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Dog's Life - First Look Preview
Mark Simons
23/07/2003
From a man who brought us Elite, it's the first dog 'em up, honestly...
'Dog's Life' is headed to the PlayStation2 early next year, aimed at a family audience - don't laugh you sarcastic people out there, Nintendo games are apparently kids things, yet we still play them and enjoy them; so there. It is being developed by Frontier Developments, a company headed by David Braben, one of the creators of the seminal 'Elite', who is beavering away on 'Elite 4' as we speak, but finding time to indulge other development interests.
'Dog's Life' is based around Jake, a young dog, beyond the house training stage it seems, who is a veritable scamp, getting up to all sorts of mischief, having fun with humans. There is a storyline involving dog-napping that, inevitably, you have to sort out, with your canine wits, and if it comes down to it, canine teeth, to help you in your quest.
The big plot sees Jake head across America in search of his best mutt Daisy, this is when he stumbles on the dog napping, having to eventually confront the evil Miss Peaches who seems to be behind it all. Makes a change to have a nasty peach that's for sure... You start off in the sleepy Midwest town of Clarksville and have to go on a long journey that sees you pass through a ski resort on your way to the bustling metropolis - watch out for the cars when you get there we say. Along the way there will be over twenty breeds of dog and numerous human, and other animal, characters to interact with.
If you prefer to just mess around then you can; chasing cats, your tail, rolling around on the floor, exploring the world, causing mischief or helping people then you can do all that, and more, if you wish. Food can be found, food can be eaten, food can be got rid of, doing what dogs to best; best to find someone with a pooper scooper first though. We're looking forward to making our dog mark it's territory, and wonder if you can write your name in the snow. There will even be fighting, let's hope there's some underground fight clubs for the doggies where you can bet on yourself to whoop that big ol' Boxer who's taking himself too seriously...
One of the more interesting things here is the dogs eye view, in this mode the world takes on a sepia tinge and smells become visible, thanks to some colour coded clouds floating around the place, we wonder if this is what it's really like being a dog, but regardless if it is, it should work for the purposes of gameplay.
There are some nice, subtle ideas here, for instance your success in the game will be linked to how well you look after Jake, let him starve and become a mangy, dirty, hungry, sad-looking dog then you'll find it hard to get those oh-so-fickle humans to help you when you need it. If you perform side-quests you can collect extra bones, more juicy marrow to munch on, mmm tasty, which are the currency of the game, what do bones mean - prizes no doubt.
Mini-games, proper missions and the ability to mess around just being a dog; we certainly want to get our paws on this game, which seems to have Grand Theft Auto as its closest companion, in terms of structure.
If you take a look at the video we've got of 'Dog's Life' you'll see that it looks rather good, and this is mainly, although not exclusively, down to the rather advanced animation techniques that Frontier are employing. Using their own technology, called 'R-TAG', the developers can layer together animations, combining motion capture, hand drawn movements and inverse kinematics - which calculates movements using physics as a factor. This allows for a lot of things to be smoothly put together, movement gradually getting more laboured and the panting getting more apparent as you tire out Jake for instance. More excitingly it allows you to smoothly grab things in your mouth, keep running and have your dog realistically throw the thing around in with its head, discarding it when necessary, all in a smooth motion where you can't see the joins.
These dogs are some of the most impressively animated characters we've come across, having seen one of Frontier's animation demonstrations, three dogs running around on a wireframe landscape, we are very impressed. In the game they look even better, the environments nice and big, some good level of detail technology being employed, and there is even better, some of the best use of depth of field effects we've seen to date.
It's hard to tell from the small movie we have, but look at the screenshots and you'll see what we're on about. The backgrounds, the things that would be out of focus to your eyes or a television camera, are blurred in the game, this quickly and simply makes things look a lot more realistic. People may not know what the developers are doing, but they'll know that for some reason this game just looks nice than some others, the depth of field effect is one of the reasons why.
We should find ourselves becoming more familiar with Dog's Life over the next few months, we hope to give you a hands-on at some point, but for now this first look, the screenshots and movie will have to do.
