Exclusive Interview: Atomic chats with Starcraft II's Production Director, Chris Sigaty!
Starcraft II is undeniably one of the biggest games that is destined for the computing world this year; it's been teasing us for a significant amount of time already, and though it suffered a few delays, it's getting ever-closer to the final release. Though some might think that the devs at Blizzard spend all day wandering the halls of their artwork-filled campus and only a small portion on the game, they spend a phenomenal amount of work on game design, balance, and features that have been somewhat addressed by the beta - even choosing which engine to run Starcraft II on was a challenge.
Thankfully, we had a chance to talk with Chris Sigaty, the Production Director for the game, and we've grabbed some juicy details that cover everything from which physics API SC2 will use to the amount of tilesets that Blizzard created for it! On top of that, there's a whole gallery full of concept artwork that we've got our hands on, so take a quick look and get started on the interview below:
Atomic: What kind of capabilities does the game engine have; is it multithreaded, and will we be seeing it on OSX? To what degree is it multithreaded?Chris Sigaty: It is multithreaded for some things, and yes you will see it on OSX. It's multithreaded for certain things that load; for example, our loading is optimised to work with more than one core. It's not optimised to be quadcore, to use all cores on a quadcore system or anything like that. More than one; dualcore. Beyond that, there are certain parts of the graphics engine that will use a second core if it's available.
A: Which physics API are you using? What is the reasoning behind that?CS: We're using Havok. We wanted to allow there to be more interesting deaths and things. We definitely have some different philosophies with regards to physics-related things, it's generally to make a death or a moment play out slightly different; the rocks bounce, and hit in different ways. There's a lot of other things we could've done that we actually stayed away from because we don't want abilities that are based on randomness, specifically in Starcraft, that was part of our design.
For Starcraft II, part of our design is that you know what is going to happen when you do it. So we don't allow, like, units to be thrown in a random direction or something like that, it's the specifics that the player knows and can count on. Generally, it's used just for looks.
A: The game animations, each level is animated to some degree, how much work goes into creating a world, say the lava world?CS: A lot, I mean it takes us a lot of time to go through all that. Each creature/unit, many different death animations, birth animations. If I were to guess on the amount of time spent making the lava world take shape I would say we spent probably, just on the tileset, cliffs and all that, probably a couple months across several artists, to create all the content for that. We have, actually, a large number of tilesets. In Starcraft II shipping there's I think 22 different tilesets; these are the most tilesets we've launched with. We're not putting all that into the betas right now.
A: How did you decide which levels would and wouldn't make it into the game?CS: We developed the tilesets around the story. There are certain looks; we wanted Mar Sara being more of a deserty, a desert-like environment with lush jungle worlds and all that. The story played out largely on where those levels take place, and then based on that we start generating the missions. [We said] ‘this is going to take place, centered around the Protoss', so then we determine ‘ok, this tileset makes sense for that', and start developing the tilesets based on where the story's gonna go, where the missions are gonna go. There were so many places they were jumping to that we ended up getting 22 different tilesets - which is a lot for us.
A: Move on to read more about the tilesets...
Issue: 137 | June, 2012