Interstellar Marines Interview - PAGE 1

There's no shortage of quality shooters available these days, but you'll want to make room for another before too long: Zero Point Software's single player, co-op and multiplayer title Interstellar Marines, releasing on PC and Mac, and eventually consoles.

One of the problems with the FPS genre is it can be tough to know what's worth your time. For many, the games blend together into one generic mess. Fortunately, the official Interstellar Marines website has two gameplay demos you can try out immediately, and we think you'll have a good idea of what separates this one from the pack if you do.

The demos are available via browser thanks to Unity engine functionality; in time, traditional install versions will be downloadable as well.

As an independent developer, Zero Point is treading a different path than most, releasing these minimalist 'slices' one at a time before launching into the single player/co-op campaign, all the while taking pre-orders, which unlock more demo content.

If you're keen to learn more about the project, listen to or read our interview below with the studio's graphics artist and game director Kim Haar Jorgenson, who provides very interesting and entertaining insight into what it's all about. Note as usual, the audio version contains quite a bit of extra content -- transcribed are the essentials.

I was really impressed with [the demo]. I've been playing a lot of independent games and shooters the past couple years...it's not to say anything bad about them or attack anybody personally, but a lot of them have been mediocre and I feel like the developers don't put that kind of work into making sure it's a solid end product. So it was relieving to give Interstellar Marines a try and see you guys could pull it off with a limited budget.

Thanks a lot. It really means the world to us. It's one small step at a time for us to prove that this dream of ours is going to happen one way or the other.

You have a lot going on. There's a lot to talk about, the single player, the um... (laughs)

(laughs)

The sharks.

The sharks. (laughs)

(laughs) That must come up in every interview.

It does, it does. For us internally it's actually just one level in the game. Early on people were like 'Are you really serious?' I'm glad we did the photo session to show this is mankind playing with evolutionary technology. It's cool for us to have such an icon, and it takes the pressure off all the other things we want to hide and have for ourselves. It's just fantastic.

It's good to have something memorable the press can jump on and then users jump on and say 'oh my God are you serious?' When I laugh I'm not laughing because it's completely ridiculous, just very...different.

Fair enough. We just know when the lights go out and the pools start flooding, the scientific labs of this orbital genetics space station, you're gonna hope you're playing co-op at that point in the game, that's for sure. (laughs)

(laughs) Are there underwater sections?

Absolutely.

The basic idea for Interstellar Marines was born when Nicolai and I -- my good friend and co-op buddy -- we played every FPS we could get our hands on and if it featured co-op inside the product or through a mod, we had to play in co-op. We played a game back in '93 called Hired Guns on the Amiga which featured split screen click-to-move really crude co-op.

Back when we saw Alien Resurrection in '97, we just knew the ideas we had for shock would work even better in the context of things we set up, if some of the levels would be flooded.

You're gonna be swimming with [the great white shark], but it's going to behave like an animal, not like in Lara Croft, a regular enemy; it's going to be attracted to blood and stuff like that. Then there'll be genetic experiments which will have the teeth and jaw from the white shark but inherit some of the traits from other animals as well. Their sight is pretty bad but the smell is very good; it adds up to an interesting enemy where if you stand completely still, it's not going to be able to detect you, so kind of a T-Rex moment in some of the levels.

It sounds like you're trying to recreate the experience of those moments, actually being there with the shark and being completely horrified. Not a lot of games can pull that off; you're usually aware you're playing a game. Are you trying --

Yeah. It is a challenge for us as well. In [the previous engine] Unreal 3, with the prototypes we created a behavioral system that was almost completely random. There were controls for wayward spawning, but after they were spawned they would react completely independent and try to work together. It worked really great; it was so cool sitting at GDC a few years back demonstrating the publisher demo we had, just you walking around a space station with these sharks everywhere. It was really intense [because] it wasn't scripted. I sat with a few publishers who were scared to death because a random situation came up...I checked a hallway, nothing there, moved on, checked it again and a shark was running full speed at me and grabbed me between the jaws and shook me and eventually killed me.

Early on we figured we could get this enemy to work. We haven't worked on it since; it's some of the things we have in the backlog for the game.

It's got to be really satisfying and terrifying at the same time when you see something like that, that you created but it's behaving on its own.

Yeah it is, it is. It's where the AI in games need to go. You need to set up rules that govern certain parameters so you don't spawn every shark in the same room as you, but after that it's really important that we, that all developers I think, [their] AI evolves a bit to be a bit more unpredictable and less linear. I would rather have an hour of intense gameplay I could play over and over again than 10 hours of the same scripted enemies coming at me. The best enemies I've seen is in Halo; the scripted ones in F.E.A.R. were quite good as well, and Killzone 2 on the harder difficulty was exceptionally [well done]. I know Halo and [Killzone 2] both had behavioral tree [AI], so that's the AI technology we're working with as well.

AI is generally one of the toughest things to code, isn't it?

It is, it is. The first test we did with the shark, it worked really good 80% of the time, but 20% of the time [sometimes]...there's an area you know you have to sweep and control, but sometimes the sharks wouldn't spawn. Some events have to be scripted as well; it can't be completely random. It's definitely a challenge.