The “Procedural Architecture” hopes to communicate this aspect of the war to the player in some way. The game engine will set up each room in each building in a procedural way, and this will happen even if a player needs to try a specific section again and again. The goal is to make each encounter feel new and unknown.
We spoke with Peter Tamte and Jaime Griesemer of Six Days in Fallujah about our latest IGN Unfiltered, and they discussed more about this technology and how the team spent “months bordering the years” developing it.
“So when we heard about these guys continually, you never knew what to expect whenever you walked into a house, whenever you opened a door, you couldn’t predict what would happen on the other side,” said Griesemer. “And in a traditional video game, that applies the first time you play, right? You are playing on a campaign mission, you open the door with a kick, it is an ambush; there’s a guy over there, there’s a guy over there. And maybe you can’t do it, maybe they’ll get you, right? You go back to a checkpoint, you go back to the same door. You already hit the first guy before you even opened the door, right?
“This is not the experience these guys had, right? They had a chance. And how are we going to recreate this in a game? So we spent literally months verging on the years developing this technology that allows us to recreate entire sections of the city dynamically. So, not only do you not know what will happen when you open the door with a kick, but I, as a designer, don’t know, right? I didn’t enter, play and configure the script and all these things are generated. “
This technology aims to give players a way to feel “just a little bit of what it must have been like” to be in this battle. Although Griesemer acknowledges that Six Days in Fallujah is nowhere near the experience of real war, he hopes it will provide players with context when they enter one of the included testimonials and hear a marine talking about how scared he was each time he debuted. a door.
Another major challenge for Highwire Games was to make it “as easy for you to order your team to do something like fire your gun”. Teamwork and coordination are essential for survival in hostile situations, and the team wanted to ensure that this was an integral and accessible part of the game.
“How do you create enemies who are really using tactics that require a coordinated team to subdue them? And, number two, how do we make it so easy for you to order your team to do something like fire your weapon? Fundamentally, if we can make it so easy to drive his team as well as firing a gun, so it becomes as powerful a tool for the player as the gun. And this is where we get the Go command, and this is Jaime’s, this is brilliant thinking about how to do that, ”explained Tamte .
The hand signals must be contextual so as not to confuse players and appear to have a similar function to the ping system in games like Apex Legends. If you aim at a location, your team will know how to get there, if you aim at an enemy, your team will know how to aim at it or make suppression fire, etc.
“And if you’re pointing at a door, when you say go, it means stacking that door because we’re going through it,” said Griesemer. “And if you’re aiming for a corner, it means protecting that corner, watch that corner because I’m going this way, but I need someone watching, it’s a 360º battlefield, I need someone watching this way. You may not make elaborate plans in three parts with your AI, but it’s very responsive, it’s happening constantly, as you’re going through a house, you’re able to manage your team while also trying to focus on a bunch of other things. op too, right? If we’re playing together, I don’t just have to describe an elaborate plan. I can just give you the appropriate go command and you’ll see it on the screen. You’re like, okay, I understand what we’re doing. “
Six Days in Fallujah is scheduled to be released in 2021 for PC and consoles, and draws on the real life events of the Second Iraq War – it has been a controversial project since it was originally announced in 2009. The game was later resurrected by Victura and Highwire.
We recently spoke with several Arab and Iraqi game developers, members of the video game community and a U.S. military veteran about how complicated and painful Six Days in Fallujah is for those who are connected to the real events that the game is trying to portray.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.