by:	July 21, 2006

XE: What is your direct involvement in the development of the title, and how many people does it actually take to create it?

Tian: I’m the producer on RoboBlitz and we’ve had over 30 people working on the project.


XE: Is this Naked Sky’s first project, or have they worked on more? What other games have the team been involved with in the past?

Tian: RoboBlitz is our first commercial game to be released. There is another game we started 4 years ago and spent 2 years on, but that project is on hold right now.


XE: The game will be under 50MB, yet it uses the Unreal Engine 3, and looks to be as detailed as many regular Xbox 360 titles. How much of a game is actually included?

Tian: All of the game is included! We’re looking at 19 levels spanning across 7 unique environments and over a dozen physics-based weapons, tools, and upgrades.


XE: How much does a project like this cost a small independent developer? Has the company received help from companies such as Intel and nVidia to pay the bills?

Tian: RoboBliz is completely self-funded. I would say this project costs anywhere between 10 and 20 times the cost of other Live Arcade titles. But for a next-gen title, the budget is very low in comparison. Intel and nVidia have been very supportive in hooking us up with both hardware and booth space at GDC and E3. They’re great partners to have.


XE: It seems like the game is a shooter, but the team has also said it was more like a platformer. It sounds sort of like this game could be in a subgenre with the likes of Ratchet & Clank. How would you define the title, and what were the inspirations?

Tian: At GDC and E3, lots of people who played RoboBlitz compared it to Ratchet & Clank. It is definitely a platformer, but our game is different from others in that it allows the player to creatively use physics-based gameplay to solve puzzles and dispose of baddies. Our inspirations include our favorite classic games, such as Mega Man and Super Mario.


XE: Besides the Unreal Engine 3 and AGEIA Physics Engine, what other tools does the team use to create this and other games?

Tian: Besides your standard art tools like Maya, 3D Max, and Photoshop, we use Allegorithmic’s ProFX to create our procedural textures.


XE: Does Naked Sky have plans to develop titles for PlayStation 3 or Nintendo’s Wii console?

Tian: We do plan to develop titles for the PS3 and the Wii, and of course, our good ole’ PC. Speaking of which, RoboBlitz will be coming out for the PC as well, and it will include a very cool feature that we can’t yet announce…


XE: The team has displayed this game to show off dual-core Intel chips, and it is of course being developed for the triple-core Xbox 360. Could this game run fine on a run-of-the-mill 3.2 Ghz P4, or is it too complicated? How does it even take advantage of there being more than one core?

Tian: It’ll run on a run-of-the-mill PC, but it’s not going to run as fast or as smoothly. We’re doing a lot of threading to handle all the physics and rendering, so you’ll definitely lose some of that speed when you drop down to a single-core machine.


XE: Does the team plan on creating expansion packs or more downloadable content after the initial release?

Tian: Absolutely! One of our first expansions will be the multiplayer mode. We’ll also release new maps, weapons, characters, game modes, etc.


XE: What is the most exciting thing about the next-generation of games? What are you looking forward to specifically for the next-gen?

Tian: For us, it’s the physics driven gameplay and hardware that can support it. In the past, we’ve been limited to hand-animation driven gameplay where the player actions are bound by the designer’s imagination. If the designer only comes up with 2 solutions to solving a puzzle, then that’s all you can do. With physics, the only limitations are the rules that govern it. For instance, there's a simple puzzle in RoboBlitz where you have to rotate a platform to get it into the correct position. It's a heavy platform, designed so that you have to figure out how to get enough torque to line it up right. However, as soon as we started testing the puzzle, people were finding all sorts of alternative methods to line up the platform. In our game, every puzzle is solvable in many ways. If you come up with a solution for which we didn’t plan, it's still going to work because everything is driven by physics. In fact, we’re still discovering new play mechanics every week!

Thanks Tian and Naked Sky Entertainment! Hopefully, RoboBlitz will be out before this fall, and Xbox Evolved will have more about RoboBlitz in the near future.

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