Regeneration:Probably the most impressive graphical feat is the regeneration system. This essentially lets the player shoot chunks of flesh out of the creature. The technology works by having a double skinned enemy model, the outer skin and also a skin inside that is textured with muscles and bones etc When you shoot the creature it projects the impact based on a spherical cage and then applies an alpha decal with normal map to cut a hole in the outer skin revealing the insides.
The demo shows this at stage 1, two skin levels and no limb loss. The plan for stage 2 was three skin levels (outer, muscle, organs) and limb loss. Animation would also change when a limb was lost. The creature would move in a different way until it had chance to regenerate. You can see the end result of 4 months hard work by viewing the play through video below.
Game Design: To find out more about the game concept itself please see the brochure we created to accompany the demo below. We put a lot of effort into our presentation but due to limited costs we couldn't afford to bring in world class concept art talent and so all the concept in the brochure was created by team members including Pablo Hoyos (Characters) and me (Environments).
5mb
See the play though video on the right or download the HD version with the link below.
104Mb
This entire demo was created by 8 people in 4 months, imagine what we could have done with more time!
The end result of demo, videos and brochure was a very polished pitch presentation.
I was lucky enough to be able to pitch the concept to various top tier publishers including EA, Ubi-soft, THQ and Namco, going through several rounds with the various hierarchies of business development.
Conclusion:Unfortunately even after all that hard work, this project didn't work out.
Kuju Entertainment was bought in Jan 2007. The new owners business vision was to focus on development services and not IP creation.
They could see that finishing the demo to the stage 1 art and tech demo as being a worth while sales tool but they wouldn't fund further development of the game design.
I was allowed to pitch what we had developed so far at GDC 2007 to which many publishers were impressed with the demo quality but wanted to see the game play mechanics of regeneration, fire avoidance and enemy AI before they would commit.
Unfortunately we were not able to continue but I am still very proud of what we achieved in that small time frame.
