Q&A

Q: What sort of game is Nightwalker going to be?
[GxS] Wedgie: Nightwalker's going to be a stealthy first-person shooter. You're going to have to creep around to achieve your objectives.

Q: That's a bit vague. Can you give us any concrete information on what's going to be in the game?
[GxS] Wedgie: Well, most of it's still classified at the moment, but I can tell you the first level's based in an alien detention centre in the Antarctic. You've got to escape from there before you can stop the Bionides. And it's not going to be easy either.

Q: So, are there going to be lots of weapons to make your escape that bit easier?
[GxS] Wedgie: Oh yes...

Q: Returning briefly to the storyline, haven't you chosen a bit of a cliché? It's the old "hero has to save the world but he's locked up" story, isn't it?
[GxS] Wedgie: Lots of games are about heroes triumphing in the face of adversity. So yes, it is a bit of a cliché, but we thought of this idea and we decided it was something we'd like to play, and we reckon that if we'd like to play it, the effort we'll put into it will be that much more, resulting in a better game for everyone. The alternative is we invent a new board game or something dull like that (no offence, but board games are pretty dire in general) and hate writing it, resulting in a terrible game. Or we could reinvent an old board game and join the ever-growing number of people getting sued by Hasbro...heh

Q: You're using one engine for the actual game, but you've got screenshots posted from another. Why?!
[GxS] Wedgie: Yes, it does look a bit weird, doesn't it? Basically, Smidge was in the middle of changing things in the Lightning engine (he's written a load of collision detection code which still doesn't really work at the moment and he was trying to fix it), so that meant I couldn't work on the engine at the time. So I went off and implemented the Thunderbolt engine so I could try some new things out while he still had the code. Anyway, I concentrated more on the graphics than we had in Lightning to start with, so pretty soon Thunderbolt starting producing pretty great screenshots. And, well, it would have been criminal not to have used them... :-)

Q: I have to say your textures do look rather like they were ripped straight out of Quake II. What's the story on that?
[GxS] Wedgie: They won't by the time we've finished the game. Yaume's working on some original textures at the moment. Those are just for testing, because we didn't have enough time to make any that quickly and we wanted some good screenshots.

Q: Will you be publishing the code once you've finished the game, so that others can use your engine?
[GxS] Wedgie: Well, to be honest, we haven't really decided this yet. We might release it eventually, and it'll certainly be available for use if anybody wants to license it (not likely, but we can dream!) but it's going to take a lot of time to finish this engine and we're not really that keen on giving away months of hard work for nothing straight away. If you search the Internet, you'll find plenty of open-source 3D engines which you can use if you want to go down that path.

Q: The Nightwalker page mentions loads of confusing words, which are probably programming terms. Is this the case, what do they mean and just why exactly should we care?
[GxS] Wedgie: Yes, they are programming terms. BSP, if you're interested, stands for binary space partition and PVS stands for potentially visible set. You should care because using these techniques is going to make Nightwalker run at a decent speed on your computer, even in complex environments. Suffice to say they're pretty important, and they've been used in lots of FPSs before now: the first one which calculated a PVS was id Software's Quake and things have just kept improving from there.

Q: On the front page it says that this is the latest game after the "award-winning" Tank Zone II. Just what award did you win exactly?
[GxS] Wedgie: We won the OMT Award for Innovation in Computer Studies. Basically, it's a school award for great programming and web site design. The other lead programmer on the Nightwalker project, Adam Szmigin, has actually won it two years running now. The first time was for Plague II, and this year was for TerrainX. They're both great games, I recommend you check them out at www.smidge-tech.co.uk.

Q: You weren't working together back then?
[GxS] Wedgie: No, this is the first project we've cooperated on. Hopefully we can both learn something from it. Apart from which, it means that the workload gets shared, which is great because neither of us has a great deal of time at the moment. And it gives us some experience of working in a team-based environment.