How customizable will the vehicles be? Is there a set list of options that are available to everyone or will you earn upgrades as you play the game? How many vehicles/weapons are shipping with the game?
You can choose the style of your car and a paint job. Each of the seven vehicles has slightly different handling characteristics but for the most part all cars are equal on the playing field. We designed the game to be skill-driven where all players have an even advantage.
How to the physics in the game impact the gameplay? What kind of design challenges do physics engines create?
Everything is physics driven, from the cars, to the ball, to the debris thrown out from demolishes. Personally, I feel that physics engines do more to reduce design challenges than create them. We decide the physics parameters of the game objects and the rest is taken care of. In the end you get a game that has a kind of purity to it where you don’t rely on the game rules to dictate what is going to happen. If you can find a creative way to score goals using the physics system, even if we have never seen or thought of it before, then you can still do it.
The game seems multiplayer focused, what different multiplayer modes will SARBPC ship with the game? What will anti-social shut-ins who don’t play online get out of the game?
We have an amazing army of AI opponents to go up against. They are surprisingly good at the game and you can play a custom match or take them on in the Tournament. You can also play one of the twenty mini-games we included. Some of the games help you get better at the game such as shoot-outs and goal keeping. We also have games that just mix-up the gameplay like playing with a cube instead of a ball and one where time slows down the closer you get to the ball.
If you don’t care for online but you still want some multiplayer action you can also play split-screen.
Players will be able to upload videos to YouTube, what kinds of videos will players be able to upload and how is the system incorporated into the game?
We spent a lot of time on the system because there are so many great moments that occur in the game and we wanted to capture them all. At the end of any match you can choose to save the replay of the game. Then you can go into our editor system where you can replay the match and move the camera anywhere you like. There is a timeline where you can scrub forward and backward in time and even set keypoints. You can also change the game speed to run fast or in slomo, change the camera to lock to any object, zoom in and out, and record any footage you want. After you finish you can output the video to the PlayStation(R)3 hard drive or directly to YouTube.
Is there any reason this game is a PSN exclusive and not coming out on Xbox Live Arcade? Any chance the game will make the jump in the future?
Sony has been great to work with and we love the platform. They were very open to working with us as a small team and allowing us to self-publish with the degree of freedom we wanted. Anything is possible in the future but right now we are focusing all our efforts on PSN.
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