Interviews

This month we will find out more about a great Brazilian team and their new game - MatchBall.

Q: Who is Espaco Informatica and why did you choose the Acknex engine for your projects?

A: Espaco Informatica is a Brazilian company, with the mission to produce high quality games, with innovative features and a lot of creativity. Espaco intends to become one of the best Brazilian development teams, and with a lot of work, one of the best of the world in the future. We are aware that it's not easy, and it can sound like a dream, but we are here, ready to fight, and with a lot of good ideas. Each new game, each day we continue studying, growing, and we understand that we are on the right path.

The Acknex engine can be considered cheap, but it is an excellent engine. Acknex allow us to create great effects, great sceneries, to use great models, and this way to produce good games. We have searched about engines, and we can say that GameStudio presents an excellent relation about cost and benefits. Unfortunately some publishers don't like it too much; some of them have told us that Acknex can not produce a AAA title. It's bad, and it could force us to use another engine for some of our future projects, because you know, publishers rule, they are our clients.

We understand that these persons have this opinion because GameStudio is featured as an very easy engine, for beginners, and you can find comments like this on the main page of A6. Conitec uses this strategy, and it can be considered right, it's really easy to start and to learn. But we believe, and I will use this interview to suggest to Conitec, to release an special version, with a powerful new name, and treat this new version as a Professional Engine. I think this way we can change some publishers' opinions. I think that a good game depends on the quality of programming, sceneries and models. Acknex give us all we need to make it run.

Q: Your new game - MatchBall - looks really good. Which were the most complex problems you ran into while you were developing the game?

A: Thanks. Producing a sports game is really complicated. The ball logic, and the ball physics is one of the activities that takes a lot of time. But I think that the AI of the computer player can be considered the most complex problem. You need to make the computer player decide about the kind of hit when the ball is still far, else he can not play the right animation. You need to consider that the ball can come from right or left, tall or short, and this way there are hundreds of possible situations.  To solve this, we used the old and good mathematics. But, it took us several hours and days of test.

Q: The game runs smoothly on low-end systems. How big is the poly count for the player models?

A: We have used LODs for the main models, which helped us get a certain performance gain. We were really worried about performance, and this way we decided to cut off some polygons from the models. The final poly count is  790 faces for the body, and about 200 for the heads.

Q: What tools are you using for your projects (excepting Acknex, of course)?

A: The main tools (after Acknex) are 3D Studio Max, and Adobe Photo Shop. These are powerful tools. We used a lot of photos and films too. To make the movements we filmed a real player making the main and real movements. Later, Gustavo Bulow, who leads the 3D and art, made the models move as the real player. It's a very interesting process. It take a lot of time, but we got good movements for our models. Take a look at this AVI, (http://www.hades2.com/temp/avi01.avi), in the front we have the 3D model, in background the original video recorded (we have used two cameras).

Q: The crowd used in your game is one of the best looking I've ever seen. Could you tell us how many different sprites have you used and which were their sizes?

A: We have used ten different people, with different clothes to make our crowd. There is a simple script that makes the crowd be ever in a different and random position. The sprite size is 256x90 pixels for each group of seven people. We confess that we have planned to insert more different people, and we planned to insert sprites with beautiful girls, but because of the deadline we could not make it, and the game remains a bit uglier than planned. You know, without the bright girls in the crowd. Here in southern Brazil you can find some of the most beautiful girls in the world... well, they will be in our next games.

Q: MatchBall includes a great tutorial. Could you name a few more advantages over the competition?

A: We have played all the other tennis games available on the market, including the oldies. We have tried to keep the best features of them, and to introduce different features too. We decided to implement a new way of control, so the playability is completely different from the others. We received some critics for that, but we are sure that these guys didn't learn how to play (didn't use the tutorial), so they haven't actually played the game. Once you understand how it works, you can have total control over the hits. For sure it's different when compared to other tennis games, but it's easy to understand. Another thing is the Career mode; in other games we can get a lot of virtual money, win the tournaments, but we can't spend our fortune. In Matchball we introduced this concept: if you get money, you can spend it. You can buy mansions, equipments, as a prize for your success in the game. We think it's new, different, and a good feature to get a reward while you are playing.

Q: I have played Hades2 (www.hades2.com) a few years ago and I liked it a lot. Do you plan to release Hades3 in the future?

A: Many thanks. Hades3 is already planned. For sure we intend to make it soon. But, not always we make our favorite games, we need to make what the publishers want, because they pay us for that. We create some games, sometimes not our favorites, while expecting by the chance to make another project that we really want to do. Actually, we have fun while developing any kind of game, but we have our preferences. This makes part of development process, and it's needed; we need to make money, and producing any kind of  game, we always learn new things.

Q: What important features would you like to see implemented in the engine in the near future?

I think the Acknex is accompanying the new technologies, and providing good features. Sometimes I see that the light system looks a bit artificial, so maybe some improvements of the lighting system (and shadows) are needed. We didn't used yet the new bones system, but we were waiting for this feature.

Q: Please give us a few tips for the beginners.

A: I think the best tip I can give to users in general is always take a look at the links session, news session, the Acknex User Magazine, and to use the Forum. Here in the AUM, we always can find good tips and examples. I use to visit this site. In the news and links session we find good tools, and more content. Using the forum we can share our problems, and find out the solutions. And we still have the Conitec support, that always gives us valuable information. The rest is work and creativity.

Thank you a lot, Augusto.