If you’ve read my recent hands-on preview / class breakdown for exciting upcoming shooter LawBreakers, you’ll know that I was recently in North Carolina visiting Boss Key Productions to go hands-on with the game in its pre-alpha state. It wasn’t just about playing the game, though. As part of the visit, I also had interviews with key developers (stay tuned for those at a later date), and had a tour of the new studio.
The studio is headed by co-founder and CEO Cliff Bleszinski, which is a name you might recall as being synonymous with Gear of War, Unreal Tournament, and Epic Games prior to his retirement. When Bleszinski found retirement to be too boring, he formulated a pitch for LawBreakers, then presented it to a bunch of publishers with Boss Key co-founder and chief operating officer Arjan Brussee (co-founder of Guerrilla Games). Ultimately, Nexon had the best deal, and LawBreakers is now being built for the generally free-to-play publisher.
When I visited, the studio had a 55-person headcount, which may grow by a few more people, but Bleszinski hopes to keep it small. During our interview, he specifically mentioned that larger headcounts tend to breed the kind of office politics that’s not conducive to the kind of family environment he hopes to create at Boss Key. In fact, Bleszinski said they picked the location because it’s close to restaurants and bars, to help promote that family feel among employees.
I joined the studio tour late, while the group was chatting with senior animator Zach Lowery. Animation might not sound like the most exciting of departments to visit for your average first-person shooter, but then LawBreakers isn’t your average first-person shooter. Lowery was breaking down the animation challenges of animating characters in the zero-gravity sections of LawBreakers.
Originally, the idea was to have characters simply float with their regular on-foot animations, but the result looked tacky, with characters appearing to spin around on invisible poles with static animations. The animation system has been overhauled to not just look believable for how characters move in the space, but also to provide vital visual cues to enemy players. For instance, as a player switches from aiming below to aiming above, the animation kicks their legs out beneath them as their aim readjusts.
While this information is useful for lining up enemies in zero-g, it’s also potentially useful for players hoping to minimise their profile in the same space. In the same breath, there’s a bit of a learning curve for predicting player movement as, like being in water, a player animation will kick out to the left to indicate they’re moving right, and vice versa.
Next we visited senior gameplay programmer Nathan Wulf who showcased how death is handled in LawBreakers. It’s a mixture of animation and physics, which also takes into account the type of damage the player has taken, as well as how much damage has been taken in the killing blow. In practical terms, the mixture of animation and physics was best showcased for electrocuted enemies, as we watched a graph that tracked the alternating between animation and physics that resulted in some believable post-frag feedback.
It’s the kind of detail you’re not likely to pay too much attention to in a fast-paced shooter, but it’s a welcome touch for adding to the overall subconscious immersion and, strangely, believable grounding of the sci-fi shooter. It also helps to add that extra level of feedback that specifically complements some of the beefier weapons.
Wulf emphasised that physics trumps animation, so you shouldn’t expect to see dead bodies clip through walls. All of this was demonstrated live within Unreal Engine 4, as Wulf loaded up multiple players in the same map and on the same PC, shifted one into position for zero-g death demonstrations, then switched to the other to execute (in every sense of the word) the demonstration.
After Wulf, we visited senior character artist Chris Wells. Instead of talking specifically about character art, Wells focused on LawBreakers’ impressive set of subtle visualisation tools inspired by Hollywood lighting techniques. With the effect switched off, it’s easy to lose sight of a player’s silhouette in shadowy areas, but with the effect switched on, the silhouette is subtly lit so you can always distinguish player from shadow, or background, even at range on a smallish screen. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a fantastic touch for ensuring that hiding in the shadows isn’t a viable tactic in LawBreakers, which keeps the emphasis on forward momentum.
Just before we moved on with the tour, Wells mentioned that his team is currently working on a system for greater visual differentiation between friend and foe. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that players feel they’ve died for skill-related reasons and not because they cannot see an enemy.
Our final stop during the studio tour was with senior concept artist Jay Hawkins. He was one of the first to come on board at Boss Key Productions and is a veteran of working with Bleszinski (10-odd years, in fact). Hawkins showed off a fifth class that’s currently in development. Apparently, the character had been running around in-game for a couple of months using another character’s mesh before there Hawkins had the opportunity to put a costume on him. Boss Key is clearly interested in prioritising gameplay over aesthetics at every turn.
That’s not to say the characters suffer for this, as Hawkins showed off the new class. For the Breakers side, the working name is Syndicate, and the pitch was to have a character who’s a super-slick James Bond-type in a trench coat… with demon horns. Given the grounded vibe LawBreakers is going for, demon horns doesn’t really work, so Hawkins solved this particular pitch problem by designing a hammerhead shark-like visor that looks like horns at range.
Because this gave Syndicate a decidedly demonic vibe, Hawkins contrasted this with an angelic feel for Syndicate’s counterpart Archangel. This angelic-looking character’s backstory is that he’s an ex-bishop who has a cyber halo and wings. There was some internal debate as to how those wings would work gameplay-wise, particularly because Archangel reportedly doesn’t fly. Whatever the outcome, though, Hawkins guaranteed that Archangel will have some kind of wings by the time he makes it into the game. What I saw of Archangel’s design looked like a mix between Too Human’s science-fantasy meshing and Equilibrium, in that Archangel was dual-wielding a couple of Gun Kata pistols.
The big challenge for creating characters in LawBreakers, though, is the opposite side of each class has to be built atop the same skeleton and share the same rig. There’s the idea of synchronous gameplay trumping art again, but it makes for an incredibly balanced product from what I played in pre-alpha form. Hawkins’ final thoughts were that this new class is the first character that’s been purpose-built for LawBreakers because, up until this point, Boss Key was refining what the game would be, up to and including the last couple of months.
We ended the tour with the Hawkins’ pledge that the new class is a lot of fun in terms of gameplay, so it’ll be interesting to see what powers are brought to the mix. During the tour, there was evidence of Bleszinski’s idea of creating a family feel for the studio time and time again. Boss Key Productions may not have made me geek out like visits to Gearbox and Valve have in the past, but as far as building confidence in the product the new studio is building, the tour made me even more excited for an evolution of shooter that’s bound to capture the attention of PC shooter fans.
