Recently we previewed Harbinger, the upcoming and innovative RPG developed by Silverback Entertainment and soon to be published by DreamCatcher. Harbinger is expected to be in stores at the end of February 2003. Now we are fortunate to have conducted an interview with Andrew Muir, Lead Programmer and Co-founder of Silverback Entertainment. We thank Andrew Muir for answering our questions and for sharing with us his knowledge of the creative process and world of Harbinger.

HARBINGER INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW MUIR

THE DEVELOPMENT OF HARBINGER

1) Please tell us about your company and about each team member that is helping to create Harbinger.

Silverback Entertainment was formed over three years ago by former members of Running With Scissors. Our lineup consists of the following:

Myself - Lead Programmer \ Co-founder: My responsibilities include AI, quest engine and utilities coding, dialog writing and promotion.

Steve Macomber - Art Director \ Co-founder: Steve’s responsible for designing, modeling, texturing and animating nearly all of our characters. He also oversees the other artists and ensures art consistency.

Stephen Andrusyszyn - Graphics programmer: This Steve is responsible for our renderer, particle system and a hundred billion other things that nobody else would dare touch.

Greg Miller - Background artist: Greg has designed, built and animated the majority of our background and interface pieces. Greg has also lent a hand with Harbinger’s sound effects.

Dale Bloom - Programmer: Dale has created nearly every sound effect for this game. On top of this he is responsible for maintaining our website and network. He also handles our installations and acts as a resident scapegoat. Whenever anything goes wrong Dale cheerfully absorbs the abuse for it.

Jared Binder - Artist: An outstanding artist, Jared built nearly every inventory item for Harbinger. In addition to this, he has also built and textured a number of non-player characters and background pieces.

Jason Weiss - Programmer: Jason is a jack-of-all trades when it comes to code and he’s had his hands in nearly every system in this game.

Shane Tuerpstra - Level designer: Shane has built and scripted all of Harbinger’s levels. He is also responsible for balancing our economy and combat systems. On top of this, he also takes care of any worrying that needs to be done.

Mike LeHew - Programming Intern: What can you say about Mike that hasn’t already been said in a dozen restraining orders? Mike helps with hundreds of crucial tasks and I can’t say enough good things about him.

Mark Samuels - Composer: Last, but certainly not least, Mark is the talent behind all of Harbinger’s music.

2) What was the development history of Harbinger like and what stages did you have to go through to get the game in the condition it is today?

We started in on the design of Harbinger almost immediately after Silverback was founded. We spent a lot of time establishing our goals and what we did and did not want Harbinger to be. After the artists put together the concept pieces for the backgrounds and characters we moved forward on building the level editor, tools and skeleton for the game.

By the end of the first year of development, we were taking a very early version of the game to E3 to show to different publishers. At this point, we basically had the player and one enemy type and some rudimentary AI. Everyone who saw the game liked the look, but wanted to see more.

After that, we fell into a cycle of adding features and content, polishing, and submitting to publishers until we were picked up by the good folks at DreamCatcher Interactive. Now we’re in a bug-fixing / polishing phase and getting ready to ship.

EXPLORING THE WORLD OF HARBINGER

3) What is Harbinger and what elements will RPG gamers find unique in your game over others like it?

I think probably the biggest thing gamers will find unique is the universe and story design. Our biggest overall goal was to bring to life a universe that is unlike anything else seen on the PC. We started with a blank slate and built everything from scratch. New worlds. New histories. New races. New factions within those races. You name it. It was a lot of work, but it gave us a great jumping off point to build new adventures.

4) Harbinger is described as having advanced artificial intelligence which promotes unpredictable gameplay. Please tell us more about this.

Most of my efforts on the AI side of things have been toward making the enemies as non-deterministic as possible. At their core, our enemies our impulse driven and constantly search their environment for things to satisfy those impulses. One of my pet peeves has always been games where the enemies just stand around waiting for the player to show up. Sure, we have our guards, but right at the beginning of the project I threw in patrolling AI that had enemies roaming the map looking for anything out of the ordinary. They prefer checking areas the player hasn’t already visited (based on whether chests or doors have been opened, not through a cheat). From a gameplay standpoint, this fosters the feeling that you could meet danger around any corner, which is exactly what we are going for.

