Reign of Fire Preview

MW: A sophisticated scripting system allows both Dragon and Human units to vary their movements and targets based on what happens during the game. For example, the human fire trucks will try and put out fires caused by Dragon attacks and will prioritize the ones they save first. A rocket launcher is more powerful than a tank so they will have their flames dowsed first. Using this scripting system has given the non-player characters decision making abilities and created a realistic and reactive environment.

The Dragons enemies are made up of 8 different basic types of Dragons, which are as follows:

The Bull - The Father of the Dragon scourge and the only male that fathered the Dragons that have over run the Earth, the Bull is the most deadly of all the Dragons.

Spitfires - A very small airborne dragon: doesn't take too many hits to kill but they are very agile. They spit out lots of small fireballs and there will often be many of them swarming together through the air.

Fireballer - A red-scaled, medium sized dragon. They always fly low scaling hill sides. They probably follow the movie dragon the most closely. It attacks with strafing runs: firing large fireballs at targeted enemies. They often fly in pairs or more.

Dive Bomber - A larger dragon with yellow markings on its scales, this dragon swoops to pick up objects such as Quad Bikes and other small vehicles and then drops them on the player or N.P.C. allies.

Napalmer - Heavy, orange scaled dragon which swoops pausing briefly, before unleashing an uninterrupted stream of fire like a flame thrower, moving its head slowly from side to side.

Jakyls - These are the dragon's young, armed with dangerous claws and teeth they are ferocious and unrelenting in their desire to feed and grow. Powerful muscles give these Dragons unbelievable speed and stamina even against the quickest of human vehicles. They attack by ramming the player and eating humans.

Land Tank - A huge, FAT, dark green dragon similar to a Rhino/Triceratops and very tough. Slow moving but charges at the player once targeted. Napalms from each nostril. This is an ancient Dragon, too old to use it's ragged wings any more.

Pitcher - A dark blue, large dragon, that throws Jakyls at the player from a nest of eggs on which it sits.

AT: From what we've seen of the game so far, the whole thing looks really impressive What engine did you guys use?

MW: The core engine used for Reign of Fire was based on core technology developed by Kuju for it's projects. The engine was capable of supporting both gameplay types so instead of using half the team to develop the engine and tools during the duration of the project we could focus on the gameplay programming instead. The bulk of this work was developing the vehicle physics and the Dragon animation system.

The game uses physics to model the behavior of the player vehicles, allowing the designers to create distinct driving model characteristics for each player vehicle. The goal was to make fun and easy-to-control vehicles (not necessarily "real world" dynamics).

For the Dragons the programming team implemented a skinning system (as opposed to a rigid jointed animation system) so that the Dragons would look believable organic beasts. This was essential to developing convincing Dragon models and animations, and was enhanced further by developing a blended animation system so the player Dragon would react immediately to the player's input and also to situations around them (e.g., head moving, getting shot, flapping wings etc).

AT: Is Reign of Fire going to have a multiplayer mode? In other words will it support Xbox Live?

MW: Multiplayer would have been good had time allowed, we'd looked into team and one on one combat, but we would have encountered problems with performance. It was our intention at the outset to push the engine to its limits in order to deliver the special effects and environment that we felt would be expected of the game. In order to do this, the technology has been heavily optimized to make the game look and feel as good as it does, had we added multi-player we would have had to compromise these aspects and the environments.

There is always the possibility of developing a sequel or mission disk for future release. There are a wealth of features that we can expand upon based on the current feature set, as well as a number we have not had time to fully implement during the development of this initial version. Multiplayer and online features are definitely something that we would like to see in a follow-up version of the game, imagine being able to play the game with a friend with one of you as the Humans and the other as a Dragon!

AT: Can you reveal an exact release date yet?

MW: The first week of November 2002