Interviews

You've seen their shots in Aum7 – Wide West is another great game that is being developed with A5. Now it is the time to find out more about their team.

Q: Who is Giant Arts?

A: Giant Arts is a small group of nerds located in Germany. The core team consists of only 2 people: jotha (Juergen Haug) and bearf00t (Ulf Ackermann) in addition we currently have a talented musician helping us out, his name is Jerry Carleton and he is from the States. Our goal is to make games that are actually fun to play and thus focus on gameplay and atmospheric design instead of only eyecandy. -bearf00t

Q: How would you describe WW? What type of game is it?

A: Wide West is a mixture of 3D-Shooter and Adventure/RPG; if you have played 'Outlaws' from LucasArts you know in what historical background we are. But it is not 'only' a shooter like that because the player has to solve small riddles too, talk to npcs or collect and use items at the right places and times. All in all we will implement funny gameplay elements from almost all games we loved to play. -bearf00t

 
Q: You have created impressive terrain-based levels; what tool are you using for heightmaps?

A: We simply use photohop to create the maps. -jotha

 
Q: Do you have "huge" levels in WW? How big is the portal count?

A: I will try to keep a max portal count of about 3000. Not really huge but you can do a lot with 3000 portals. Our little video shows the tutorial map with about 1600 portals and you haven't seen the whole map yet. -jotha

Q: I like the AI ideas in your game; can you tell us more about what you have achieved so far?

A: Right now I have a NPC-System in alpha stage. The NPCs can talk to each other, follow different paths and just do their daytime job. Meaning we are able to script pretty good NPCs wich adds very much to the atmosphere of our game. Then I also have some simple animal brains but nothing spectacular yet. -bearf00t

Q: I see a few more panels in your hud; can you explain what's with them?

A: Well, i have a panel for ammo, health, armor, air and the backpack. The last two are probably the interesting ones. The blue air panel shows you how much air is left when you are diving and the red air panel how much air is in your lungs for the next jump. This way we want to prevent bunny hopping. The backpack panel shows you what item you currently hold in your hand. You can use it with the activate key if your hands are empty you can open doors and so on. If you have money in your hands you can give it to an npc for example. Its a very simple system if you get used to it. You just cycle trough your items in the inventory, much easier than big inventory handling like in diablo or other rpg games. -bearf00t

Q: I have downloaded your video and I liked it a lot; when can we expect to see a demo version?

A: I will not promise it, but we are making good progress and so I estimate that you can download the demo version which will contain almost all the game features in the first quarter of 2002! -bearf00t

Q: Can you tell us more about Killerhuhn 3D?

A: Well it was my first finished game project. I have used the 3drad engine a competitor for A5 and I wanted to make a very simple game to get used to it. Because 'Moorhuhn' was very popular in Germany at that time and it was only in 2D I created it in 3D and found a publisher. First I did it for fun, but when I had a publisher I implemented his ideas and because I was alone with no experience it was a hard task. I could finish it in about 2 sleepless weeks. After that I was happy and wanted to rest a bit before starting my next project. Then I came over A5 and started playing around with that engine. -bearf00t

Q: Do you have a publisher for Wide West?

A: No, and I dislike the idea of getting one now. I will first complete the demo and see what feedback we get. Then we will implement what the gamers want and finish the full game. After that we can lay back and search for a publisher. (: -bearf00t

Thank you.