5) Which feature would you pick as the most impressive within this game?

You know, I don’t really have a favorite feature. I know that probably sounds like a cop out, but this game wasn’t built to showcase a piece of technology. It was built to provide a quality play experience. Sure, a lot of cool technology has been built along the way, but it’s all been to support the game itself. For instance, I like the way the item-swapping code was implemented. I like the way the engine combines 3D lighting with 2D animation. I like the way the AI code works. I think the quest engine is pretty neat. There are a lot of things that I think are cool, but nothing that should jump out at you as the “Harbinger feature”.

6) Tell us about the real time combat that will be featured within the game.

A lot of time is spent fighting in this game, so we put a ton of effort into the combat engine. Every enemy has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s up to the player to adapt his tactics to each foe. Probably the coolest thing is how the battles look on screen. I’m a big fan of the “accidental” cinematics that just sort of emerge when the action gets intense. That’s probably the best part.

7) I enjoy the sci-fi theme that this game is using. What were your artistic goals when you were creating the environments, creatures and all other facets within the game world? Tell us about your graphics engine and what it is capable of doing.

When we started work on Harbinger, we knew that we would have to do something extraordinary to stand out from the crowd. We were looking at the crop of current and upcoming games and they were all sort of moving in the same direction artistically. We saw lots of low-poly characters and environments combined with smeared and noisy textures to make up for their lack of detail. Don’t get me wrong, there were some good-looking games, but they weren’t really sharp or for lack of a better word, “crisp” looking. After dealing with a lot of publishers, the reasoning behind this trend became pretty obvious. It’s a lot easier to sell a game to a publisher if you can stick the 3D environment/characters bullet on the box. But just because a game is true 3D doesn’t mean that it looks better. It’s sort of like the elephant in the living room that nobody wants to talk about. The real problem is that on most systems there just aren’t enough polygons to draw large numbers of highly detailed characters at once. So, we made probably the riskiest decision of our development and went with using 2D sprites for our character and backgrounds.

After that decision was behind us, we went ahead on working around some of 2D’s major shortcomings. We wanted to avoid, as much as possible, the tiled look but still reap the tiled benefits. To this end, a lot of artist work went into pushing as many curves as possible to hide the tiling. Also, since we had a lot of energy weapons in the game, we wanted the fire fights to look as intense as possible. So we mapped our 2D sprites onto polygons, built separate lighting meshes for them, and pushed the whole stew through the 3D card.

So, with the Harbinger engine, our artists can build extremely high-detailed characters and backgrounds, but we can still draw and light large numbers of them without destroying our frame rate.

GAMEPLAY

8) Please tell us about some of the quests, puzzles and objectives that players are likely to find within Harbinger.

We’ve done our best to make the quests and puzzles in Harbinger a natural extension of the storyline so that it all kind of flows together seamlessly. The cool thing is that since we built the whole universe from scratch, we can put in events that actually surprise the player. We can start with a simple fetch mission and have the whole thing change directions without the player ever seeing it coming.

MUSIC/ SOUND EFFECTS

9) What kind of music and sound effects can we expect within this unique sci-fi universe?

I always have a hard time describing sound (especially in a written medium) but here it goes. To draw a parallel to the music industry, Harbinger is a heavy industrial game and you see it everywhere in our art. The ship was built to a giant scale with lumbering heavy-duty machinery and thick, towering walls. The sound effects were built to re-enforce this theme with deep clanging machinery and high-speed servo whirrs. Lots of big sounds. The music is basically a series of dark industrial tracks that’s layered in on top of these to set the tension and mood for whatever area you are currently exploring.

BETA TESTING

10) You have asked for members of the community to help you beta test Harbinger. What do you hope to achieve from this and what will you do with the feedback received?

We’ve been receiving a tremendous amount of feedback from our beta testers and already we’ve started rolling some of their suggestions into the game. What we are looking for now, besides the obvious bugs and system issues, is balance. Are enemies too difficult or too easy? How is the economy working? Are mission goals are clear enough? Those sorts of things.

Official Harbinger website

Harbinger Just RPG Preview