Warhawk Flies Again!
Warhawk PS3.
Wow. That takes me back. Warhawk and Twisted Metal were the first games I ever worked on professionally. I look back on the development of both very fondly, but I think my favorite game was Warhawk.
When I arrived at that newly-formed SingleTrac in October of 1994, it was filled a pretty sharp bunch of engineers from Evans and Sutherland who didn't know much about games, but knew a lot about 3D technology. I found myself in the role of "resident expert" on games, though pretty soon we brought another couple of gamers on board so that we could sanity check my limited expertise. At the time, Warhawk had the working title, "Red Mercury" (a name which kinda-sorta stuck as the subtitle), and Twisted Metal was being referred to by the very generic title "Firestorm." Within a week or so, Twisted Metal had been renamed "Urban Assault" (which for some reason didn't pass a trademark check, but Microsoft managed to push an "Urban Assault" game through somehow a couple of years later).
At first, I was more excited about Twisted Metal (DUH!), because I was a fan of the old Steve Jackson game, "Car Wars." But the Warhawk ("Red Mercury") concept really thrilled me. We were on the cusp of the "3D Revolution" with the yet-unknown Sony Playstation (we had the test boxes later called "PSX" - I don't think they even knew for sure what they were going to call it then). To me, Warhawk was about taking the old 2D side-shooter games like R-Type, Raiden, and SideArms, and putting them in a 3D world with 3D gameplay and graphics.
I remember one meeting when we had a late design meeting to discuss the Canyon bosses. I think we ordered Chinese food, and had it delivered. The sun was setting through the blinds of the boardroom, the whiteboard was filled with funky pictures, and we were arguing about missile launch rates and blaster attacks from the "eyes" of these things. I remember thinking to myself, "This is a business meeting? This is the coolest job EVER!"
My biggest contribution at that meeting was the warning that the bosses actually needed to get HARDER as they take damage, not easier. One of those little gameplay "duhs" that somehow escaped us at first as we were talking about shooting off weaponry.
Mike Badger, the lead programmer on the game. We had other guys working on the sound, the shell, and the 3D engine, so Badger and I got to divvy up tasks for gameplay. Badger worked on the flight controls for the Warhawk (called the "Peregrine" during development), and did an absolutely astounding job of it. Freed of the constraints of the flight simulators he'd spent his career working on, he decided that rather than the controller directly controlling the ship (after all, how much direct input could you get from a non-analog controller?), that it would instead simply be "hints" to what the player wanted to do, which a routine would then translate to appropriate actions on the ship. The controls were praised in numerous reviews for how awesome they were, and how easy the ship was to control. That praise mainly belongs to Mike Badger (and Kellan Hatch, the designer) - both of whom are (I think) working on Warhawk PS3 with Incog.
I got to work on weapon systems and some common functionality ("Destructables," explosions, special effects, etc.). Anything that didn't directly fall into those two categories were up for grabs between Badger and me. We had kind of a "task bucket" of jobs - and as soon as we finished one, we got to pick another one from the list of the appropriate priority. This had the added advantage of motivating us to finish our current tasks as quickly as possible, so we could pick of the most fun jobs from the task bucket. Like bosses. Programming the bosses were great fun.
Pierre Dufresne was one of the modelers. He'd work all through the night, and it would seem the less sleep he got, the more imaginitive the results. It seemed he'd just start having these imaginitive dreams half-asleep in his chair or something, and then BOOM! Four hours later he had taken whatever bizarre images his subconsciousness would generate, and convert them to simulated reality on the screen of his SGI machine - and in the game.
The found myself alternating between Twisted Metal and Warhawk pretty regularly - Scott Campbell (our producer) would shift me between projects pretty regularly. This is a bizarre practice that I've never heard of anyone else doing anywhere else in the industry, but it worked great for these projects. They originally shared the same code base - in fact, our early test level for Warhawk was the arena for Twisted Metal, and you could drive one of the cars around with one controller while flying the Warhawk (Peregrine) with the other. Even after we diverged the code bases for the game (the engine and sound code, along with certain other modules, remained common to both games throughout development), the two were similar enough that we could just yank code from one game and drop it into the other with only a little bit of modification.
My most famous contribution to Warhawk were the notorious "Swarm Missiles" - I'd taken the idea from numerous Japanese anime shows. When Scott Campbell to told me to put them into Twisted Metal, I almost got mad about it. These were special to the point of defining for Warhawk, and now they were being thrown into Twisted Metal as just another "cool" element. It turns out that because the cars were so close to the ground, the randomness of the missiles had to be reigned in so half the missiles didn't explode harmlessly into the ground or into a building before reaching their target that was dead-ahead.
Incidentally, I tried to put the swarm missile behavior into Void War - but the more realistic physics of my recent indie effort meant that the randomization of the flight path tended to even out so that their trajectory was unaffected. So it just looked like the missiles were buggy. So I got rid of that behavior.
Warhawk received pretty consistantly high reviews, with some reviewers simply gushing over the game's graphics and sense of flight (like I said, these were the early days of the 3D revolution - we weren't being compared to Quake yet, we were being compared to Doom and the first Starfox). The videos for the game drew jeers - they sucked to the point of being comedy, and we knew it, but Sony spent so much money on them we weren't about to say "No." Unfortunately, the amount of work we had to do on the levels kept the game pretty short, and the single-player only aspect also kept sales (and popularity) a bitl below that of Twisted Metal. Still, it went on to sell about a million copies IIRC, and was one of Sony's "Greatest Hits" series for the PS. We considered doing a sequel to Warhawk many times - we had a couple of design documents floating around, including one for a "spiritual sequel" to the game that never materialized.
But now it looks like a true sequel will finally see the light of day. I'm sorry I won't be a part of it, but I'm sure it's in good hands. The swarm missiles will fly without me. Though I expect they need about four times as many people this time around - depending on how much time they've already put into it, it looks like they have about twice the development time to work on it as we did for the first one (we had from October '94 to August '95 to put both games together - from SCRATCH).
I'm mostly just reminiscing about good times here - I don't know if I can tie it into indie gaming too well. There wasn't much "indie" about SingleTrac - except for the spirit that was there the first year or two. Part of the thrill of going indie for me is to try and recapture some of that spirit. I felt it working on Void War - or maybe it was just the the feeling of working so many hours without sleep. But Warhawk was one of those games that just succeeded because of the amount of sheer passion that went into the game. It wasn't technically resounding, it wasn't perfectly designed - but the people working on it just loved what they were doing and burned the midnight oil trying to make something great.
I'm just glad to see Warhawk take flight again.
Labels: Mainstream Games, retro
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:47 PM (Permalink)
I always liked singletracs/incogs style. There was something about them that you can identify who made the game just by looking at some footage.
Thanks.
Rock on.
As a student programmer, it's fun to read about your first hand experience in "the field".
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