Descent
3’s
creation was a long and arduous task that was both a joy and a pain. Exciting
technology coupled with inconsistent design and almost nonexistent management
had all members of the team exhausted by the end of our 31-month development
cycle. When the game finally did ship however, we knew we had a winner.
Developed
by Parallax Software and published by Interplay Productions, Descent
was released in 1995 and took the world by storm with the first first-person
shooter offering 360 degrees of movement. No longer were players constrained
just to walking around a 2D world — now they had complete freedom of movement
in a true 3D space.
Players
were able to fly their Pyro ship in any disorienting direction — up, down,
and everywhere — and top became bottom, bottom became up, as players plummeted
down never-ending tunnels blasting mechanical robots and saving imprisoned
miners.
This innovation
in action gaming was immediately successful and garnered The Academy of
Interactive Arts and Sciences Best Title of 1995 and Best Computer Game
of 1995. And PC Gamer voted it Best Action Game in the World. One year
later, the sequel Descent II was released, which added another
30 levels to the mix and improved the game’s AI, thanks to the addition
of the Guide-Bot and Thief-Bot. The game ended with a cliffhanger cinematic
that almost certainly guaranteed another sequel. That’s where the Descent
3 project began.
Who the
Hell Is Outrage?
Descent
was developed by a small group of programmers and artists at Parallax
Software in Champaign, Ill., headed by Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog. After
the successful completion of Descent, Toschlog moved to Ann Arbor,
Mich., and established a second office for Parallax Software. He took
three designers with him and hired two additional programmers. Both offices
then began to work simultaneously on Descent II. While Descent
II was deemed a successful project, the process of trying to get teams
located in two distant offices to work effectively together took a heavy
toll on both teams. It was at that time that Matt and Mike decided that
each office should work on separate titles and eventually become separate
companies. Thus, Outrage Entertainment and Volition Inc. were born.
It was another
eight months before the production of Descent 3 began. After the
release of Descent II, Outrage immediately began work on The
Infinite Abyss (a Windows 95 version of Descent II, along with
a new level add-on pack entitled The Vertigo Series). Meanwhile, Volition
concentrated on development of FreeSpace. It wasn’t until after
the release of The Infinite Abyss and Descent Maximum (the
Playstation version of Descent II) that the developers here at
Outrage began focusing all our energy on the design and development of
Descent 3.
Another
Sequel And Why Descent 3?
Descent
I and II had the makings of a franchise for Interplay, and
with any franchise, successful or otherwise, sequels are sure to follow.
Technology had taken a big leap in the year and a half that Descent
had come out: notably Windows 95 and hardware-accelerated 3D. It was easy
to see how Descent 3 could be dramatically improved over its predecessors.
By the fall
of 1996, we began to compile a list of features that we would like to
see in Descent 3. By November we had created a design document
detailing the new features that would be implemented for Descent 3
and submitted it to Interplay for approval.
 |
Initial
conceptual drawing of the Phoenix Interceptor. |
The initial
design and programming work on Descent 3 began in December 1996.
Some of the team had just completed work on Descent II – The Infinite
Abyss and Descent Maximum for Playstation, while others
were involved with research and development for Descent 3, where
they learned about new tools and technologies. We were excited about taking
the Descent franchise to the next level and eager to begin, but little
did we know that our over-eagerness would impair the game’s development.
About six
months after starting development, we stepped back and took a long hard
look at what we had and where we were going. Originally, it was deemed
that Descent 3 would have both a software and hardware renderer.
After checking out the competition, it was apparent that, if we wanted
to be visually stunning (and maintain interactive frame rates), we would
either have to scale back our technology design or go with a hardware
renderer only. We chose the latter. In retrospect this was a good
decision, but it was unfortunate that we had to make it six months into
the development, since many of the tools and software rendering technology
were already developed.
At this
point, not only did we decide to go with a hardware-only renderer, we
decided to scrap the engine that we had been developing. The engine we
had going was an enhanced segment engine — a portal engine that used six-sided
deformed cubes to represent geometry. Essentially, it was the same technology
used in Descent II, with some additional features thrown in for
improved geometry modeling. If we had stuck with this engine until the
game shipped, we would have been way behind the technology curve with
respect to our competition. Instead, we went with a "room"-based
engine, which allows designers to create just about any geometrical area
within a 3D modeling program, such as 3D Studio Max or Lightwave.
Shortly
thereafter, the terrain engine was developed. We were seriously considering
the idea of creating outdoor areas for Descent 3, but we worried
about the high polygon count associated with such a large rendering distance.
Fortunately, we used a good level-of-detail (LOD) algorithm to combat
the frame-rate problems. Unfortunately, the decision to include terrain
would adversely affect the overall design in ways that we couldn’t possibly
have foreseen, such as the scale of the terrain dictating how fast the
ship appeared to move while outside.
For the
next 18 months, work continued on Descent 3 at a frantic pace.
We were learning how to use our custom in-house tool, D3Edit, so in the
process we ended up creating and then throwing out an incredible amount
of our content — what looked cool one month looked dated the next. This
was largely due to the fact that we were developing a cutting-edge engine
at the same time we were trying to design the game itself — a pitfall
many developers have fallen victim to. Unfortunately, throwing out so
much work also cost our team a lot in terms of our morale. What we should
have done is freeze the design of the engine about a year before the product
shipped and then worked on the game. Unfortunately, in our lust for sexy
technology, we just couldn’t do that.
When we
finally did ship, we were exhausted in a variety of ways. Working on the
same game for two and a half years is emotionally depleting, to say the
least. Although we knew the game was cool, we didn’t know how the public
(or reviewers) would receive it. Thankfully, it turned out that our fears
were unfounded — Descent 3 has received incredibly good scores
from a variety of sources, including print magazines and gaming web sites.