Exclusive: Evil Genius Dev Diary #4 Feature

As we draw close to the end of the series of diaries from Elixir looking at how they have put Evil Genius, their superb game, together, the most important aspect â?“ gameplay - we have left until near the end.

With the release not that far off the team is currently wrapping up the beta phase, and hoping to go gold very soon. The designers are busy with final balancing and play testing; the programmers are in bug-fixing mode. Basically, the game is finished, and the team is polishing up any rough edges at this point.

Peter Gilbert - Producer (PG) along with Mike Rosser - Assistant Designer (MR) were on hand to give some important thoughts on gameplay but injected a comment also on the current state of the code.

PG: â??We have also been working with internal focus testers who have been giving advice on how easy Evil Genius is to pick up and play. This has been the major focus for the past few months, to ensure that the casual gamer will be able to understand the game. It seems to have worked, early quotes from journalists have been very positive about the accessibility of the game.â?

Gameplay Starting at the beginning.

MR: The player starts on an empty desert island. Their first task is basically a gentle introduction to the main principles of the game â?“ a bit of base-building, combat, interrogation and training. Once this objective is out of the way, things start getting more interesting, and more challenging.

Gameplay events and challenges that open up to the player as they progress.

MR: There are 10 main objectives to complete, each one being composed of several sub objectives. There is also a number of secondary objectives that donâ??t have to be attempted (but will provide rewards if they are). An early main objective involves establishing your evil credentials by gaining the respect and compliance of the worldâ??s most prominent criminal masterminds. Once youâ??ve persuaded the crime bosses to come to your island, you can gather them together at the conference table and make an example of one of them. Secondary objectives are often shorter. For example, one requires you to steal a prototype-cloning machine and use it to create a clone that can be used to throw the forces of justice off the scent.

Gameplay progression and complexities.

MR: As the player gets further into the game, they gain more notoriety and heat, and itâ??s these â??resourcesâ?? that shape the gameâ??s progression. As heat rises, the agents who get sent to the island become tougher and more dangerous. At first youâ??ll just see investigators, whoâ??ll try to gather evidence and wonâ??t pick fights with your minions. If your heat gets out of control, youâ??ll see assault soldiers, who are a lot harder to kill, and much more aggressive. On the other hand, rising notoriety unlocks new henchmen and raises your baseâ??s minion capacity. Take into account the research system that allows you to develop dastardly new traps, and itâ??s clear that although the enemies become tougher as you progress, you also have increasing flexibility in the ways in which you can tackle them. The base building aspect becomes more challenging once you reach the second island â?“ itâ??s a lot bigger, and managing a base of that size can be quite an undertaking.

Characters, skills, and plot.

MR: The player assumes the role of one of three Evil Geniuses: Maximilian (short, bald, psychotic); Alexis (beautiful, sultry, and also psychotic); or Shen Yu (exotic and enigmatic. Oh yes, and psychotic). The Evil Genius avatar has a number of useful abilities, but the use of these must be traded off against the risk of assassination. Almost all agents will attack the Evil Genius on sight, so if the player is careless and leaves the avatar unguarded, the world domination attempt could be ended prematurely. The benefits could be worth the risk, however: the Evil Genius has a powerful area of effect that boosts the stats of any nearby minions. This effect can be temporarily made even more powerful by performing an impromptu execution of a hapless minion to strike fear into the hearts of the others. The Evil Genius can also prioritise important base building orders so that they get built first, and can gloat over captured enemies for a small notoriety bonus. The Evil Genius cannot attack enemies directly, however: he/she relies on minions and henchmen for this. Henchmen can be recruited from around the world at various stages in the game, and each has two unique special abilities that are unlocked by earning experience points through combat and missions.

Highlighting a couple of the most innovative ideas for the genre.

MR: Personally, I think the heat system is a very nice game mechanic. If youâ??re reckless, killing people wantonly, investigators will use the body bags as evidence, and report back to their headquarters, raising your heat. Youâ??ll then find that more aggressive agents start coming, and life becomes more difficult. On the other hand, you can make sure that incriminating objects are well hidden, and get rid of unwelcome visitors by using social minions instead of simply killing them and concentrate on taking over the world in a slightly more humane fashion. The second approach requires more patience, but the beauty of it is that both strategies are equally valid.

PG: I am a big fan of the traps system. The player places triggers and traps and links the two together. Itâ??s an incredibly simple system but it allows great creativity as triggers can be linked to multiple traps, and traps can be linked to yet more traps. The player is rewarded for making more complicated traps systems to dispatch agents which fits in extremely well with the genre and the style of the game.

