Hey all -- welcome to the latest Prey Weekly Update. Originally, Peter
Johnson from Venom was going to update this week on the status and progress of
the Xbox 360 version, but due to their crunch his update will have to wait until
a future update (possibly next week).
Like Venom, we're in crunch here at Human Head as the game is in late beta.
We're getting tons of feedback from 3D Realms, Take2 QA, and other beta testers.
Every day the game improves pretty noticeably.
I'm going to update with little snippets of thoughts on various things that have
happened around here. Like I said, we're incredibly busy, so there's way more
than this happening, but here are just a few:
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Last week I was in Dallas visiting 3D Realms. Tom Chick from CGM flew in for the
first single-player hands-on demo of the game. We showed him the first two hours
of Prey, and then jumped around and showed him a few cool areas later in the
game.
The game pretty much shows itself off now. In the past, it was 80% talking and
20% showing -- as we discussed the story and what we planned to do in certain
sections. But now, those numbers have flipped. Most of the demo was just seeing
the game and experiencing the story -- the 20% was us talking about what we had
yet to fix and tweak, and talking about the history of the game and its
development.
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Recently I speed-ran through the entire game, taking stock of the following
items:
- Action/Puzzles: Any long stretches of the game without any action or
puzzles? (not many!)
- Tommy comments: Making notes of additional comments needed and which
current comments could use reworking.
- Combat frequency: Is there not enough combat in areas, or too much? Do
certain creatures show up too much?
- Death frequency: Did I die too many times in a given area before I was
able to get through?
- Animation tweaks: Which animations could use reworking
- Sound tweaks: Any sounds that could use tweaking, or any places where the
volume mix is off.
- General bugs: Just anything that seems wrong or is broken.
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Michael Greyeyes (the voice of Tommy) will be visiting us in a couple of weeks
to record new lines and re-record some previous lines that didn't work well, or
had to change due to story tweaks. I'm compiling a (pretty large) list of
comments culled from suggestions here and from suggestions from 3D Realms. I
doubt we'll have the in-game Tommy say everything from that list, but we're
going to record all these lines just in case.
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More voice recording fun:
We brought in a local actress/singer named CJ Schellback to provide additional
female voices and screams for the game. She did a fantastic job, with some
excellent screams of pain and yelling such things as "Help me!", "Where am I?!",
"What's going on?!"
Our recording booth is apparently not entirely soundproof as her AMAZINGLY LOUD
screams of pain heard by one of the offices directly below us.
After several minutes of her screams -- someone from the office finally came up
stairs and asked "Is someone being raped up here?"
Seriously. They didn't ask if someone was hurt or needed help. They go straight
to raped.
In the future, we'll be sure to inform our neighbors of our voice recording
sessions.
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