NerdMentality | INTERVIEW: High Voltage Software

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INTERVIEW: High Voltage Software

Posted April 4th 2009 by Chris Selvaraj.

I can't say I'm a big fan of the first-person shooter genre. But when I heard about High Voltage Software's The Conduit last year, it stood out from many other Wii games. Since then, it seems the game has captivated online communities in an almost Cloverfield-esque way. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Tony Mecca of High Voltage Software touching on just about everything Conduit related.

N-Philes: First, can you tell us who you are and what you do at High Voltage Software?
Sure. My name is Tony Mecca. I've been at High Voltage for about three and a half years now. I am the primary animator on The Conduit. I've been on The Conduit since early, early, early on since we were just concepting it out. So I've been on the project the entire time, throughout the entire game, pretty much had a hand in everything that had to do with animation or control-wise in the game.

N-Philes: So being the primary animator do you deal with actual character movement, or is it more of an artistic design with your position?
It's primarily the movement of the character but I am involved in the design of the characters, the look of the characters, how they behave like how fast they move, what they do, all the first-person stuff, the controller input, design based on cutscenes you know things like that. So it's primarily the movement of all the characters, but overall the whole look and feel of the game as well.

N-Philes: It seems High Voltage has been gaining more attention since early last year. Do you feel like the company is expanding to include more original titles, compared to your previous ones?
Yeah, definitely. Ever since The Conduit was announced we've grown as a company. And we do have more original IP's coming in the works, so unfortunately none of the other ones are officially announced right now, but High Voltage has traditionally been known for doing the licensed titles, things like that, but ever since The Conduit was announced and gained the popularity that it has, we are moving into doing a lot more of our own internal IP's.

N-Philes: The Conduit doesn't sound like a traditional name for a first-person shooter. And I'm sure most people don't even know what that word means. Can you give us some background information on why this name was chosen?
Sure. I mean, we played around with a lot of different names. Believe it or not, the game actually had the name The Trust for a while, since that was the organization that you work for. But after batting around a bunch of different names with management and throughout the team, we felt The Conduit was the best. At first, believe it or not, we all were kinda like, "No, put that in the ‘NO' pile." And once we started hearing people refer to it as "Oh you're Team Conduit, oh this is The Conduit team," it just really flowed a lot better and with the specific story arcs we had and a lot of the surprises and plot twists in the game, and after you really beat the game and have a full understanding of the story, you can really appreciate why we decided to call the game The Conduit. A conduit is actually a medium of you know, conduit piping, it can be the dictionary definition having to do with getting something from one place to one place through a portal, or means of transportation and that's really what a lot of the game is about. This alien force is coming to us, or you going to them, or kind of all the conspiracy elements so there's a lot of traveling going on, even with information. So we felt that The Conduit really summed up what the game is supposed to be about.

N-Philes: Yeah, it has a lot of meanings and I agree it's a good name. Kind of mysterious too.
It's definitely different than first-person shooter names, but I think that's why we picked it. A little bit of it was just to be different.

N-Philes: As of now the ESRB hasn't given The Conduit an age rating. In an ideal situation, do you think a T or M rating would be more beneficial to both-
Actually we did get rated by the ESRB. It's unofficially Teen.

N-Philes: Oh Teen. So you think that's what you're sticking with; that's what the company wants?
I mean, right now now we were designing the game from the actual get-go in a first-person shooter, whether it be T or M, it probably wasn't going to be E. We knew that much. But we were kinda hovering between the T or the M. We decided to shoot a little more toward the Teen rating, only because the project might open up a little bit larger demographic especially for Wii owners, rather than just going super-hardcore, blood, heads popping off, things splattin' all around where we could still get the same effect but still obtain that Teen rating so you don't have to be 17 to enjoy the game.

N-Philes: It should help it sell a lot more too, I mean appeal to a broader audience I think.
Most definitely, yeah.

