The wheels on the bus go - what? Well if you entered the SEGA Newsletter competition for October you’ll hopefully have answered “round and round” for it was the correct answer.

We’ve drawn five names from the huge number of replies we had out of a big mud speckled hat and those who can look forward to receiving a SEGA Rally t-shirt in the post are

Bjorn Eriksen - Slagelse, Denmark
Steve Price - Birmingham
Adrian Hamer - Stanmore, Middlesex
Linda Rumsey - Mildenhall, Suffolk
Edward Steer - Marshfield, Wiltshire

Congrats to those of you who won, commiserations to those who missed out and there’ll be another contest in the next issue of the newsletter.

LONDON & SAN FRANCISCO (8th November, 2007) - SEGA Europe Ltd. and SEGA of America, Inc. today announced that Brain Assist(TM), a game designed to exercise the brain while still keeping things fun, is coming to the Nintendo DS(TM) portable handheld system. Derived from Touch de Uno!, the classic Japanese arcade game, Brain Assist is easy to pick upand play and is filled with a variety of ways to test mental ability.

Focusing on strengthening the right hemisphere of the brain by challenging the player’s memory,concentration, reflexes, deduction and analytical abilities, Brain Assist features four nurses to choose from to act as guides and help players through the game. Each game increases in difficulty and demands that players think fast to truly maximise their memory’s potential and response times. Players will then be put to the test again in the “Lightning Round” where the pace and difficulty of gameplay becomes even more challenging. Brain Assist takes full advantage of the Nintendo DS Touch Screen technology and allows for an addictive interactive gameplay experience in either two-player co-op mode or fast-paced competitions for up to four players via the Nintendo DS Wireless Connection.

“Giving your brain a workout is important no matter what your age, especially if you want to increase those IQ points” said Gary Knight, European Marketing Director, SEGA Europe. “Brain Assist is easy to pickup and play, and being on the DS means you can exercise your mind wherever you go!”

Brain Assist will be available for the Nintendo DS portable handheld system in Spring 2008.

What is Brain Assist?
Brain Assist is very cool little DS title derived from the Japanese arcade touch game “Touch de Uno!”. The games are designed to challenge players in various areas of memory, deduction, concentration, and reflexes. When gamers complete each game, they’ll learn about how well they performed as well as how to fine-tune their reflexes.

What makes Brain Assist different from other “brain training” games?
Brain Assist takes a little different take on “brain training” games where we focus on the right brain functions. Right brain functions can be summarized as more of the “creative and artistic” side of the brain that demonstrates more intuitive and reflexive thinking. More importantly, Brain Assist is a nice mix of “brain training” with a lot of fun. Just watch out for the evil nurses.

What are some of the most challenging games in Brain Assist?
Personally, the absolutely most challenging game is Touch of Brilliance where you have to follow the flashing dots and pick their last location - in the later stages, the dots flash so quickly the eye can barely follow them. Match Game can become very difficult in later stages as the images become more visually complex. Speeding Numbers can also be difficult once players get to the point where they have to recognize numbers going at Mach 2 speeds across the screen.

Will there be a version other than the Nintendo DS version?
There are currently no plans to bring Brain Assist to any other platform other than the DS and quite frankly, because of the touch nature of the game, the DS is the ultimate platform for this title.

Does the game support multiplayer?
Brain Assist supports numerous multiplayer options including head-to-head competitive play for the highest score - it’s definitely a lot more fun to play with more people.

A rather unique feature tied to multiplayer is the “Compatibility Check”; when playing a 2-player game, Brain Assist can compare/contrast the different “right brain” aptitudes of each player in a rather humorous manner. And by no means does this “Compatibility Check” make speed dating any faster.

Matt Rice, Software Engineer, AI : We originally started off Condemned 2 with a key goal of adding more variety to the combat.  We did this in a few ways - by expanding the players potential attack options, by expanding the sheer number of AI types and by expanding the base AI’s behavior set.  A “behavior” is an atomic action that an AI may make, be it swinging a pipe, recoiling in pain or running to hide.  At Monolith, one of the AI Engineers’ main responsibilities is creating, assigning and managing the many behaviors for each character.  The technology we’ve created has made it a simple process to move behaviors from one character to another.  Want the dog to block melee attacks (we don’t…but if you did), just drag and drop that behavior into his behavior list.

The base AI, which from here out I will refer to as simply the “Thug”, is the typical character the player fought in Condemned: Criminal Origins and is still the bread and butter of Condemned 2. He may have many looks (he may even look female), he may be carrying different weapons, and he may play many different attack and recoil animations, but from the AI Engineers’ point of view they are all the same character. The thug was pretty solid in Condemned: Criminal Origins and we found that engineering didn’t need to do much to him for the sequel. He got an entirely new animation set, new character models, new sounds, but not many new behaviors. What new behaviors he did get came as a direct result of the expanded player options.  The new thug needs to respond correctly to broken limbs, being lit on fire (in numerous and fun ways) and how to throw things at the player.

Creating entirely new AI types is really the fun part of AI Engineering and it is an incredibly collaborative endeavor.  The process typically starts with our Lead Game Designer (Frank Rooke) riffing off a piece of concept art he has received.  He comes up with a few baseline actions he wants the character to make. He then sits down with the Lead Animator (Richard Lico) and me to see what can and can’t be done.  While looking at the concept art for the Burning Rioter, it was pretty obvious what we needed him to do.  The dude is on fire, he isn’t going to make it and he knows it.  The Rioter is simply running after the player and attempting one last grapple attack before his own fiery demise.  At this initial meeting, we agree on a core behavior set and see if we can find any holes in his design.  What happens if the player avoids the attack?  What happens if more than one Burning Rioter attacks the player at the same time?  Can he attack other AI as well?

