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.