Gravity Crash – Developer Q & A Part I

The first in a two part Q&A session with the Gravity Crash developers, including theaveragegamer.com‘s very own Tikipod (Dugan Jackson).

Q – Firstly, what’s the inspiration behind Gravity Crash?

Dave Parsons (DP): Well, I suppose it ultimately goes back to a mis-spent youth spending a long time playing 8-bit games on early home computers. This introduced me to games such as “Thrust”, and a variety of other gravity/inertia games, and I was always charmed by the simple mechanics which were fun to play with regardless of the rest of the game. I had been wanting to make a proper game of that type for a long time, so when I had some time off in between jobs, I made a start on a PC game which eventually led to the PS3 version.

Q – What was the thinking behind including a level editor?

DP: I’m not entirely sure of the origins of the idea, but I know the designer we had at the time was pretty keen on the idea. We knew that inclusion of an editor would be a great feature to include, but obviously it has entailed a lot of work for us. But we also knew that we’d need some way of constructing levels for our own use (the original editor which I had been using for level construction had gone through 3 different iterations, but was still extremely fiddly and slow to use). So, all of our game levels were created using the very same editor people will have access to. We did have a few extra features available to us, but nothing major.

Stewart Gilray (SG): From my perspective it seems the perfect way to introduce some of the players to this type of game, and indeed into what makes up games like this, via them using the editor. It was something that sat in the back of my mind from day one.

Q – How long will it take on average to knock together a decent level using the editor?

DP: A simple level can be put together in a matter of a few minutes. To make a level really good takes a lot of testing and tweaking though. This is something that we can’t really assist with the editor, so we have just tried to make everything as simple as possible to use. I’m sure an interesting, playable level could be put together in less than an hour.

Q – How difficult was it to come up with the trophy challenges? Were you trying to avoid the boring, reach x number of points trophies?

DP: Initially the problem was simply finding the time to think of them. Once we got started however, it wasn’t too difficult to come up with a lot of ideas – we could easily have done more if allowed. We have only one silver, and all the rest are bronze, because we’d rather have lots of trophies than a few high-value ones. I suppose I had in mind an idea of roughly the sort of things we wanted, so it became a question of choosing challenges to fit.
SG: I have to agree with Dave, however there were a few stops and starts, we had some ideas, but they were either too simplistic or too trite in that everyone else has done that type of trophy objective.

Q – How easy was it to port the game over to the PSP?

DP: Well, when the code was originally started, it was aimed at low-spec PCs. However, even a modern low-spec PC has a lot of processing power. The general game code isn’t too demanding, but things like the numbers of particles have needed tweaking. Our PSP guy, Paul Carter, has been doing a great job with the conversion, and the biggest task has been to re-write all the rendering code for PSP.

Dugan Jackson (DJ): From an art perspective, a number of the more complex objects have had some subtle refinement to suit the PSP better, and many levels have been modified to suit the PSP’s screen and view, but you get all the objects the PS3 version has.

Update 23rd Nov 09: You can read part II of this developer Q & A here.

Gravity Crash is released on the 24th Nov 09 on the PlayStation Network.

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