N-Philes: The Conduit looks visually impressive from what has been shown so far. Could you compare the technical graphic achievements with any games currently on the Wii, or ones with similar art direction?
Um...the Wii specifically? Technically no, only because we are the first game that I even know of that we've investigated, a lot of these other games that are actually doing real-time normal mapping on the system. I know a couple other games claim that they did it, and we looked into that, but we haven't actually seen it actually happen in real-time on the Wii. So we have a lot of those effects going. We also have the real time normal mapping, the full bloom HDR type lighting, we have an advanced rendering and lighting system you know. So technically I don't think a lot of the games actually come close to what we're doing. Artistically? You know we did look a lot at Metroid, but we are a little bit more on the real side. So I think we're smack-dab in the middle of like a Metroid and a Call of Duty game. We're sci-fi and alien things like Metroid, but with a little more realistic style.

N-Philes: I recently watched a trailer showing off what looks to take place at the airport in Washington D.C. and I have to say I love airports and other real-life areas in games. Can you tell us what other environments we'll see Mr. Ford navigate through in this game?
A lot of it does take place in Washington. There are a couple levels that we haven't announced, and you're probably not going to be able to see until you pick the game up. But we do have the airport in there, we have the Library of Congress, The Pentagon, The White House. And what's really cool about these real locations is, I'm a big fan of playing through real locations as well because you get the feeling of, "Wow, this could actually exist somewhere." What was really cool with The White House and The Pentagon is that even though we have information on the basic areas, like popular areas that a tour group would be allowed to visit, we got to be able to take creative freedom in all the secret areas of the White House or in The Library of Congress if they have any secret chambers or in The Pentagon when you go into the computer rooms, things like that. So there is a lot of real locations in Washington, we put up all the major ones, but there is still some undisclosed locations that you guys have not seen yet which are really cool.

N-Philes: Why did you choose to develop games for this particular system? And are you hoping to see more "core" gaming titles on the Wii from other developers in the future?
To make a long story short, essentially the way The Conduit went down is that we got some external funding to pretty much make whatever game we wanted. This could've been a 360 game, PS3 game, it could've been a DS game, it could've been for the next Xbox, or super high-end PCs. So we could make any game we wanted. The way The Conduit came around is that we all had Wiis and we all felt that, okay, Wii Sports was awesome. It was a lot of fun especially when you had family over and things like that, but we felt that there was definitely something missing off this system. A majority of the team is hardcore shooter fans, like PC, like your Left 4 Dead, your Team Fortress, Medal of Honor, Battlefield, things like that. So we're all hardcore PC shooter fans and we wanted to get something out of the Wii. We wanted to prove that the Wii isn't just this little gimmicky controller.

So we decided to develop on the Wii because we had our advance technology group work with some of our artists on the team, one was me included, kind of just put together these little tech demos. Like what can we do on the Wii? We're not bruteforcing the system, it's not like we found an extra, you know, "Oh here's an extra 10 megs nobody ever found in the RAM," or something like that or, "Hey! Here's a second processor, nobody found this, check it out." We just found different ways to rerender the pipleline of getting these next-gen techniques to run on the Wii's limited hardware. Then we went ahead and pushed to see what we could do with the whole controller scheme and played games like Red Steel and Metroid and all the first-person shooters on the Wii, and although we felt they were pretty cool games, we thought that the control was not quite there yet. So we all discussed it as a team, the management got together, and we said, "You know what? Let's combine this technology we have and make a first-person shooter while nailing the controls and getting a really really cool storyline on there." So it's like bringing water to the desert.

In terms of it being a hardcore game, we really really wanted to push for the hardcore audience. And we knew because if you cranked the game on even hard or insane setting, you've got to really work at it to beat this game. But on easy and some of the parts of normal, we wanted to have it accessible to even first time first-person shooter players. So it was just one of those things that made sense at the time. The Wii didn't have any type of hardcore games on it. The Wii graphically, you know artistically looked good, like Super Mario Galaxy obviously, Metroid, games like that had great art direction in it, but they weren't really pushing the technology that we saw the Wii could do. And they were still a little bit behind on how good the controller could work, especially on a first-person shooter. So it just seemed like the right thing to do at the exact right time and so far we've been correct. Everybody that's played the game has really really love it, it's gotten a lot of positive reviews, and everybody that takes a look at it seems to say it looks fantastic for a Wii game. So I think we made the right game for the right console especially.

