October 7, 2008

Breaking the Mold: We talk to Day 1 Studios’ Dan Hay and Deke Waters about Fracture
By: Steven Hopper

“We want you to approach Fracture differently than you do other shooters, and that requires you to unlearn everything that you’ve learned from playing a lot of different shooters.”

In a time where every year boasts a ton of sequels, it’s truly great to see a new franchise hit the market, especially if that game shakes the foundations of its genre with unique gameplay elements. Fracture is a game like that, offering a wholly new take on destructible environments and allowing players to deform the terrain in very impressive ways.
Fracture is an action packed third-person shooter that gives players a variety of options for combat, including a nice array of weapons, dynamic AI, and a terrain deformation ability that must be experienced.

GameZone recently had the chance to sit down and chat with Dan Hay (Senior Producer/Art Director) and Deke Waters (Associate Producer) of Day 1 Studios, to discuss the game, including some of the challenges they faced in creating it.

What can you tell us about the storyline of Fracture?

Deke: The game is set 150 years in the future. You are Jet Brody, a seasoned veteran who has seen a lot but still has a lot to learn. You’re a little cocky going into this world, on a regular exploration mission of figuring out the reconnaissance of a downed freighter that just hit Alcatraz. Some of the back story that you get on that is that there are two sides: The Pacificans, who are all in on the idea that genetic enhancements are the way to go in the future, and the way that humans should be. The Atlantic Alliance side believes that you shouldn’t tinker around with genetics, and that you should augment what’s on the outside, through cybernetic enhancements based on what you can do with technology. You are on the side of the Atlantic Alliance when you come into this, and you’re starting to understand that the head of the Pacifican Army, General Sheridan, he’s really not thinking that you should exist if you don’t have some sort of biogenetic enhancement. That’s kind of the center of what the main conflict of the story is.

150 years in the future you have a much different layout of the land. There is a cataclysmic event that changes the structure of the United States as we know it and it literally creates a fracture down the middle and puts both sides at odds. There is already this tension of East versus West, cybernetics versus biogenetics, but it takes someone that gets a mad scientist flare like General Sheridan to really push the envelope. As you play through the game, you’ll find some of the successful and not so successful experiences that he’s had with doing that, and your job is to take them out.

Dan: You have this cataclysmic event that shows up and the two sides deal with it in two very unique ways, and they disagree on a fundamental level on what it is to be human, and now they’re pointing guns at each other, and we put you right at the precipice of that event.

Terrain Deformation puts a lot of control over the level layout in the player’s hands. Was that an issue when it came to creating a cohesive single-player experience? Did you have to worry about “hand-holding” the player through the game?

Deke: We want you to approach Fracture differently than you do other shooters, and that requires you to unlearn everything that you’ve learned from playing a lot of different shooters. Once you get an understanding of what you can do with our game, we want you to feel comfortable with being able to use the controls in such a way that you’ll be able to terrain deformation any way you want.

It definitely presented some challenges. Whenever you are able to raise a spike 30 or 40 feet in the air and then raise the ground underneath it to go even higher, it presents some pretty interesting challenges with regard to what we allow the player to see in the world and where they can go.

Dan: It’s definitely three dimensions. It’s vertical, and even in the tutorial we’re teaching you that you can gain access to areas that would otherwise be out of reach. For example, when you finish your first combat area, you work your way through the interior of the prison and get into a room where it appears that there’s no way out. The only way, you realize, is to put a mound down and climb up to something that is broken and you exit the room out of the top. If you’re not using TD [Terrain Deformation], then you’re not moving forward. It was about putting specific types of challenges in front of the player. Not puzzles, but challenges that use TD and try to be inventive with the situation. That is what crafted it, and it offered as many opportunities in level design as it did challenges.

Aside from TD, are there any other abilities at the player’s disposal?

Dan: There are a lot of augmentations, and one of the things that we really wanted to do was to make sure that you felt like you were building your player when you were playing for the Atlantic Alliance. You start out as young but seasoned, and when you start to build your character and play through these experiences, you’ll get these augmentations, earning the ability to jump higher, or have greater defense, and use the Stomp Augmentation, which doesn’t necessarily use TD in the sense that you use it to gain access to areas, but allows you to stomp the ground and create radial damage. That’s the type of stuff that we wanted to put in there to offer augmentation.

