nFusion Interactive Deadly Dozen Interview  
(October 31, 2001), by Rushian.  © Copyright 2001, SpecForce.net

Deadly Dozen is tactical shooter set during World War II, with missions taking place from 1942 - 1945 in various war-torn locations, such as Norway, France, Africa, and of course Germany itself. The following is an interview with some of the members of the development team regarding the game.

Here are the 3 core members of the team:

  »Jason Zisk: Lead programmer, graphics guy 
  »Phil Vitiello: AI and sound programmer 
  »Jeff Birns: Lead artist and level builder

1. How did the nFusion team come together and how did the idea for the game come about? Were you inspired by Illusion Softworks' Hidden and Dangerous game? WWII movies?

Jeff: nFusion was formed in 1998. Jason an I began making technology demos in hopes of landing some contracts. At the same time we were working as contractors for various other companies to keep ourselves financed. After several years of working with Activision we contacted Infogrames. The idea of the Deadly Dozen was proposed to us by Steve Ellis who is an Infogrames Producer. Originally the idea was to capture more of the top down commandoes feel however we presented a demo to them of a full 3d world. At that point they let us take the game in the direction that we wanted.

I myself was a huge H&D fan. It was one of the only games I played from beginning to end without a break. DD is clearly inspired by H&D yet builds upon the concept.

Jason: I'd just like to add that the first time I watched Saving Private Ryan was for research for Deadly Dozen. After watching it I simply said, "There's our game." I think we captured the hectic "feel" of combat that Private Ryan tried to portray pretty well.

2. The screenshots so far look terrific. What graphics engine is used? Does it have a name?

Jason: It is an in-house developed engine. It doesn't really have a name, I guess if you wanted to call it something you could called it nWorld. nWorld is the name we gave to our editor, we really like lower case N's for some reason. But anyway, the engine has been in production for almost a year, we've been working on it since the company was formed and this is the first game to use it to its fullest.

 
Nice gfx engine fellas!

3. Why is there no multiplayer aspect to the game? A game of this type really cries out for co-op play at least...

Jason: Basically we were given a small budget and an even smaller amount of development time. We decided that focusing on creating a well-polished single player experience was more important than attempting to do everything and have the game be mediocre.

4. What game feature are you most proud of? (great AI, save-anywhere, awesome sound, immersive environments, etc.)

Jason: I think I'm most proud of the gameplay. We started off with a rough idea of the type of game we wanted and not nearly enough time to do it. Our original goal was lofty, we wanted to present a realistic wartime environment to the player and let them figure out how to complete the mission completely on their own. Kind of like Deus Ex, where you have a ton of ways to solve any obstacle and its up to you to create a solution. What we ended up with is very very close to our original goals, much closer than I even thought we'd get.

Phil: I think that if I don't say I'm most proud of the AI then I should quit my job and go do something else. :) Especially considering I worked on it for the entire length of the project. Our team is committed to AI, and all aspects of a game really, and we try to give each area our full attention. I think our AI is strong and I think it often does things that are cool, interesting, and hopefully somewhat realistic. However to be fair, the AI is also the thing I'm also most disappointed in because there were many ideas I had planned that I just didn't have time to implement. Oh and since you mentioned it and since I coded it I'm also pretty proud of the sound too :) Not so much for what it brings to the user (although it does support EAX and all that good stuff) but for its ease of use. I was glad I was able to do that for the rest of the team and make their jobs that much easier. It lets us add sound quickly and easily wherever we need it and it's something I'm going to continue to improve in all our games.

Jeff: I am very proud of the environment, ambient sound and music. I think we achieved a good amount of detail over a very large map area. And of course the gameplay :)

 
This must be Holland

5. How is your squad controlled? Orders on the fly (point and click?, hotkeys?, map screen?)

Jason: It is all done through four keys. You can tell them to follow you, stay put, fire at will or hold fire. It is a very simple interface that takes almost no time to learn. You can get more involved than those four keys though, you can tell your men to attack a specific target, you can give orders to specific guys and of course you can hop into any of your squad member's bodies to take direct control. So you can just run around with your squad trailing behind you firing away or you can get into it and set up complex ambushes and cover fire. It allows you to get however deep you want to get.

6. How does the enemy AI react to things in the game? Do they "see" and "hear" you? Can you fool them by causing a distraction? Will they take cover or retreat? Are there scripted events?

Phil: Yes, the enemy AI does see and hear you. They even smell you as well! That of course is mostly for the German attack dogs :) We tried to implement some sophisticated algorithms for those things, especially eyesight, without slowing the game down too much. You can in fact fool them by causing a distraction. You can bring along US quarters on any mission and throw them to distract an enemy and possibly lure him into an ambush. Sadly taking cover and retreating were some of the things I didn't have time to develop fully. However because of the way we do the AI sometimes you will see emergent behavior. For example, occasionally the enemies will fire a shot then duck back down behind a car or low wall only to pop up again and fire at you some more. I didn't program them specifically to take cover but they do know how to change posture and so sometimes you get cool things like that. Retreating was left out because of our realistic damage model. Most enemies don't get to live long enough to retreat if you shoot them. The same goes for your men as well. But we do have neat things where sometimes, based on what's going on, the enemy will just drop his weapon and cower in fear, or he will flip out and come at you in a berserk charge either with his current weapon or possibly just the knife! I think it's pretty cool. We don't have any scripted events in this game. In fact the team overall is not really in favor of them and I personally don't like them. Sure you can make some neat things happen using scripting, but it's the same neat thing over and over. I would prefer to have an AI that knows how to do a bunch of different cool and "smart" things in different situations so that you get behaviors that look scripted but really aren't. That way you never know what is going to happen, but it should always look like the right thing when it does.

