Weird West is a game built on giving the player full control.
Control the doused enemies in oil before setting them ablaze.
Control to bury the dead or dig em' right backup. To sneak around, go guns
blazing to be a hero, a villain, or blow the doors off
instead of finding the key
It's an immersive sim, and the core principle of any immersive
sim is to give the player as much control as possible
to allow them to take their own approach, to craft their own story.
And of course, the ability to shoot
absolutely everything
If you saw a coin on the floor, you could aim at the coin.
If you threw a bottle in the air, jump and start aiming at the bottle.
[KURT] That is Raphael Colantino - Raf for short.
He's the co-director of Dishonored, director of Prey and founder of Weird West
Development Studio.
WolfEye. For Raf,
Being able to shoot anything in real time is one of the game's
most defining mechanics, but it also sent
the game into development hell.
There is moments where you really think,
are we screwed?
When Raf and his team
set out to make Weird West
they wanted to make the actual genre of weird west (Westerns
but with horror and fantastical elements) and put it in an action role
playing twin stick shooter set in a fully 3D rendered world.
After all, all of those things have existed in one way or another.
Immersive Sims, isometric RPG, twin stick shooters -
All WolfEye needed to do is just combine them.
What could go wrong?
A lot, actually.
We initially had an idea for
strictly top-down 2D kind of thing.
All the twin stick shooters that I had played back then,
like Nuclear Throne or some other game where it felt like though
I had never worked on a twin stick shooter, it seemed like a sort of problem.
You aim with one stick while you move with the other,
and it felt like we could probably do that
in 3D. It would be a little more pretty. You're not constrained to a 2D plain
anymore for combat.
So we put some elevations. Sooner or later
you're actually in a free environment. Like fully 3D.
Not just for the rendering, but also for the gameplay.
But back then what was happening is that we forgot that we
our plans for aiming system
was based on, on a 2D system
and even some, some twin shooters that are actually rendered in 3D,
they are still operate on one plain.
That's the thing that did not click with us, with any of us.
Twin stick shooters operate on the core principle that one analog stick moves
your character while the other aims where you shoot and that's it.
And that control scheme has remained unchanged since the genre's
popularization with Robotron back in 1982
Which is a great game, by the way.
Now it may have evolved from flat pixels to fully 3D worlds, but how they operate,
function and move has remained the same. You point
and you shoot
Weird West, on the other hand,
well, they wanted to do things a little different, weirder even.
As we implemented our our aiming system
It was quickly
hell.
We quickly realized that we were stuck
because there was no game that had pulled that off.
There was no game where there were elevations
and at the same time
you would aim anywhere the same way you can in a twin stick shooter.
The aiming feature we thought would be planned like four weeks on it,
but unfortunately it probably took more like four to six months.
[KURT] Even more, the problem arose one year into the game's development, putting Raf and his team
in a pretty tough spot.
It was out of the question to do, to not let the player amazing
and at the same time at this point was out of the question to go back in 2D.
And there is moments where you really think you are we screwed.
Did we corner ourselves in a way where that's it?
We'll never be able to make the game that we were set to to do.
The team tried a lot of different solutions.
They experimented with a own system where instead of aiming a thin line of sight,
the player instead directed a cone relative to the player's peripheral view.
However, it was never a one to one representation
of the players intention and what exactly they were aiming at.
So they scrapped it.
Then there was the flick system where the player would cycle
through targets around them by flicking the analog stick left and right.
However, cycling through every object on screen quickly became tedious
and cumbersome for the player,
so they limited the player to only being able to target NPCs,
which was a No-Go because it went against the immersive sim philosophy
of giving the player the freedom to do what they wanted, how they wanted.
So they scrapped that too.
Things weren't not looking good.
One of the big pillars of the game was hinging on that thing to be a success.
It was a lot at stake.
It would have changed the
we would have had to change the nature of the game severely.
So that was not an option.
Sometimes you got to make a big shift and you think "okay, we give up."
Maybe it would have led to another type of game,
like because some time from constraints emerges something really cool.
But is it pride or a bit of,
yeah, I don't know, a bit of ego or something.
Yeah, we gotta crack that nut.
They poured months of man hours into trying to solve
this problem and were on the verge of changing the game entirely
until they had a breakthrough. [RAF] Nobody believed it was possible.
Everybody was ready to to give up.
It took us to two different programmers to go through that
and the person who eventually found the solution
or at least the beginning of the solution was...
Etienne Aubert, our lead animator, surprisingly.
And he thought "let's forget the 3D part.
It's not it's not a 3D thing anymore.
It's like we render a rectangle that is constantly facing the camera.
And even if you move the camera, the perspective, it will always cut
what is anything that is under that line, that's you're moving...
It's exactly like a cursor.
It becomes a 2D cursor, even though it's calculated with 3D stuff."
[KURT] Instead of trying to
figure out how to aim in a 3D space using a 2D control scheme,
they created an invisible line tied to the right analog stick.
Wherever the player pointed it,
it would render anything in its path as if it were 2D.
So regardless of elevation, whether that's an oil lamp on a table
or vulgar way up in the sky, if the line is pointed in its direction,
it reads as though it is on a flat plain.
Now that I'm talking about, it sounds like super obvious,
but I swear, when when you're stuck in it
with all the smart people around and like, most of the time it was like... "Hmm,
I don't know."
You know, so it's funny that it came from from an artist.
I think artists, we tend to not be paralyzed by the knowledge of mass.
They look at the intention more than the engineering behind it, you know.
And so here he had
he had the great the great solution for us.
Now, probably one of the most
amazing parts for me hearing this story is that if I had not known about it,
I would have just probably never noticed anything really remarkable
about Weird West's aiming system, which is a good thing.
That means Raf and the WolfEye Studio team
did their job
Even still, despite all the time they sunk into the game's development
to be able to execute on the vision they had intended...
there's still a 2D mode you can still just click on overhead mode,
play the game like that, and I got to give it to them.
I think it's pretty fantastic that they still allow the option despite
all the work they put in, you know,
to what they had intended in the first place.
In the end, Weird West is everything it had set out to be.
It's an isometric RPG,
it's an immersive sim, and it's a twin stick shooter all at once.
Something that was deemed impossible during the game's development
that is, if it wasn't for the perception of an artist.