Stolen Designer Diary #3

Currently scheduled for release in March, Stolen is a stealth action game in which you'll assume the role of a thief named Anya Romanov. Last week, we had our first opportunity to get hands-on with an almost-finished version of the game. This week, we're pleased to bring you our third Stolen designer diary. In it, lead designer Jonathan Biddle discusses the game Stolen was originally intended to be, the game Stolen has become, all kinds of stuff that happened in between, and levitation.

Mission: Submission

By Jonathan Biddle
Lead Designer, Blue52

I've been working on Stolen for approximately all eternity. I started on the project five years ago when it was a single-line concept on a sheet of paper. In that time, I've helped to work it up through various incarnations and playable prototypes of varying quality to where it is today.

When we first started Stolen, Splinter Cell didn't exist, and Metal Gear Solid 2 hadn't even been shown yet. The hype from Sony was that the PlayStation 2 was to be the most powerful and capable processor ever invented, and only our pathetic human brains would hold back what we could possibly achieve. As a testament to that fact, the early designs of Stolen had a full, free-roaming living city in which you could break into any building you wanted, steal whatever you could find, and sell it to the highest bidder. Like a classic heist movie, you'd stake out buildings from afar, investigate the security systems' weaknesses with your contacts, influence or manipulate the security staff within, or survey the inside of the target building the day before the job. While some of this has since been proved to be possible (stand up GTA), at the time we came to open our first PS2 development kit, it was clearly beyond what the PS2 was capable of. Since that day, Stolen has been broken down into its core components and reformed and streamlined many times over into a more focused and more cohesive experience. (Still, future generations of consoles may one day yet play host to the original vision of Stolen. Here's hoping... I'd certainly like to play it myself!)

Whenever I tell people what I do for a living, I always get the same, "You've got the best job in the world!" response, or, often, "You must just play games all day." While, in a sense, both these things are true. What's it really like?

At the moment, we're going through a process called "submission." Now, this sounds very much like a brand of humiliation-based Japanese game show, where people are forced to succumb to progressively more-evil events designed to break their wills and leave them crying in heaps on the floor. However, the reality of submission for us is only slightly more intense than that.

Submission sees the game in its final stages, where all that's left are a mountain of bugs and issues that need to be overcome one at a time. On the design side, that sees my team of cunning designers and me dealing with a wide variety of tasks through the day. This can include changing and tweaking the cameras, moving shadows so that hiding points are optimized, altering the security guards' patrols and scripts to provide either more or less of a challenge, and finalizing the positioning of those ever-so-important pickups. These issues must be solved quickly and efficiently, as time is now limited. The upside of this is that the game improves on a daily basis. Every now and then, when I do manage to raise my nose up from my PC to pause for breath, I catch various people playing through the game and having their own fun Stolen moments. It's good to see it coming together after all this time.

Of course, we're also fixing a lot of bugs. And the thing they don't tell you about bugs is that while they're a pain to fix, they can also be really funny. The first screenshot that accompanies this story show a floating-guard bug from late last year that had us in stitches. And there's another where even the guard seems to be despairing at our attempts to keep him on the ground.

Playing it now, as it nears completion, I'm really pleased with the way that many things have come together. I'm especially pleased with what we call the gadget games and what they add to the game as a whole. These are the minigames that open in a side window of the game and must be played in real time as the gameworld continues around you. While other games have used this feature, none have pushed it as far as Stolen has.

Stolen has four of these gadget games: lock picking, hacking, steel cutting, and safe cracking. The way we have integrated these games into the gameworld has made good on our intentions to put the skills of a thief into the hands of the player. The better you are at these gadget games, the better a thief you become. There's nothing tenser than sneaking around a guard to crack a safe after you've carefully timed his patrol. Quickly turning the dial and listening for the clicks, you hear his footsteps as he returns around the corner, preceded by his lengthening shadow. Fumbling with the dial under the pressure, you somehow manage to click the final digit in place and still have enough time to duck out into the shadows as the guard strolls past...safe cracked and undiscovered. The way this tension has been translated to the game, wholly, is really pleasing, and we've had a lot of positive feedback about all the gadget games.

I'll be sad to see the end of development on Stolen. While it's been a long journey for me from the conception five years ago, the last two and a half years of full development have been an absolute blast. However, the best thing is that after we've finally all fully submitted, I'm sure you'll have as much fun playing it as we've had making it.