BYW Dev Diary 3
Developer Diary 3 for Eidos’ Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This At Home
Tags: Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home Categories: News, PS2 News, Xbox News
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Oct 6th, 2003
Answered by Mike Bilodeau, Designer. Edited by Omar Kendall, Designer, and Edwin DeNicholas, Asst. Producer.
How did BYW translate from real-life into the playable game everyone is expecting?
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From the beginning, Backyard Wrestling was a very unique license to work on. The world of backyard wrestlers is a hugely unique one, as different from professional wrestling as night and day. The hardcore violence, unorthodox weapons, makeshift arenas, and unique wrestling style found in real life backyard wrestling made a new approach to the wrestling genre a necessity – these aren’t the wrestlers dominating the professional scene today, and simply dropping them in to the contemporary wrestling game simply wouldn’t have sufficed.
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Still, it’s silly to assume that a game entitled Backyard Wrestling could exist without exhibiting some features found in traditional wrestling games. In truth, much of what Backyard Wrestling the sport represents originates in professional wrestling. The combat structure, which centers on basic strikes, grapples, and aerial stunts, is at least partially represented in backyard wrestling the sport. Momentum – whereby one wrestler is able to perform maneuver after maneuver on a helpless, almost unconscious opponent – is also found in both professional and backyard wrestling. It was important to us to capture the truest representation we could of backyard wrestling while still maintaining a structure appropriate enough for competitive play. Remember, one additional crucial aspect that both professional and backyard wrestling share that we couldn’t possibly emulate is that it’s all an act, and the winner and loser are predetermined long before a single slam is performed.
To this end, we feel the game has captured much of what takes place in actual backyard wrestling. The traditional wrestling element is exhibited in many regards, including many orthodox combat elements. Our slams are authentic, and it’s possible to finish your opponent off with a pin. We have flying leaps, and even an Irish Whip, one whose function is unseen in any game before us. We even found a unique way to simulate momentum – our Stun system, which we believe offers the best compromise with which to string together a series of attacks.
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With the basic traditional wrestling aspect satisfied, we focused our attention on the more unique aspects of backyard wrestling. In the game the list of weapons is unusual and large, with several weapons historically found in backyard wrestling, like light tubes and barbed wire baseball bats, appearing in multiple levels. However, many of the other weapons are objects more appropriate to the in-game environments we selected, adding the exhilaration of wrecking the place in the fervor of combat.
Also of note is the complete lack of a wrestling ring in Backyard Wrestling. After much debate on this subject, we ultimately felt that incorporating rings might detract from what makes Backyard Wrestling truly unique – the notion that the action is more interesting outside the ring. Yet even without a ring in the game, there is plenty to jump off of. From rooftops, to trucks, if you can climb it, you can jump off of it.
From the early ideas/concepts (high-level game play focused, like was there ever any other style of game play thought of for BYW?) What did it take to get from those early concepts to where we’re at now?
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Backyard Wrestling has evolved significantly over the course of the project. For example, at the very beginning of the project, players were required to press a button in order to be able to face away from each other! We also had several different methods to identify weapons and item pickups. At one point weapons had an animated cursor around them, next we switched to a glowing aura, and finally no visual cue, as it was felt that part of the fun was discovering some of the less obvious weapons in each stage.
Our stun system went from a specific amount of stun inflicted by every attack, to a built up bar that activated a stun period when full, to the three bar system in use now. The current stun system allows for combinations, and depth of strategy not seen in other wrestling games.
Bringing all of our traditional fighting game engine technology over to the intense battle that is present in Backyard Wrestling was no small feat. With a lot of the game only on paper, everyone was anxious to see the systems in play. Once they were in, it became obvious which other systems were affected, and what adjustments would be necessary for their integration. With the implementation and following complexity of these added systems, their evolution was imminent. Like the transition of the stun bar, many other game play systems had some rather radical changes.
What were ideas or features that worked… or didn’t work… explain?
For every idea that made it into the game, we had ten that were rejected in its favor. Of the systems that went into the game, many evolved far beyond their original expectations, and others were removed as their function became obsolete.
One success was the auto navigation system. In Backyard Wrestling, all navigation, from walking to climbing a ladder, is done using the analog control – no buttons are required. This was done largely for ease of use – most of our face buttons had already been allocated to other functions, and we didn’t want to overlap if it could be helped. Ensuring every type of navigational ability was accounted for was a challenge for every interaction. Huge advancements were made throughout the project, and each new bit of tech, opened another branch of possibilities for each new interaction. In the end, the auto navigation system feels great, and is one more feature that we are really proud of.
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Similarly the camera system was also difficult. It was a double-edged sword in trying to have large, interesting environments without slowing the game down to a crawl. We developed a camera that doesn’t focus on a particular character, but rather at a point between the characters, all the while riding along a giant circle in the sky. The full 3D “ring” camera allowed us to have extremely complicated and full environments, but it too was not without its problems. The camera would pass through geometry and characters, many of the important scripted events triggered throughout play would occur off screen, and the camera never would never seem to settle on any one area. Several systems were created to deal with these issues, and virtually all problems have been suppressed with a large amount of tweaking. Special one-time-cameras showcase the important events when needed, and a new “see-through” technology helps our walls fade in and out on the fly.
Though the road was long and hard, pride and perseverance have really brought this title: Backyard Wrestling – Don’t Try this at Home, to a successful close.
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Tags: Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This At Home
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Oct 6th, 2003 and is filed under News, PS2 News, Xbox News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
