The Inspirations of Starhawk – An Interview With Dylan Jobe

Anyway, In PvZ, like I mentioned before, you get to see zombies that are going to attack you with that initial camera pan — a critical bit of info for setting up your plants! Likewise, in PixelJunk Monsters, you have the wave progress meter at the bottom of the screen, as do many TD games. So it was really the sum of the info from these games that helped to inform how we present info the player in Starhawk. Although in Starhawk its more complex because it’s a full 3D environment.

Tower Defense At Its Finest.

So, the progress bar that you see in the upper left of the screen in Starhawk is our analog to the wave display from PJM. You get to see what is going to attack you and in what order. Furthermore, Cutter sometimes can’t get a good reading on the advancing Outcast units, so the player may be presented with a “?” to denote that a wave is coming, but you don’t know what it is. We also have moments in the solo missions where Cutter takes control of your camera and then shows, *and* marks for your, the specific regions in the level where attacks are going to come from. This is basically our adaptation of showing the player the kinds of zombies that are going to attack but we do it in such a way as to provide the player with locational info as well since the environments are full 3D and not just a 2D backyard with a pool ;-)

DO:  Excellent, I can clearly see those inspirations now.  However, when I first saw Starhawk I was immediately reminded of games like BattleZone and Savage.  I know BattleZone was an inspiration and a game that is far easier to make comparisons to than PvZ and PJM, but did any ideas come from S2′s lesser known franchise?

DJ:  BattleZone has always had a special place in my heart. BZ was the reason why I bought a 3DFX card way back in the day (god I feel old). But, yes, BattleZone has come up several times in our discussions and debates about Starhawk and the comparisons and influences are pretty obvious.

A Promotional Image for BattleZone (1998)... Look Familiar?

And yes, we have talked about Savage, but honestly not as much as the other titles. While I love the top down, classic RTS view in Savage, we actually felt like that was something that we intentionally wanted to steer away from. We really wanted Starhawk to feel like its RTS-lite elements and its action elements were more fused rather than having the game feel like it has two different modes like FPS mode and Commander mode in Savage.

Now in Savage, before you ready-up, you get to vote on commanders — which is a cool thing. Very early on we talked about having only 1 player in Starhawk be able to build but in the end we felt that we should let all players build even though it was going to be more challenging for us.

In Savage Can You Play From a 3rd Person Perspective

As Well As A Top-Down Perspective.

DO:  Well, since you’ve pulled inspiration from all these games, how do you think it turned out in the end?  Does everything work as seamlessly as you’d have hoped, or is there still a ton of balancing to be done with all of the different gameplay elements?