N-Philes: Could you tell us how The Conduit will utilize the Wii Speak peripheral during online play?
Well we do support Wii Speak. We're still doing a lot of testing with it right now, so I can't give you any final answers on it. In the next couple of weeks though Sega is going to be putting together a press announcement that will reveal every single detail about multiplayer, and that Wii Speak will be in there. As it stands right now we do have it working, we are play testing with it right now, but as far as final specs on exactly what we are supporting, we're still tweaking and finding our answer to that question as well.

N-Philes: And finally what makes The Conduit stand out from first-person shooters on other consoles in a time when the genre is so popular right now?
Well, like I said we're all hug fans of next-gen first-person shooters, even PC side. The way The Conduit stands out is primarily on the controls. And it's not just a gimmick control. First it's like Red Steel that did a fantastic job of being a launch game, I mean I give those guys major props for trying to figure that game out. We feel that we're doing a lot more in the controls than just giving you a dead zone, and when you get to the dead zone you just start turning. There's actually a lot more going on behind the scenes in both art and code and design. In the actual control scheme, even when you're inside your dead zone, how fast you turn your cursor, how fast you move, even at the default settings. And anybody that's played it that has gone from Red Steel or Metroid, it's been unanimous when we take the game to show, that something about it feels better, feels smoother. It feels more it's an extension of your arm and you're really holding these weapons rather than a game you're playing with a gimmicky controller. So our control is fantastic. We have options that rival some PC shooters I'd say. I mean you can control everything you want in the game. And what's cool is that you actually get to see it in real time, so as you're tweaking your controller settings. Just as long as there's no enemies around because it will pop up a dialogue box that says, "If you start tweaking these right now, and there's guys around, they will kill you." So we're one of the first games where you can actually customize your controls, your turning sensitivity, your flick radius, your bounding box, all in 100% real time in-game so you can feel your effects as the game is moving.

We feel that the story is also very strong. Even though a lot of people say it's a generic aliens invade type thing, we have a lot of plot twists in the game. We have a lot of really cool, not necessarily in-order story telling. It's told actually a lot like Lost where you start out the game, and then the next level is five days earlier. The way that it presents itself is an extremely interesting way of storytelling. And a lot of cool plot twists. A lot of times you'll be in game thinking to yourself, "I don't even know what's right or what's wrong right now. I just need to get to the end of this level to find out what I believe, who's right and who's wrong." Things like that. So you're not always this gung-ho soldier who only one-sided. So a lot of the story always has you doubting if you're doing the right thing, if you're a part of something bigger, or if it's nothing. I'd say the two major things to sum all that up is going to be the control scheme and our story. And obviously the graphics on the Wii.

N-Philes: So it sounds like you guys have a little bit of everything.
Oh yeah I mean again we looked at every single, not just Wii, first-person shooters. Especially in the art aspect and control aspect of it we knew we were better than dual analog. We might not be as super precise as a PC mouse and keyboard, but it's a heck of a lot more fun because you definitely feel, especially in multiplayer, when you headshot a guy it's not like, "Wow I just totally out-thumbwarred this dude," it's, "I picked up my weapon and aimed it with my hand like a real weapon in real life, and used my motor skills to gun this guy down." So there's a whole new level of satisfaction, especially in multiplayer where you feel like you've achieved something and you have some overall skill rather than just, "Oh I'm a little bit faster at clicking popups than you are with a mouse and keyboard setup." So that's just one of the things that a lot of people have been saying feels way more satisfying as you're playing the game

N-Philes: Alright well thank you for sharing your time with us today.
No problem.

The Conduit is currently scheduled for a late June release on the Wii.

Tags: High Voltage, The Conduit