the environments from each of those perspectives yourselves as a player so it's kind of a challenge we took upon ourselves to try and find a way to make each of the environments work for each of the the characters even though we hadn't originally started to plan it that way the brief we were working to earlier in the project was that each of the species would have their own campaign their own set of levels and that was all we had to worry about so that's what we focused on making those levels as good as they could be for each species the late-stage decision to make all the missions playable by all three species in the game proved to be an immense technical challenge but it was well worth it in the end the human is ground bound can run around and make small jumps but basically you know they're stuck on the ground with their guns and their flares and they're very much susceptible to the aliens which can crawl on walls and ceilings and leap out of ducts and attack them from any angle out of the darkness and as a player if you play as the alien you can do exactly that so the environment is like totally your playground and the predator was similarly ground bound to the the human but could jump a bit further detecting while we design the environments to play to those abilities and strengths the alien environment in particular to make the most of the gameplay for the alien player used much more verticality so you'd have to climb walls and ceilings to get into new places and look around above the humans and and then leap down and kill them and take them out as you continue on your way the solution we came up with for the Marine was we gave you a jetpack which is arguably not necessarily totally in line with the the AVP franchise at least not yet but it was certainly a lot of fun it didn't feel too far-fetched for the kind of technology that the Marines might be using and certainly it solved a problem for us and was a lot of fun to boot for the predator the solution we came up with was we we go to the predatory a grappling hook so you can basically fire out this this grappling rope to any point in the environment and then swing on it very much like Spider Man so I had like full physics you can be swinging around the environment that was kind of one of my favorite things that came out of the game while it's like you know not not a traditional part you might expect from a nail EA the P game or franchise it actually turned out to be an awful lot of fun and a very interesting way to navigate an environment the narrative of the game again was something that came in relatively late we started with a series of missions which we then you know had to go back and look at how we could string them together into a narrative coming up with a whole bunch of cinematics wasn't really feasible and nor did it feel like it was fitting for the game where it was better to be in the moment in the game playing it so one of the key solutions we came up with was to actually have like mission briefings or background information on what's going on actually playing in the game on monitors in the environment as you explored which vote was pretty revolutionary technology at the time of us actually being able to stream a video on a texture in the environment in the world that you could you know watch while you were playing or by being while being attacked by aliens and you can even destroy those monitors and they'd cast light into the environment and it was a pretty exciting fun way to like get a narrative across in a kind of a fairly you know doesn't hit you over the head and make you go right stop playing watch this now now get on with it it was just like in the background feeds taking the story if you want it and then when it came to actually creating the content for those videos which we conceived as like you know admission briefings people talking to camera much like I did on the the video phones in aliens which you know seemed like pretty advanced science fiction technology back then and now you know we take for granted like talking to each other on skype with FaceTime and all the rest of it but that was pretty sci-fi back then there was actually been a couple of different iterations of those movies that are in the game in the original release prior to the Gold Edition they were actually acted by professional American actors we as a team didn't feel like they kind of captured the urgency we were looking for they were quite sort of performed as if they were you know a man behind desk who as being quite separate from the action welcome to the main colony based marine looks like the colonists [ __ ] a brick and pulled out attention all units all doors have been secured they on maximum alert for us the game was always like frenetic dark scary atmospheric and we wanted a little bit more you know energy in those for the gold edition' we actually created versions ourselves which I think you'll find probably quite a healthy debate online if you look on YouTube comments about like the quality of the acting because we were basically doing it ourselves and the fact that we were all very young at the time and probably didn't look too convincing but we had a lot of fun with it and I think one of the things we did get across with them worse a bit more energy we had lots of atmospheric lighting flashing lights and we threw in a bit more gore and stuff as well so yeah we filmed them all over the course of a weekend in the in the office we had like lots of bin bags down where fake blood would be thrown around and yeah various of us played different roles of Marines and scientists and spaceship captains and the like damned alien can and will be stopped there's only one of them and it only takes one of us to kill it down to one of the guys he actually constructed some predator wrist blades out of wood that he'd sawn together and like put onto a a back plate that could then go under Ed's clothing and I poked through his chest so it looked like he'd been like had predator blade stuck through him from behind which while he was filmed it was like out of shot and then he did a rather melodramatic fashion at the end of his few lines would like you know move upward so the blade will go into shot and it would look like he'd been stabbed from behind and it was hokey but a lot of fun to do and added a bit of a bit of drama to the proceedings are you guys yeah what's good time back then for the game we were we were dealing with very very small amounts of video memory you know we were limited to I think I think I've got the number that burned in my brain actually of like you know 31 to 8 by 1 to 8 pixel textures for each environment like that's what we were allowed to use the videos themselves were outside of that but they they themselves had to be very very small vials like that they were also I think 1 to 8 by 1 to 8 pixel size images and they were compressed so very heavily to make them very very small that you know each individual frame of them really it's almost unintelligible but the movement of them all together kind of gets the idea across what's going on it was like watching a you know the crumbling YouTube video you've ever seen but you know it worked we were thrilled with the way that aliens vs. predator was received both critically and by players and the integration of the three species is something that we were proud of then and we remain proud of to this day ultimately making like all three characters work together in the game I think was arguably the defining success of the game so much of what people loved about the game was the atmosphere the fact that it like made them feel like they were playing the movies and the different perspectives it offered I think being able to make each of the environments playable as each of the species just helped I don't know crystallize and focus on that aspect of the different perspectives is a tough thing to pull off and I'm really proud of what we did and yeah I hope it remains something that people will enjoy too playing one way or another for a long time to come [Music]

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Keywords: aliens vs predators, alien vs predator, aliens versus predator pc, aliens vs predator game, aliens versus predator 1999, 1999 aliens versus predator, aliens vs predator pc game, aliens versus predator war stories, war stories aliens versus predator, avp war stories, tim jones aliens versus predator, war stories, war stories 2018, aliens movie video game, avp video game, aliens video game, avp pc game, tim jones game producer, avp, avp game design, ars, ars technica, technology

Id: YERrs7FYkxo

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 20 2018