August 27, 2009

The State of Play on Blur

The silence is broken... here's a studio update!

Hey everyone...Ben here! As you all know it's been a while since I've written anything for our Web site, and shamefully I've not been very active on the forums at all recently. It's not through lack of will... but rather a combination of factors (binge drinking, midget toss, etc. - kidding...sorta...) which means that it's difficult to find the time. We haven't been talking about our games as much as I'd like, but Bizarre now has more to talk about than ever before, so it's time for a change!

Back at the beginning we knew that creating a brand new, world-class racing franchise was going to be tough. We've been iterating like CRAZY over the past few months to find the perfect mix - stuff like adding Power-ups to a realistic racer are always going to take time to get right. Integrating a full social network was always going to be a challenge, and we've been constantly going back and tweaking the interface pretty much since it was concepted.

Normally we love to tell you guys everything about our games as they're in development. However, with Blur it's been tough since with a new franchise we've been trying out new stuff, and we don't want to hype anything that doesn't work well in the game after rigorous testing. Don't get me wrong... we wouldn't work any other way. Trying new things and experimenting in new areas is the only way you can truly innovate! It just makes things tough to talk about externally...

So yeah, the game has been changing a whole bunch recently, all for the better though - things are really coming together very nicely now. I'm particularly pumped about Blur's multiplayer, although I'll go into this in waaay more detail in a future update.

As you know, we've been paired up with Activision for a while now. From a development perspective it was a good call because now we have the support of the world's biggest games company, and thus, access to some cool stuff now which we couldn't have really even entertained back in the good bad old days. :)

For example, we continually bring people into our studio every single week for focus testing now. We've got an external agency selecting gamers from a huge catalogue of registered people, and then bundling those people into a minivan and bringing them to Bizarre. Our design team basically say "Yo! We want to test 4 player split-screen mode with hardcore gamers," and the Activision guys go make it happen. It's pretty awesome, and something we've only done sparingly in the past.

We also work with a fantastic UK production team, who seem to spend more time in Liverpool than they do at home now! Likewise there are some excellent people in Central Design, PR, Marketing, Web, Business Development, etc. Pretty much the entire company is full of excellent and talented people, and we're able to make full use of their individual skill sets on our games.

Back to Blur though... As I mentioned, we've tried so many new features for this game that it's difficult to sum up. One of the toughest jobs was boiling down exactly what the game is about - there needs to be focus. For example, this is a snippet of the current feature list:

• Upgradable and multi-layered power-up system
• 20 player online/system link
• 4-player offline split-screen
• 50 or so licensed cars, with unique concepts designed especially for Blur (and approved by manufacturers)
• 20 cars on-track
• Custom event mode: create your own customised race mode and play it with your friends.
• Photo Mode.
• Full progression-based multiplayer mode, with challenges and upgrades.
• "Destruction Derby" style bowl arena for multiplayer.
• 14 environments, over 40 different routes
• Variety in terrain: cities, suburbs, dried-up urban rivers, mountains, deserts, etc.
• Story mode, with cutscenes, voiceovers, heroes and heroines.
• Social network delivering the story and tying the multiplayer together.
• "Fan" system - our updated version of Kudos
• Variety of race targets: not just "come 1st", but stuff like "catch up to a rival", "shoot X opponents with Y power-up", "cause X amount of damage", etc.
• Full simulator-style driving model, with braking and steering assists for newbs.
• Destructible objects on-track, and multiple alternate routes to race on.
• Etc.

The 'Etc.' above covers off a few other things that I'm really excited about, but aren't at liberty to divulge yet unfortunately. But you get the idea - Blur is a HUGE game. Frankly, it's incredibly tough to talk about all of this stuff without people just going cross-eyed (trust me, it's happened...you should see Ami right now). With all these great aspects of the game, it became pretty obvious that we needed to distil all of this stuff down into something more manageable. So the outcome is that Blur is racing powered-up.

Yep, there's no doubt about it. Power-ups are the focus for Blur, and we've got a really cool method for handling them on-track and their progression, and we're super excited about it.

Blur is about intense racing, **** blowing up everywhere, and using powerups in a strategic way.

If that sounds cool to you, be sure to come back in a few days when I'll be writing some more about the game. Thanks for reading!