As far as weaponry, a lot of effort went into selecting a roster of weapons that would affect the environment in cool ways. How did you decide on the final roster of weapons?

Dan: First and foremost, we wanted the game to be a good shooter, so we pull from that. Then it was the variety of TD.

Deke: In the early days, we had a more standard set of shooter weaponry. From the very beginning, we wanted to make sure that we hit that shooter mark. What we found was that TD was really something that we wanted to give the player unlimited access to. We didn’t want to limit it to ammo or to grenades, and we wanted it to be something that they always had it available to them.

Dan: And also that it was fast and tactical, and that you’d be able to have the ability to control your environment and make choices.

Deke: With the weaponry, it just made sense that we would have weapons that interacted with the world. When we first started out, we had weapons with alternate fire. Primary fire was a standard bullet and alternate fire would be terrain deformation. We tried to mesh that to make things a little bit easier, and a little more accessible, and to give you a variety of more balanced weapons.

Dan: If you think about the Black Widow [mine/grenade launcher] and the ability to seed things for multiplayer. If that thing had any more radial damage in multiplayer, it would own. There would be no reason to put any other weapon in there, because it would just destroy everything. You need to balance it against the guy who uses the Entrencher [shotgun] for surreptitious reasons and tries to flank, or somebody who has the loadstone, or AI that has the Ice Rifle.

Tell us about the AI in the game. How did you make it work so well with TD?

Dan: The key word is iteration. Hopefully, there’ll be another developer that looks at this game and goes, “Wow, that was a lot to bite off.” We wanted AI that doesn’t get stuck, that paths well, and that looks responsive.

Deke: They don’t just turn off whenever you get behind a mound, you want them to search you out but not to instantly know where you are.

Dan: You play in multiplayer and you watch someone put up a loaf, you don’t wait, you think that you’ll attack that thing or you’ll go around it. And the AI makes that choice.
Fracture is a very different kind of shooter. How did you decide on which multiplayer modes to use?

Dan: We had a bank of classic stuff that we knew we wanted to do. Based off of design and being in the playground we would invariably run into situations where somebody would do something that was something we hadn’t thought of, and that would be an idea for how to do a new type of game as applied to Fracture.

Team Kingmaker, for example, was born off of one case where someone came in, and their style of gameplay was that they would always go to subsonic at the foot of anybody they were fighting, and all of the radial stuff would fall in and crush them, and they were very successful. We started looking for how to use that in a multiplayer match, and that led to games of different types and gameplay styles, so it was just about inevitable discovery.

Were there any elements you wanted to implement into Fracture that you were unable to?

Dan: Honestly, the answer that I think we both come back with is nothing. It’s about sleepless nights, right? The game is over, what didn’t we put in? Our sleepless nights come from the fact that we were working and putting stuff in the game.

The truth of the matter is, we don’t feel like we left anything on the table. You think about things that you want to try and do, and just at a base level, TD was a big bear to try and master, and then there’s all the other stuff that’s in this game. It’s one of those games that stay with you, and when people are playing it, we want them to play it, then play another game, and wonder where the TD is.

Deke: For me, it’s just personally a lot of fun to play around with ideas. Honestly, if I think we were to add more ideas, I’d want to go back to the sandbox and play, and do more of what we did, trying new things. And that’s a lot of what we did, and where we ended up.

Dan: Fracture is all about discovery. We really enjoyed getting into a room and figuring out what the toolset would allow us to do, and if you long for anything else, it’s doing more of that process. It was really fluid and really cool, and it sure wasn’t static.

What do you feel was the biggest obstacle when it came to making Fracture?

Deke: Unlearning what we knew going into Fracture, as far as level design, AI design, and just overcoming the fluidity of what TD brings to our experiences of working on games, and that was a huge hurdle.

Dan: It’s expensive from the point of view of resources, and allocation, and making sure that it runs, and you’ve got to weigh the value of TD and how we’re doing it. Everything is malleable, dynamic and accessible to weapons, and the weapons are big. How do you pay for all of that, and how do you make sure that the lighting is working and you’re still making quality art and everything is running in real-time? There are no tricks; you pick up a crate, and the shadow moves with it. The characters have shadows, everything looks real. It’s hard work, and we’re just trying to do it right.

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