It’s not literal, which is a great feeling. They’d ask: ‘Okay, okay, but when are going to texture it? It doesn’t look like a real game.’ But I saw those Quake levels and knew that it worked. Most of the guys on the team believed differently: that a game can’t work well without specific textures. That prototype feel really worked with SUPERHOT. When you resign from that then you gain total freedom. You have to switch programmes, choose textures, and the geometry is constrained by your texture set. Textures take something away from mapping, a freedom. I started building those and found it was something that works. There was this trend in the mapping community of doing maps without textures – geometry competitions. I did a lot of levels for Quake, the first one, even when there was a third one: it was fun and my computer was old. You rip something off and at first it might seem like total abuse, but if you’re mixing things your own way then you find your own voice. Now the story has had some time on the shelf, we think that’s just the way inspiration works. It was too obvious: too much like Eyes Wide Shut too much like The Invisibles, the comic book by Grant Morrison. Iwanicki: When we were working on the storyline in the beginning, we had this fear of ripping something off too much. It needs to bloom.ĭET: Does spontaneity mean you base the game on instinct more than any explicit inspirations?
Now we’re hoping to concentrate on good old-fashioned hard work, just experimenting with the game. Iwanicki: Kickstarter is a wonderful idea, but I’m not sure if a lot of people realise that it also changes the way you make the game. It’s one level and it’s going to drastically change when we have the other levels when we know how the game’s going to react to light and other situations that aren’t simple corridors. It’s the level we did two months ago for the Kickstarter, the level we did a month before the Kickstarter, and it’s the level we’re doing now for another demo. At the moment we’re still in the very first level we did: a corridor – three enemies in the back, you start at the front. This is very tiring because doing a videogame, especially one with many different levels, should start with the levels. Marcin Surma: And it’s only a small fragment. When you’re going with Kickstarter, it’s difficult to retain all that because you always want to have something finished and demonstrable. When you’re making a game spontaneously in a game jam, you’re experimenting, just having fun, doing what works immediately. Kickstarter was more of a deliberate plan to make content for the video, and that’s a big development problem. It gained popularity very fast just because we put it on the internet. Piotr Iwanicki: We’re coming from the game jam, obviously, so the game was a complete something that you could show and talk about. With experience spanning experimental Flash puzzlers, large-scale R&D projects, comic books and 3D art, Team SUPERHOT seems to have all the mental agility it needs.ĭET: How much does the nature of a Kickstarter campaign affect the development of a game like SUPERHOT?
#SUPERHOT PROTOTYPE FULL#
The following interview with creative director Piotr Iwanicki and art director Marcin Surma reveals developers just as comfortable with full game development as with the seven-day game jam or the gymnastics of a Kickstarter campaign. Needless to say, the game’s minimalist facade is deceptive. Its creators are full of amazing ideas, as you’ll discover, but the front-loaded nature of crowd-funded development has meant it’s polishing ahead of schedule, rewinding and refining that single hallway.
Bang, bang, bang.įor all its momentum, SUPERHOT has also been at something of a standstill this whole time, hacking at a single corridor sequence with slice after vertical slice. The pitch itself is all bullet points, sound-bites and explosive animated GIFs. An ongoing Kickstarter campaign to turn its prototype into a complete package blasted through its funding goal in a day. It’s the overnight sensation you can sell with just a sentence. Everything to do with SUPERHOT, the shooter where time only moves when you do, seems to occur in moments.