With plans in place, many departments may begin working on the same character at the same time.  Character Art starts modeling, animation gets someone in a funny suit for motion capture, our FX artist starts looking at burning Tibetan monks for fire reference and the Audio Department will start screaming in combustible pain into the microphone.  I will start out by creating the base framework for the characters behaviors.  As AI Engineer, I start by copying a relatively similar character and trimming behaviors he doesn’t need, like throwing weapons or hiding, and adding behaviors he will need, namely, a single sprint to player that results in either a potential deadly grapple or a painful to watch burning for our friend the Rioter.

This part is fun not only because it is both challenging and rewarding to see such plans come to fruition, but also because…well…it can be quite entertaining.  After my initial implementation, I need to verify as much of the code as I can so that when final assets are delivered from the other departments they will simply drop in with no problem.  So I have to pick the best (or not) of the currently existing assets to use as stand-ins.  At this point, the Rioter looked an awful lot like the thug.  Animation wise, he “ran” towards the player with the limp of a broken leg and if he failed to grab the player he would not so much writhe in pain as much as jump and down as if he was at a hip-hop show…then die.  If he succeeds in grabbing the player, he would invert himself upside down and seemingly try to hug the player to death.  Instead of being on fire, he became a fountain of puke, an effect that we have so many variations of.

Along the way we will continually test the character to make sure he is fun to play against and fits the theme of the game.  When near-complete, the character is given the green light to be placed by the Level Designers in their levels.  What once seemed like a slam-dunk in our test levels may end up playing not so well within the context of a full production level.  More than once we’ve had to re-visit characters that were mostly done and had to re-design, scale back or simply cut them altogether.  This can be painful for all involved, no one likes seeing days or weeks of their work scrapped but characters that are no fun to fight can really bring the player down and generate distaste for the game.

Right now, we are pushing hard towards final Beta and I find myself splitting my time between fixing mundane but import bugs and making exciting last minute revisions to characters before we lock in the code and finalize the game.

    Creating a New Action Experience - With Nick Davies

Nick Davies, Design Manager at Bizarre Creatios Gives us the lowdown on The Club

The Club Background
As I think we’ve probably mentioned a few times before in various interviews, The Club was developed gameplay first and the storyline and background came a little later into the project.

Although we are all fans of story led games, as a company our strength was in gameplay so we looked for external help to flesh out the world of The Club. The background for The Club and for each of the characters was written in conjunction with a great writer called Gordon Rennie, who has worked on 2000AD writing for Rogue Trooper and Judge Dredd, as well as in many videogames such as Killzone and Rogue Trooper, as well as some fantastic new projects he’s currently working on but I can’t tell you about.

Racing and Shooting
The main challenge with blending the best aspects of a racing title with a shooter is the length of the levels, we have a term we call ‘reboot racing’ in the office, it’s that feeling that if you completely mess up a corner of a race you just hit restart and give it another go, races only last a few minutes at best so you often don’t mind restarting over and over again. With a shooter it’s generally different, if you mess up 30 minutes into a level you don’t want to have to start it all over again, so we have made all of our levels really short and intense, if you miss a bad guy, or think you’ve been a bit inaccurate then you hit pause and restart and give it another go, it can prove to be a wonderfully addictive mechanic when done right.

Scoring
Scoring is the big thing for The Club, in fact it’s generally a big thing for Bizarre Creations, from PGR through Geometry Wars to The Club, we always like to give the player a chance to compete against their friends on leaderboards, and give people a chance to prove they are the best, whether it’s the best in the world, or just the best among your mates.

A lot of current games, especially first and third person games, tend to rely more on a gripping story to keep the player going, rather than a more ‘old school’ desire just to just keep improving. We’ve nothing against this, the story side, most of the guys here love Bioshock, Gears, Half Life and the like, but we just felt there was a chance to stand out and do something a bit different.

The system itself is incredibly simple on the face of it, it’s a time and combo based system. The basic premise is that if you kill one enemy you then have a set period of time to kill the next one in order to increase your combo. The higher you get your combo then the less time you have to get to the next enemy. This gives it a real frantic pace, which only increases the better you get at the game, the looks on peoples faces as they try to sprint to the next enemy while their time is ticking away is priceless, and often turns the air blue in the office!

On top of this you’ll be given extra points for more stylish kills like headshots, or for performing an action move (like a roll or a barge through a door) then a kill straight afterwards.

Single Player Game Modes
The game itself is split up into a series of mini events, of which we have five types in total - Sprint, Survivor, Siege, Time Attack and Run the Gauntlet. So if for example you enter the Steel Mill tournament you’ll have to play one of each of these game modes in order to win.

As you can probably tell from the names, some of the game modes like Time Attack and Run the Gauntlet are time based. Some like Siege and Survivor are based on surviving against the odds, against way more bad guys than you normally see in a shooter, which can get a bit frantic at times.

All the game modes share the same basic scoring system, but learning the game rules is the only way you’re going to be able to get the best scores.

BC Expertise
The core team on The Club has worked on a pretty wide variety of games, some worked on PGR3, a lot of the team worked on the Fur Fighters games, and we’ve hired people from various disciplines, so we’re pretty experienced in a lot of areas.

So although this is our first shooter as Bizarre Creations, it’s not as though it’s been an alien concept to everyone, and I think that shows in the quality of the finished product.