Update: 06/27/97 We know a lot of you out there have been asking for it, so here it is: a Quick Time movie of our Prey engine in action. This is taken from our E3 demo, and it shows a small combat arena, occupied by a somewhat agitated saurian adversary. You might want to take special note of the highly-polished marble floor. Enjoy! [ Download The File Here ] WARNING: This file is very large. It's 11.2Megs, so if you download this, and have a regular modem, it'll take a little while to download. This file requires Apple's Quicktime viewer, or anything else that can play a Quicktime Movie File. To get software to play a Quicktime file, go here. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update: 06/26/97 Well, it's is finally here: the time to complete our Prey team. We need two of the finest mappers available to help us craft the game the world's waiting for: Prey. You've read all the buzz-you know it's for real. If you're making maps for another company, or if you think you've got world-class skills you've learned on your own, then we want to see what you can do. Click here for some more details, and how to contact us about this. Our goal for Prey is simple: to create the best action game ever! We're on the ragged, bloody edge of innovation with our Portal Technology engine, and mappers will have the opportunity to work with Preditor, the most advanced and intuitive environment creation tool ever. We're looking for dynamic, creative intellects who live and breathe games and understand the subtle nuances of level design. If you think you're one of the best, hop on over to our job listing page and see what you need to do to get your work considered. Best luck and we can't wait to be impressed! Here's what Matt Wood, our "environmental alchemist," has to say about the power of Preditor: "Put the ease of WorldCraft and the versatility of the Build editor in one room and in a few months, you'll have the almighty Preditor. This is, hands down, the best editor you could ever want to work with. Say goodbye to all the little annoyances every Quake editor ever made you deal with. Your imagination is the only limit here, pal." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update: 06/25/97 The dull-pounding hum of E3 is beginning to wear off, and we're just starting to get our sea-legs again. All in all, we couldn't have asked for a better show. Sure, everything seemed to crap out when we went to install the Prey demos (a card was dead on one machine, and on-board S3 chip was over writing memory on another machine, no PCI slots available over here, only runs from the CD over there... arrgh!!), but we beat those machines down and got Prey up and purring. While William, myself and the folks from Remedy were wrestling with the machines, Matt, Allen and Tom were trapped deep in east Texas, after Matt's Subaru broke down. Hours later, after a bus ride, a change of cars, and a drug sniffing "hello" from the Georgia K-9 unit, the "second team" arrived at the show, exhausted but ready to go. The show was huge, busy and as over-stimulating as always, but we did see some cool games out there that we're looking forward to playing. The response to our non-interactive floor demo of Prey was amazing-everyone was blown away, and we even caught some of our competing developers video-taping the flythrough. Those who were lucky enough to sneak back for an invite-only peek of our back room, interactive demo, really got a chance to see what we mean by Portal Technology. We're damn proud that we left so many members of the press shaking their head in disbelief at what they had just seen. As one web guru told me after the demo: "I think I know what I've just seen, but I can't seem to find the words to explain it to anybody else." We've even learned that a major game publication is about to name Prey "best of the show" at E3... not too bad for a game that, as George put it, "is a year away, so right now it looks the worse it's ever going to get." The whole team is excited to be back, and ready to get rocking on some new ideas we have. Loyal Bassett, our third coder, started today, and he's ready to get up to his elbows in code. All that's left to round-out the Prey team, and to get us into "full steam ahead" mode is the addition of two mappers... look for a notice on those openings real soon. Until soon, I'll leave you with a few screens of our back room Prey demo... enjoy! -Paul Update: 04/25/97 (from 32,000 feet, high above the Utah salt flats, on the way to CGDC) Since we’ve received a few requests, we thought that you all might be intrested in Matt Wood’s map that landed him the job as Prey mapper. Matt submitted a single player Duke map, as well as a single player Quake map that got our attention, but this is the deathmatch-only Quake map that he did (in far less than a week!) in response to our description of an alien power station (don’t make any assumptions about Prey based on this--it was only an exercise). What we liked about this map were these features: it seems like a real place there is a true sense of mood (run down, chaotic, madness, etc.) the envrionment is creative, interactive and innovative it features sniping spots, seige positions, areana-like areas, etc. You can download the file here. (915k) Enjoy! -Paul -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update: 04/24/97 Today I'm off to CGDC, to speak "in praise of ultra violence" and to get our Prey demos up and running at a few booths on the expo floor. We'll be showing a non-interactive demo, featuring a portion of our Prey engine handling fly-throughs of a few environments, at the 3DFX booth, the Diamond Multimedia booth and at the Rendition booth. Once I return, I'll be sure to fill you all in on the "audience reception" to our demos. The most important reason for this update is to let you know that we've chosen Matt Wood to be our new Prey mapper. Before I go any further, I want to send