Mercury Meltdown Q&A Feature

One of the initial releases on the PSP, Archer MacLean's Mercury has become a popular title on the handheld format shifting over 420,000 copies worldwide to date. An addictive blend of puzzle and dexterity, Archer MacLean's Mercury is one of those rare titles that can easily have you spending many hours trying to beat a particularly challenge. Its concept is deliciously simple but so ingeniously clever in design you can understand why it has done so well from the first moment you start playing the game. Guiding a mercury blob around a maze of simple, yet freakishly devious, levels can be both enjoyable and truly maddening at the same time.

Despite the high profile resignation of Archer Maclean, the team at Awesome Studios (recently renamed Ignition Banbury) set to work on a recently announced sequel that hopes to build upon the success of the original. TVG got the chance to take an early look at the title and spoke with Ignition's Banbury Studio Manager Ed Bradley.

Firstly, Archer Maclean seemed to be instrumental to the original, so what has life been like after Archer and how have you gone about creating and designing the sequel?

Without a doubt Archer deserves full credit for the idea as it came from an embryonic demo from one of his previous pool games, and he was the one that got the 'gem' of an idea for Mercury and ran with it. The original concept and inspiration was from Archer and he was very much involved in the original design for the first Mercury title, then once this was done he largely let the team to get on with it. In terms of building all the levels, putting it all together, making it work, that was entirely down to the team and Archer had little involvement.

It certainly was a big shock for us when he left, it came out of the blue and to this day we don't really know what happened.

For Mercury Meltdown, Archer had left before the design was completed; he had some initial input but the game has changed radically since. Fact is we had so many ideas from the first game we'd actually used less than half of them. A lot of this game contains ideas we had the first time around.

"It certainly was a big shock for us when he left, it came out of the blue and to this day we don't really know what happened."

So were there any features left out of the original due to time constraints?

Yes. Mercury started life as a PS2 technical demo and then PSP came along which was the ideal platform and we were one of the first developers working on the format. The time from getting the PSP hardware to developing the game to delivering the final code took around 7 months. Mercury Meltdown would have been the original game had we had the time it deserved. Don't get me wrong, we are extremely proud of the first game and it did really well, but it undeniably had some rough edges that this time we believe we have produced a smoother more well rounded game.

We have left the core gameplay unchanged because the gameplay was a winner and everyone could see that. We've very much concentrated on getting the production values right and removing a lot of the points that people found frustrating or annoying.

In terms of the decision making pertaining to the game a lot has been down to me but there has been a lot of strong input from our head office and Vijay Chadha, Managing Director, who is a huge gamer himself and has strong ideas where he wants the project to go. We also got feedback from our offices in both USA and Japan. We are working in a global media and we wanted it to appeal to the biggest audience possible. The taste of the Japanese is different to the US and different to Europe but if you hit it right you can appeal to them all.

How many are working on the game and are there still members from the original title?

Yes, many who worked on the first title are still here and haven't changed much, and quite a few have vast experience in the creation of games, with many coming from ATD and Silicon Dreams and all told there are 21 people working on the game.

Mercury featured an enjoyable physics model and an intuitive control setup; are you still using the same physics engine and have you made any improvements or changes to the control of the mercury blob?

We have left the physics engine largely unchanged. There are small issues that needed resolving and we have extended it a little bit so we can do more in this game than the old one; all together there's less than 10% changes and they are there to make life a little easier!

"The erratic difficulty curve of the first game was the biggest consequence of the short development time."

One criticism from the original was that the progression of the game could have been smoother, as some levels were too easy while others frustratingly hard; would you agree with this comment and how has that been rectified?

Definitely, the difficulty area is something we have worked extremely hard on this time around. The erratic difficulty curve of the first game was the biggest consequence of the short development time. When you have to get your technology and art assets in place as quickly as you can, the last few months of a project is where the 'polish' and tuning happens and that is the part of the project that gets cut off when you are running on a short deadline. On this occasion we have had time and we have also changed the game's structure for it is not so linear. If you get stuck on one level, you can move onto a different level and still make progress in the game. You are not now sitting at a level you cannot go beyond until you have done it! There is more free form progression and we have paid attention to the difficulty level and tried to smooth it as much as possible. We also have a very experienced quality control dept of 7 and on the first title there were 2 part-timers!

How do you go about creating another 160 levels based around the same principle of the first game while ensuring it offers enough new innovation and ideas; could you elaborate on the process involved in designing the maps?

Well that is the magic of the industry!

We do have a combination of off the shelf and in-house tools. We spent a lot of time on the first project developing our systems for delivering those levels. Because of the nature of the game design process you need to chop and change things quite a lot and can quickly see and make changes, even swap the entire look of the level with a simple switch of a button.

Making the geometry of the trays is fairly simple, placing the object on the level is fairly simple, linking all of those up logically and making sure they work properly is where the testing comes in and on a simple level it can be done in an afternoon but on a complex level it may take a week or two to chase all the problems out, but we are very well practiced at it and we have around 7 people working on the level building. It's an interesting fact that when you are used to working with them, spending so much time, I can play a level and tell who made it because they all have their own styles!

We also reviewed the object set from the first game; we found some objects didn't work as well as we thought and others worked better, some even worked identical to others but looked nicer. We have removed around half a dozen objects from the first game and replaced them with 10 new ones which have given us a whole new set of possibilities. There are 168 levels in the game which is exactly double the first game and we have also done away with race, challenge, puzzle levels, etc. and now a level is just a level!

"Mercury Meltdown would have been the original game had we had the time it deserved."

There are a number of new modes including wireless multiplayer; can you tell our readers more?

Yes, we have some exciting new modes which include party games. When you progress and do well through the game it will unlock a party game and we have five on offer (Curling, 3 in a Row, Race). All can be played in two player mode either adversarial or taking it in turn to score more points that your opponent. In the original we had the main game which was simply a race through the levels, which was an amusing time pressure experience and I enjoyed playing it like that, but this time we have Battle mode where most of the objects on the tray are replaced with pick-ups, which will have some nefarious affect on you're opponent.

The 'game share' feature that the PSP system offered we wanted to make use of this time because we had the time to implement it. Now you can send a small game to another person's PSP and it stays in memory until their machine is turned off! We had a number of ideas and what we finally got is the game share version, which is a simple small eight level demo and so if you are playing the game and someone shows an interest in it they can have a play.

The real problem is screenshots do the game a certain amount of justice and seeing the game in motion does it more justice but it doesn't hit home until you sit and play it live.

Have you added more rewards for the player?

Yes, we have placed lots of rewards (Easter eggs) in the game. Whereas the first game had artificial differentiation between race, challenge and puzzle levels, this game does not divide the levels up that way but each level has three challenges associated with it. The first challenge is to save 100% of your mercury (to get to the end without dropping any mercury) and that is the amount you progress through the game with. The more you save the more levels you unlock and eventually you will be able to make it to the end of the game. Running parallel to that we have scattered bonus stars around all the levels and there are further rewards by collection - basically collect all the bonus stars and unlock the five party games...

And plenty of surprises to discover?

There is a good amount of hidden content. What we found with the first game was that it was very popular with a certain hardcore section of the gaming community, and did things that certain people did not believe was possible. We here at Ignition are hardcore gamers, to a certain extent we want to make it a game for ourselves. So we wanted to retain that sense of reward for people who really want to hit the game hard and push it every which way. We have made the game very accessible for the causal player whilst also offering plenty of hidden secrets for gamers who really want to 'milk' the game.

TVG would like to thank Ed Bradley for providing us with an early glimpse at Mercury Meltdown. Scheduled for release in September, expect further coverage of the title soon.