DroneZ Interview

This is one of those titles that's supposed to exhaust every possible feature out of the new GeForce 3 graphic card. We're happy to inform you that we've had a nice one-to-one with Giovanni Caturano, the Development Leader of Zetha gameZ, and we asked him to uncover a few details about the designing, visual elements, and, of course, some of the unique characteristics regarding gameplay.

Action Trip: Give our readers a few brief words about the your company and the team that's working on DroneZ.

Feast your eyes on the GeForce Illumination.

That doesn't look comfortable.

Giovanni Caturano: We are a group of passionate people coming from different experience that are not only in the videogame business. Beyond the classic members, we have real architects as consultants for the environments, many different actors for the motion capture, etc. but, in general, we can say that the core team is definitely small (up to 15 people maximum).

AT: The game was initialized as a Dreamcast project. Now it's being developed for both PC and Xbox platforms. How does the Xbox seem to you when compared to the PC and DC?

GC: The Xbox is much more powerful than any PC or console sold now. Future PC's will be more powerful, but they will cost much much more for a very long time. Moreover, the advantage in terms of ease of use and compatibility, for a console, are evident. Beyond power, the main difference with the DC is the development kit, which is similar to the usual Windows-based systems, without having to be WinCE, which was a major issue for several DC developer (on DC, you also had the proprietary DK, for best results, but it was far from baing comparable with the PC systems).

AT: What inspired you the most when you came up with the idea for this game? Also, could you describe the story in a few words?

GC: I was mainly inspired by Cyberpunk writers (e.g. Gibson, Rucker, Sterling) for the setting and by many arcade classics for the gameplay (you surely recognize Discs of Tron's influence). The story is about hackers attempting to infiltrate secured network locations (represented as a 3D universe) controlled by Artificial Intelligences.

AT: What is the most important characteristics of DroneZ that will enhance both single and multi-player gameplay?

GC: The time factor is critical: bullets take consistent time to reach the target, so you hardly aim directly at the enemy, unless the enemy is steady. So there is much more tactics than in a traditional shooter, involving rebound, movement strategies, position evaluation and many other factors that come into play when you consider Secondary Weapons, ZNRG balance and tools.

AT: Utilizing the powers of the latest GeForce 3 graphic card, DroneZ displays some outstanding visual effects. Name some of these features which the GeForce3 has allowed you to realize?

GC: The nFiniteFX engine mainly gave us the possibility to implement our custom illumination system with bump mapping in hardware with per-light and per-pixel precision with jaw-dropping quality.

AT: "Collision with characters is very important and it is polygon-correct: this means that a character is not hit just because a bullet passed "close" to him: for instance, a small bullet could pass over the shoulder or between the legs without hitting the character." - Give us some more particulars on the game's engine.

Take a look a the thoroughly detailed game-models.

Juggling cannot save you my friend!

GC: A nice feature is the relative gravity: characters stand and move on platforms and the platforms can be freely rotated in 3D, this means that the characters can be upside-down, for instance. Another thing I love is the fact that, even if the characters are smooth-skinned (not divided into pieces), their "bones" are handled independently, so the animations change continuously from the base template: for instance, if the character is running, the player can aim anywhere (with no regards for the movement direction) and the torso and head rotate smoothly without affecting the legs, but with all the precision of a real-life torsion. If the player shoots, the character only moves its arms to shoot, thus combining an additional animation template with the current one.

AT: You mentioned that the player will have the opportunity to customize his body and armor at a certain stage during the game. Explain, how does this work?

GC: The goal of the game is to intrude into enemy systems. The player will be the cyberspace operator while some hackers will do their job in the real world. When the player destroys some enemy protection, the hackers can access some secret features and "donate" these to the player. This features include new kinds of shields, secondary weapons and also special tools.

AT: Can you clarify the 'RPG-like' technique the game will use, and in what way will it affect the gameplay?

GC: The RPG-like thing is just the way _we_ developers give the "ability points" to the enemies. DroneZ is an action game, not an RPG. This is just a way to let people know that there is a balance in the properties of the characters.

AT: Lets talk about the development stage, what's your team currently working on?

GC: We are working on tuning of the single-player levels, while developing the online and offline multiplayer modes.

AT: You've recently stated that you're also very excited about the Xbox version of the game. How's this project comin along? When can we expect the game to be released (when for the PC, and when for the Xbox)?

GC: We don't know yet. We hope to be there for the launch of the Xbox, but this issues will depend mainly on the publisher.