out a huge thank you to all of you who took the time and creative energy to send us your best works. We truly were amazed, and the decision was very difficult indeed. Again, thanks for your enthusiasm and effort! Matt first caught our eye with a Duke map he sent in, moments after we said that we'd accept Build engine maps. He told us that he was also working on his first Quake map, and we took a look at the incomplete, un-vised map and it showed some serious potential. Finally, we took a look at his finished map and decided that he, along with a few other mappers, were good enough to be finalists. The final test for all the finalists was to create a deathmatch-only map based upon this rather cryptic description: "The power has poured out of this energy center for hundreds upon hundreds of years. As old accelerating reactors fizzled out, new ones were built without thought. Parts that still worked were cobbled from the old to make the new. After nearly a millennia, the power facility has folded back onto itself without reason, the old mixing with the new, construction layered on top of construction, creating dark folds and caverns beneath the ancient machinery. The power flows from the collision of high-energy particles in a super-collider reactor (SCR). Over the centuries, many of these collider rings have been built, many abandoned, creating a gordian knot of tunnels and tube... leading nowhere. Yet, as you enter this facility on a strange and alien world, you find that it is strangely abandoned, as if the species that had built it vanished before the latest restructuring could be complete-some power still flows, enough to be deadly, enough to light the ghosts of this eerie environment, but it is obvious that the latest facilities are incomplete and were never made operational..." Matt will be joining us in May, as the first full-time mapper for Prey. Randy Pitchford will move over to the Prey project once Shadow Warrior wraps up, and then, later this summer, we'll most likely do another mapper search for the final cog in the Prey development team. Cheers! -Paul Schuytema, project leader -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update: 04/22/97 The Prey team has been cranking on a myriad of projects over the last few weeks-William is working through an "Objectification" of our engine, getting it nicely object-oriented and fitting neatly within Ayn Rand's philosophy ("Who is John Galt?"). Tom is polishing our video system so that it will work as cleanly as possible with the accelerator cards out there. Scott and I have been creating some killer environments that we'll be showcasing at CGDC (the Computer Game Developer's Conference) at the end of the week-we'll be showing off a portion of our engine (we don't want to reveal too many of the cards in our hand, just yet) at the expo there. Finally, Allen has been doing some weapon design and weapon animation-we may give you a little sneak of his work in a few weeks. Lastly, I want to thank everyone for their map submissions. After we put the word out that we were unhappy with our first "crop" of maps, our latest run of submissions have been very high quality, indeed. As of today, we're not accepting any more submissions, and will begin the arduous process of sorting through the maps we've received to find our next Prey mapper. Again, thanks for all your good work! Cheers, Paul Schuytema -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update: 04/10/97 I just wanted to check in to let you know that our latest round of submissions for the Prey mapper position have been very solid indeed. We'll probably keep collecting submissions into next week before we really start seperating the good, bad and ugly. If you've been holding out on us, but think you're a hot mapper, now's the time to send in your .bsp or .map files. Here's another screen shot of an environment Scott McCabe and I have been working on (I did the geometry and initial lighting--Scott handled the art and tweaked my lighting). It really shows of the depth of texture detail that were able to get into Prey. Click on it for a larger version. Shot too dark? Click here for a gamma corrected version of the picture. Since tax time is right around the corner, we thought that a little gift was in order. Scott McCabe, or resident pixel-man (he came to us but a pixel boy, but he's a man now), put together this rather nifty Prey poster for your downloading pleasure. It makes great desktop wallpaper... enjoy! Cheers! -Paul Schuytema -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update: 04/08/97 We've released two more screen shots from Prey, due the high demand for them. Click on either of them for a larger version. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update: 04/03/97 First off, this bit of news: the name of your alter ego in Prey is Talon Brave. We all worked long and hard on this name, and we're pretty excited about it-it captures the feel and tone of our character very well. Secondly, I wanted to let you know that Allen Dilling has joined the Prey team as a 3D artist. He rambled down Texas-way from Colorado in his rather "weathered" Ford, and has hit the ground running. He's working with Michael Wallin on some sketches of Talon Brave. He's also been designing and modeling some of the enemies you'll find in Prey... We're glad to have him aboard, but we find ourselves wondering about the pink foam pony he has next to his drafting table... Third: We've been looking at a pile of Quake maps for our Prey mapper opening, and we're not as impressed as we want to be... so we're changing the rules slightly (see our modified job opening post for exact details). As of right now, we only want one submission from you-your absolute best work. And now it can be either a Quake map or a Duke 3D map. Yes, all you "Builders" out there can now submit! We want to see game design skill and incredible creativity-you can show us that in either a Duke 3D map or a Quake map. We figure that you'll need to learn a new tool anyway (Preditor), but what we can't teach is creativity and game design savvy-that's what you've got to show us. If we like your single submission, then we'll ask to see more work. So bring on your maps! If the screen shot to the right is too dark for you click here for a gamma corrected version. Update: 03/19/97 Are you a closet 6D level design god? Be sure to check out our Get Hired postings-we've opened up the search for a new Prey mapper. If you've got what it takes, we'd love to see what you can do! