Steve Lycett is the executive producer for the company Sumo Digital which is responsible for many of the newer Sega games including Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed and Sega Superstars Tennis. A newer game in which they have now been working on this year is Katsuma Unleashed which is based around the Moshi Monster collectable toys, which is in collaboration with Mind Candy.
Katsuma Unleashed
We learned today about what it takes it create this game and the amount of work that went into just 7 months that they had to complete it and was presented on the Nintendo DS and 3DS. To begin with, as they already had all of the character designs, they started by creating the model and animating it, preforming basic tests to ensure that the movement, jumping, climbing and swimming in the game were correct. They then completed more animation tests in which they modeled the enemies and designed upon how they were going to move as they were blob like creature; in which they overcame this by creating feet like parts in the blobs at the bottom in which they could move from side to side on to gain momentum. As they could design the enemies how they wanted they decided upon robots as the main enemy as these can be given interesting and exciting facial expressions and can be adapted easily.
Along with the enemies there is also a big boss fight at the end of each level, much like you get in old Sega and Mario games in which they are more powerful and it take three hits to knock them out. These boss fights work on a repeat pattern with slight changes in the cycle which will require the player to say jump out the way three times then spin attack on his back, but this might alter to you have to jump four times in the next cycle and then five in the next. These easy changes in patterns can ensure that the young audience of this game is able to understand the basic movements and repeated areas.
Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed
The next game that Steve Lycett spoke about was the newest sonic racing game, and it is truly stunning to see. I had never really been interested in this game until now, and we saw just how much detail each level included even though most people would never even pay attention to it. There are 16 unique tracks to this game and each of them are jam-packed with animation and areas to find shortcuts. Steve commented that it was like creating 16 different games due to the amount of detail each track actually has in it and everything is animated in each environment, and I mean everything; down to each area of grass and even a manta-ray swimming in one level which I'm sure you would never see from the race track.
Moving onto the cars themselves they stuck with quite an arcadey look to them, as it was Sonic they were modeling around and he himself has a very old arcade look to him. The cars themselves work under normal physics and have a ton of different animations for different parts in the game. Due to the fact that this is Racing Transformed there cars have to be able to transform and this is where the mechanics of the game are beautiful. During the levels you will be required to drive on a road, fly a plane through the sky and use a boat on water and this transformation happens when you pass certain points laid out on the track; originally it had been designed that you could change whenever you want but due to players just being able to get in a plane, which is faster, it didn't become a race anymore. Also a lovely touch at the beginning of every level your going on there is a set of animation which takes you on a mini tour around the level to show you just how much animation there is - I guess they wanted to add this in, otherwise it would have been a massive waste of time animating it all.
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