Remedy Interview - Part 3: "The Power Behind Wake"
YouGamers: Would it have been possible to have taken the old Max Payne engine and add a wrapper or "layer" to make it next generation at all or did the ideas of Alan Wake require a new engine from start to finish? Mäki: No. To get from where we were to what we wanted to achieve for Alan Wake, we needed to something bigger than just "glitter" on top of the Max Payne engine. We still have some parts that we're still using but I have to say that those are definitely in the minority - most of it is written to be much more console-friendly. The open world naturally, the streaming and so on… Järvilehto: All of that requires a drastically different approach in general [nods]… Mäki: Yeah - it's a different game, different technology!
Max Payne's engine and technology simply wasn't up to the demands for Alan Wake.
YouGamers: At any point did you think that it would be better to go with a licensed engine (say the Unreal Engine or something like that) or was it always going to be a case of "do it all ourselves"? Mäki: I think it would be foolish not to consider all options… Järvilehto: For something that we wanted to create with Alan Wake, there just wasn't any licensed engine that would have been capable of that. For example, Unreal is an awesome platform, but you couldn’t build a game with this level of freedom, world sim depth and seamless streaming with that engine. Mäki: And looking at the time frames of different licensed engines, the console cycles and so on…[sits forward] and also the passion that our team had for creating the technology, it would be a…disappointment for us to not to let them do that, in a sense.
YouGamers: You guys have now produced 2 (or perhaps even more) big game engines. If you grab 20 or so titles off a store shelf, most will be made with just one or two licensed engines - so obviously not everyone is able to pull this off. What do you think the main stumbling blocks developers have to get over to make their own complete engines? Mäki: First of all, you need to have the best people and you need to have quite a lot of time [everyone laughs]! There is some rocket science in there but it's mostly just smart people working diligently towards a common goal. Järvilehto: Licensing an engine is a fantastic way of saving time and kick-starting development, but it also means that you're forced to operate within the limits of the licensed tech base.
Everyday locations, beautifully rendered, drive the storyline and tension.
YouGamers: Is it a lot more difficult to design and make a game or engine that works really well on two, completely separate platforms, like a PC and an Xbox 360, compared to just one alone? Mäki: [pauses for a moment] I think it is much more difficult to make a game that works on PCs and consoles; with a PC engine you can take a lot of freedoms. For example, in how memory is handled because Windows virtualises it all; hardware can scale and a PC game doesn't get bad reviews if it runs at 25fps but a console game is expected to run at 30. So there are a lot of differences - PCs can load in data more quickly from the hard drive; consoles have a bit more limited DVD loading bandwidth. Yeah, it is a lot more work but the Xbox 360 and PC are similar enough platforms to make development quite a lot of fun. Järvilehto: 360 and PC has been a fantastic combination to work with and I'm really happy that we don’t have anything else to distract us on the platform front.
YouGamers: Are you or did you consider at any time using Microsoft's XNA middleware toolkit? Mäki: Well, we naturally use the DirectX and Xbox SDKs - XNA kind of encompasses those two anyway…so I'll say "yes" [laughs] "sort of"…it would depend on what you define XNA as, I would say.
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