TVG: How do you actually test gameplay for plausibility and intuitiveness and how difficult is it to ensure the player understands what to do in a nice orderly fashion?

MR: Our game has Freaks, clones and mind-controlled monkeys. Weâ??re not that interested in plausibility. The intuitiveness of the game, on the other hand, is a great concern. Itâ??s very difficult to design a complex game like Evil Genius and retain an objective view of the way it plays. We have a team of five testers in-house who provide valuable input on how to make the game more accessible, and weâ??ve also recently been getting in a series of people to play the game for the first time while Sandy (lead designer) watches and makes notes on common mistakes and problems. Put simply, itâ??s very difficult for us to retain the complexity that a simulation demands, whilst also making the interface and mechanics as intuitive as possible, but I think weâ??ve done a good job at making it as accessible as possible. The interface is now as simple and streamlined as we can make it, and we have a system of video hints that help the player with the more advanced concepts if they should become stuck.

TVG: Will the game be open for gamers to include their own mods in any shape or form?

MR: Sadly, no. It would be great if we could make Evil Genius fully modifiable â?“ Iâ??d love to see what crazy henchmen the community could come up with. Itâ??s a possibility for the future.

Min/recommended specification required to run Evil Genius

PG: Minimum specs will be a PIII 800 chip, 128MB RAM, and a GeForce 2 or equivalent. There has been considerable time spent on optimisation, to ensure that the game will run as well as possible on the lowest spec machine.

Our recommended spec is 1.5GHhz CPU, GeForce 3 or equivalent 64MB card with 256MB Ram

Some of the most enjoyable aspects/features of the game!

MR: My favourite part of the game is probably the combat. Itâ??s always fun to watch, and the agents have lots of cool â??action filmâ?? moves like dodging and rolling, and ducking behind walls. When you get henchmen and super-agents in the mix too, it gets even more spectacular. I never tire of seeing Dirk Masters (the American super-agent) ripping my base to shreds with his dual machine-guns, before finally being subdued by a swarm of minions.

PG: For me itâ??s the interrogation. There are so many different objects that the player can use to dispatch the forces of justice, and every time a new object was uncovered the whole team would gather round to watch and laugh. Special mention must be made of our exceptional animators, Grant and Weles, who have been responsible for bringing the humour in the game to life.

TVG: What previous titles is Evil Genius similar to?

MR: Many people have compared it to Dungeon Keeper and Theme Park, but it plays very differently to any other strategy-simulation game out there. Itâ??s closer in many ways to a tycoon game.

TVG: What is the average spec on the PCs in your office and are you always trying out new gizmos and gadgets?

MR: Thereâ??s no real standard as far as PC specs in the office are concerned. My machine is a 1.2 GHz with 512 RAM and a Radeon 9600, but I suspect most people have better machines than that. The artists in particular need beefier machines for running Photoshop and Studio Max. We lowly designers donâ??t really need powerful machines to run our programs, which are mainly just word processors, text files, the game itself and our in-house scripting tool.

PG: Every so often a team member will wail and gnash their teeth at the specification of their machine; however as Producer I have the worst spec machine in the room just so I can claim the moral high groundâ?¦ â??Yeahâ?¦well Iâ??ve got a PIII 800 so stop complainingâ?. It doesnâ??t really work as an argument, but it makes me feel better.

We have had very few gadgets recently; apart from some really great external 7.1 surround-sound cards and speakers from Creative Labs. Evil Genius sounds absolutely fantastic as it thunders out of them, which is thanks to the tireless work of our exceptional audio team.

TVG: Does the team look through all the PC mags and even web sites searching for any Evil Genius and Elixir coverage and what generally are your thoughts on what is being said?

MR: Poppy, Elixirâ??s PR person, tirelessly collates each and every Evil Genius preview and feature that appears in magazines or on the net. We read all of them, and in general theyâ??re very positive. Weâ??re pleased that so many people enjoy the humour and the graphical style, and seem to be looking forward to the game a lot. Now that the game is practically done, the thought of reading final reviews fills us with a lot of excitement, as well as trepidation and dread. Only time will tell whether the reviewers enjoy playing the game as much as we enjoyed making itâ?¦

Next month we will be concluding the diary with a big fanfare in which we talk to the team about Evil Genius - completed - the high points, the low points, and one or two secrets about the game.