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Click on any of these screen shots to see a larger version. Image #1 Image #2 Image #3 Image #4 Update: 03/14/97 Holy cow! Two updates in one week! Well, this isn't an update as much as it is an excuse to show you a few new and dandy screen shots. We've been experimenting like crazy with Preditor's ability to generate blended colored lights. We've had no problem creating a room with over 30 colored light sources, all blending together perfectly. These four screens show some experiments in saturated light (light with the color intensity maxed out) and more natural light (lessening the intensity of the blended colors for more natural look). Enjoy! If these images are too dark on your monitor, you can look at gamma-corrected versions here, too. Image #1 Image #2 Image #3 Image #4 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update: 03/10/97 First and foremost, you'll probably want to check out our new screen shot. We'll have some more screens to show you real soon, but this can give you a hint at why we're so rocked on the Prey project right now. The only downside of this screen is that it doesn't even begin to show you the "like butter" feel of an corridor that you can zip around in at way over 30 frames per second. BTW, be sure to notice the hint of a blue glow from the monitor screen... and yes, I know it looks very "Trekish"--we were just playing around with modeling that kind of corridor with long thin fluorescents... We just had a cadre of press folks rumble through to take a peek at what we're doing, and one of the fine gentleman of the "linear media" took one look at Prey and blurted out "Wow! Real-time Myst!" That comment was the catalyst (do we really need a catalyst?) to head down to Two Rows, a local brew-pub, to clank some glasses of fine micro-brew together. After an evening or two of hops and bitters, it was back to our Prey-ful Pentiums. William, our engine-guru has crafted some necromantic algorithms that really push the envelope of radiosity lighting-we've been having a ball creating environments with a dozen or so light sources, all of different colors, and checking out how the light all blends and pools together. Very cool indeed! A few weeks ago, Scott McCabe joined us from the hinterlands of Kingston Canada, and has taken up refuge with Tom Pytel, one of our coders. Now they work through the wee hours, cranking the weirdest of music and soothing their troubled souls by the warmth of Tom's lava lamp. Scott has hit the ground running as a 2D artist, and is cranking through a very impressive array of textures. Now, it's back into the Trocaran trenches of Prey, but I'll resurface soon with more news. Cheers! -Paul Schuytema -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update: 01/24/97 As you no doubt know by now, we've been working through some pretty radical changes in Prey. We're confident, though, that these changes will only serve to make Prey a stronger and more intense game. The last few months have allowed us the rare luxury to do some serious R&D on our next generation engine as well as explore some key gameplay issues. At this moment, we've just bid farewell to Gary McTaggart from 3DFX, who was on-site, helping us get our engine talking to their Voodoo chip. They seem to be striking up quite a conversation... William Scarboro, our Prey engine-mystic, is continuing to sculpt the engine, which utilizes Portal Technology (PT), a fresh approach to 3D engine design which isn't limited by some of the restrictions of the prior-generation's engines. Architecture and interactive environments which were simply impossible in BSP-heavy engines are now par for the course. Of course you'll see wondrous architecture casting true shadows, but you'll see them in stunning 16-bit color at high resolution. It will be like nothing you have ever experienced! It won't be too long before we can post some fresh screen shots from the new engine. We've also taken a long, hard look at the design of the game, and decided that we needed a fresh approach which will match the power of our engine. A new main character has been developed--he's a full-blooded Apache with an attitude. The story is all new, and involves the Trocara, a trinity of alien species who are kept (somewhat) in check by the mysterious Keepers. As a player, you'll have to draw upon all of your resources--your intelligence, your physical abilities and your attitude to survive long enough to learn the truth behind the mysterious Trocara and their doubly-mysterious Keepers. As you know, strong characters and exciting stories are hallmarks for our games, and we're really excited about the Prey story. The character is fresh, complex and interesting and the story (a dark and riveting tale, if we do say so ourselves) should have more than enough meat to entice even the most hard-core science fiction fans. As a team, we're beginning to shift into high gear. I (Paul Schuytema) came on board as the project leader in November, and Tom Pytel, a super-talented "in the trenches" coder, just started on this week. In the coming weeks, we'll complete "team building" as we blast ahead into the content creation portion of the game's development (the most exciting part, in my opinion). Look for more updates and some screen shots in a few weeks. Cheers, Paul