 
Say g'night Fritz!

 
7. Is the game a hardcore tactical sim, or an arcade shooter?

Jason: The way the game is meant to be played is as a hardcore tactical sim. One bullet kills, slow-moving, very tense. But we understand not everyone enjoys that type of game so we put in a few options that allow you to play it like a normal action shooter. Turn down the damage realism and maybe the difficulty and you can run around taking multiple bullets to the head like the best of them.

8. Are the missions based on historical ones, or just 'made up' for fun and/or challenge?

Jeff: Most of the missions are made up however some of them take place in real locations focused around historical events.

9. Can you drive vehicles (planes, tanks, jeeps, cars, motorcycles)?

Jeff: You can drive cars, trucks, and motorcycles. Although tanks use full physics they are only controlled by enemy AI.

10. Does the game have 'atmospherics' in it? (rain, snow, lightning, etc?)

Jason: Our environments are dripping with gooey atmosphere. Our technology is geared towards making you feel like you are there. So we have rain, snow, some really incredible clouds, great lighting, swaying grass, and all sorts of other cool effects.

 
A snowy day

11. Is the environment destroyable? Can you shoot out windows, break tables/chairs, etc?

Jason: Yes, many things are destroyable. Not as many as I would have liked, but it turns out that making an object blow up is a lot of work for our poor, overworked artists. :) But you can still get into some pretty crazy firefights with stuff exploding all around you.

12. Will there be a mission editor included?

Jason: No mission editor will be included. If there is enough interest I'll try to get our crappy tools together and write up some docs on how to use them. But its not easy making missions for this game, we didn't have enough time to make nice shiny tools so most of the work is done in Notepad. :)

13. What levels will be included in the demo?

Jason: The tutorial level and the first level of the game will be included in the demo. The demo won't be crippled in any way either, you will be able to save and load and pick your squad from all 12 guys.

14. When is the retail release date?

Jason: It should be on shelves everywhere in mid-November. I don't know an exact date but I'd say the 2nd week of the month is likely.

15. Do you have any 'war stories' to tell of something particularly cool that happened during the testing of the game?

Jason: It was all such a blur...

Jeff: The whole development was a war story!

Phil: Heh oh yeah I've got a good one. Jay demanded that I recite this one :) I was testing the tutorial level and I got to the part where you have to use the anti-tank mines on a tank. So I get to the table where the mines are supposed to be and there are no mines. So I go to Jason "aren't there supposed to be some f***ing mines on this table?!" We were under a lot of pressure at the time, hence the cursing :) Anyway no mines. So having more important things to do I ignore it and move on. Eventually I get a chance to double check the problem as I was the only one who had seen it. This time I cheat and go straight to that part of the tutorial and the mystery is revealed. I see the German tank chugging along backwards! It backs right into the table which is entirely full of mines and of course goes click, click, boom! It flies up into the air, comes crashing down and starts to smoke. Suddenly it completely resets itself and continues on its merry way...backwards of course. :) After seeing all that wacky behavior, I realize once again that I don't have the debug library linked in for the physics engine. So of course the vehicles don't work correctly in my debug build. The first time I had tried the level I had just gotten there too late to see all the fireworks. :)

16. Any 'war stories' on creating the game? The day you lost all the source code, or anything of that sort?

Jason: Wow if that happened I'd cry. Nothing that serious, but we did have our fair share of hard knocks. My favorite was when the entire first map got trashed early in development. Jeff had just finished it, it was his pride and joy. Soon after I had to change the file format the maps were saved in for whatever reason, so I made a way in our editor to save the files in text format then re-import them. So we saved his map in text format from the old version of the editor then imported the map into the new editor then saved in the new file format. Easy right? We thought everything was fine for at least a week. Soon enough Jeff started noticing strange things. Like a barrel was moved a few feet. Or a fence had a break in it. I thought he was nuts, the map looked absolutely fine to me. Well after a lot of convincing, I finally came to realize that the little export/import tool had moved and rotated everything in the map a tiny bit. We are lucky Jeff even noticed this one, it was really devious.

Phil: One time Jason got really sick a few days after introducing a quite nasty bug into the code. This bug of course completely messed up the AI and he couldn't help me find it until 11 days later. That was bad. Really bad. I still have nightmares about it. No really :)

17. What's next for the dev team? Patches? Deadly Dozen 2?

Jeff: Right now we are taking a short break. It's well needed after a very long crunch period. We aren't quite sure what's next for nFusion but we will keep you posted.

Phil: Sleep :) And then after that some more sleep. And during that sleep who knows what we will dream up?

Many thanks to the nFusion Interactive development team for taking the time to answer the questions. Look for the game in stores the second week of November! 

Exclusive Deadly Dozen Screenshots

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