BU Interviews: Secret Level
Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds
Developer: Secret Level
Publisher: Atari
BU: I believe that MTG:BG is the first game of its genre to use Unreal technology. Can you tell us what kind of fit it was for this type of game, and some of the tweaks you developed for it to meet the needs of your game?SL (Josh): It did seem a little weird at first to use Unreal for this. It’s about as far from an FPS as you get! However, after a couple of weeks of retooling the way the engine handles players, viewports, and controller input, it went pretty smoothly. The networking was pretty much a breeze for the most part as we only had to use a subset of the functionality (for example, all actors are relevant). We also didn’t need the crazy visibility system, since basically the entire level is always visible, so I was able to streamline that whole process. One of the biggest chores was Xbox Live support. We were able to use some of the Unreal Championship code, but we had a pretty different style of game (matched games instead of join-in-progress), which surprisingly changes the way we use Live quite a lot.BU: While the minimum system requirements are a PIII 800 mhz processor and a 32 mb hardware T&L video card, the game plays much smoother - especially with numerous creatures active on-screen with a more powerful computer. Did you have to do any 'scaling down' in order to get the type of gameplay you were looking for in the Xbox version of MTG:BG?SL (Josh): We targeted the Xbox as our main platform. We figured that a PC similar to an Xbox would be fine for this game. However, I think we may have made an error in our assumption. On the Xbox, we can take so many shortcuts and get right down to the wire. On the PC, you are always fighting against an OS and other applications. And this whole multiple video card support! Phew! I had never personally worked on a PC game before and I think that I underestimated what it takes to make a truly cross-platform title. I have learned quite a lot that hopefully I can put to good use in the future!SL (Leif): Yeah, we definitely had to work a lot of overtime to get all the compatibility issues working for PC.BU: Back to the PC version, what was the reason for not including an MTG:BG version of the Unreal editor for the community to use in creating their own mods, arenas, etc.?SL (Josh): First, we aren’t quite set up to do mod-based tech support in the months to come. If we released all the editors, etc, then we’d be getting inundated with mails, feature requests, and demands for patches, etc. Also, since we have stats and rankings, we didn’t want to make it too easy for people to cheat. Since we don’t have game servers running (one user is the server) we don’t have good ways to prevent server cheating.BU: In the Xbox version, the game stats work flawlessly, but in the retail PC version, statistics seem to be down (404, page not found). Can you explain what's happening here, and if there will be a fix?SL (Leif): We found this bug early on and have been working with Gamespy to get the rankings working for PC as soon as possible. PC rankings should be working really soon.