Oddworld 4: \'Stranger\' Update

I hope this year we see this game.  




http://www.xboxworld.nl/news/5144/?PHPSESSID=1976c2447950fc0665e2b32136311f63

Design:

In the Game Design Department, things are wrapping up quickly. Every space of the game has been built and they are going through both RT and Design 2nd passes. Quite a bit of time is being spent working with the audio department on implementing the hundreds and hundreds of sound cues they\'ve been creating, in addition to working on several of the bounty battles. They should be at the end of the new feature phase of the production cycle, but the programmers always find ways to sneak in cool new additions! They\'re also ramping up to the balance/polish phase, which will continue until the game is pried loose from the collective cold, dead hands of the department.

Real-Time:

Whoa! This week has been crazy in Real time. Lots of artwork is flying around as the levels get wrapped up. The last region has been coming along nicely. The guys are doing a good job making the main facility look huge and menacing. Ryan is working on some more weapon effects this week. Brad is squashing some early level bugs and making sure that region three runs smooth, hooking up portals and general fixes. The animators are hard at work doing cinematics and also working on the final boss and his minions. Should be pretty cool. Raj is finishing up the crossbow upgrades and starting on more weapon upgrades. Marke and Rob are working hard on the last level and should be done soon.

Programming:

The last phases of developing a game are always very difficult but also very rewarding. There\'s lots of pressure from art and design to finish all the features they need, and everything has to be ready for cert, running from a real DVD, optimizing the frame rate, and all that internal stuff that makes a game done. On the plus side, lots of cool features finally come to completion, and you get to see them actually working in the game. Mark is putting the finishing touches on the automatic lip sync stuff; all the characters in the games will talk along with the audio, and there\'s just tons of audio content so there\'s no way the animators could hand-animate all that speech. Aaron is putting some polish on our weapons and adding some new upgrade ammo types. A lot of our work is going towards memory use and our paging system. We\'ve got a ton of content, and we continuously stream it as you run around the world. So, the paging system needs to pack the data up tightly and everything needs to be very small in memory.