MAKING A KILLING
Trace the Killzone family tree back far enough and you’ll discover that its roots lay in a technical demo created by developer Guerrilla back in the late 1990’s. The demo – little more than a software showcase designed to demonstrate their revolutionary new method of drawing curved surfaces – led directly to an approach from the mighty Sony corporation, who asked them to use their sparkling new graphics engine to power a fully-fledged game, it was at this moment in time that the first Killzone sperm entered the Killzone fallopian tube. Fag packets and beer mats at the ready, the studio heads at Guerrilla began sketching out vague outlines of what would later become the Killzone embryo.
They knew they wanted to make a first-person shooter, largely on account of the lack of any decent opposition. “Timesplitters 2 was decent enough”, they thought to themselves, “but where is the PS2 game to challenge Halo on Xbox.” There wasn’t one. From that moment onwards it was just a matter of deciding on the setting. Martin De Ronde, commercial director, was an integral part of that decision-making process: “Our first step was to research all the different types of conflict in order to decide which direction the game was going to go in. Basically, we discovered early on that we found all of them interesting. We wanted to use the trench battles from World War 1, the jungle warfare from Vietnam, the Normandy landings from World War 2, Stalingrad, and so on. What we did after this was to create our own war, and to then base it around on the most interesting conflicts of the 20th century.”
DIRTY DOZEN
A deliberately simple story was thus created to tie the whole thing together. Echoing a number of classic war movies, Killzone’s plotline revolves around a small squadron of ISA troops who are sent on a suicide mission to halt an invasion of their home planet by a swarm of evil Helghast invaders. It’s like The Dirty Dozen. Only much dirtier. And slightly more futuristic.
The next stage was to hire artists and to shower them in paper and pencil crayons until they’d established a firm visual tone for the game. The only real restriction on the creative types here was that every thing in Killzone – from the weapons and the vehicles, to the buildings and the uniforms – had to be as realistic and plausible as possible. For Ray Postma, lead concept artist, this has a major impact on the way he approached the project: “We wanted to stay away from all the science fiction stuff. In terms of the guns, this meant that they had to be real and use real bullets. At the very beginning I went away and researched the various types of weaponary currently being used by armed forces around the world. After that, I took different parts of different guns and pieced them together to make Killzone’s weapons. They’re incredibly intricate. If someone actually tried to make the weapons using blueprints I’ve made as a guide, they should, in theory, actually work. Everything is in the right place and everything is in proportion.”
When it came to designing the environments, Postma’s first step was to gather a library of images to be referred back to throughout the project: “ I collected thousands of photos of war zones from the internet and then studied them for details. I then applied the colour schemes taken from the photos throughout the games environments. Most of the photos were of countries in the Middle East, though there’s definitely an Eastern Bloc feel to parts of the game. I also looked at a lot of movies: The Thin Red Line, Platoon, Black Hawk Down for the slum areas, Saving private Ryan, the list goes on.”
The geography of the city was another important consideration for Postma: “When we were laying out the city, we thought carefully about its history and how it would’ve been built. What would the people have constructed first? If you look at the slums, you’ll notice a large amount of containers. That’s because when the first settlers were colonising the planet they didn’t have any raw materials, so they brought pre-made buildings over in containers, and then lived in those. As you move closer to the centre of the city you’ll notice that the materials and the architecture get gradually more sophisticated to reflect the increasing prosperity of the people.”
The final stage of the design process was to design the soldiers. In terms of the Helghast , Killzones nasties, the idea was to equip them with ageing, mass-produced technology : “The way I look at it, there are so many Helghast soldiers that their paymasters wouldn’t be able to equip them with cutting edge materials. I wanted their stuff to look cheap and badly made. Finally, I added insignia’s similar to those worn by the Germans in World War 2 to give people an easy reference point. You need to be able to tell immediately that these are the bad guys.” The end result is devastating: a 21st century Nazi with burning orange eyes and an imposing physique.
The tables were turned when it came to designing the ISA. For these soldiers, the influences were taken largely from contemporary American technology. The financial restraints that apply to the bad guys were removed due to the fact that the ISA army is a far smaller outfit, meaning the equipment could be the top of the range throughout. It’ll need to be as well, considering that you’re never less than horribly out numbered in your effort to wedge a twig through the spokes of the merciless Helghast war machine.
MARCHING ORDERS
With the concepts in place, the focus of the development moved onto the game designers, lead by Martin Capel. His role was to catch the ideas floating through the spacious Amsterdam headquarters of Guerrilla and to nail them down and turn them in proper ‘things’ that could be placed into the game and played with. His first task was to consider the squad element of the game. In Killzone, play just one member of a team of four soldiers, but how much of an impact this should have on the nuts-and- bolts gameplay? Is Killzone going to be a tactical, team-based shooter, or an action-oriented blaster in which the squad elements is but a minor factor?
Capel is clear where his priorities lie: “For me, it was vitally important from the outset to keep the game free-flowing at all times, and I don’t think you can have that if you’re constantly having to stop to issue orders. With this in mind, we designed the game so that your team mates are intelligent enough to look after themselves. You never have to tell them what to do; they’re always bright enough to figure it out for themselves. The second thing, is even though you’re just one man in a gang of four, it’s only right that you – the player – should be having all the fun. You don’t want the computer characters stomping around with massive guns and killing all the enemies while you stand there and passively watch.”
To this end, Capel had to cheat a little when it came to the combat: “We made sure that the enemies always focus their firepower on you, otherwise it’d be too easy. Another important decision we made was that your buddies couldn’t die. We toyed with the idea early on, but it caused to many problems with regards to the storyline. Once your team mates have been hit, they just drop back, meaning you’ll have less firepower on your side and even more pressure on you.”
BOOT CAMP
It was also up to Capel and his team of coders to design and implement a solid and believable level of artificial intelligence for troops of both sides. An important factor here was that all soldiers should understand that firing from a covered position is far more effective than standing out in the open. Not that all Helghast soldiers act in the same way, as Capel is keen to point out: “We’ve tried to introduce human characteristics into the enemies. Some will be more accurate than others, some will just run at you gung-ho and try to kill you. Others will play hide and seek.” In another neat touch, enemy soldiers have been programmed to switch weapons in order to find the most suitable gun for that particular situation. Run in close at a guard holding a rocket launcher and, rather than run the risk of blowing himself up, he’ll switch to the pistol and attempt to take you out with that.
Once the team had finished educating the soldiers, they moved onto the Helghast vehicles. Though you won’t be able to drive any of the various tanks, dropships and cars in the game, they nevertheless serve a very important purpose, often rolling into view at the end of a level to block the path that leads from one mission to the next. Remco Straatman, lead artificial intelligence programmer, explains the challenges they provide to the player: “The intelligence of the vehicles is very sophisticated. The tank, for example, can only operate with two soldiers – one in the driving seat, one in the turret. So when your up against one of these you’re going to have to think about which soldier you’re going to take out first. If your clever, you’ll take out the guy on top as soon as you can, as without him the driver, whose field of vision is heavily restricted in the belly of the tank, won’t be able to find you as easily.”
