PSLS Presents – The Making of Polar Panic
Being their first game for the PlayStation 3, Eiconic Games has a lot to prove with their upcoming title, Polar Panic. A mix of classic arcade goodness and modern gameplay, Polar Panic is looking to give gamers an exciting and fun, albeit warm, gameplay experience.
As with all games, Polar Panic had to evolve; from the preliminary conceptual stages all the way to the final code. Eiconic Games has been nice enough to provide us with an extensive amount of concept art; highlighting one of the stages in the game, the Pirate Ship, and its evolution throughout development.
Click here, in case you missed our interview with Eiconic Games.
James Boulton, Eiconic Games:
Our aim with Polar Panic was to develop a game in the tradition of our favorite classic arcade games, with the looks of a modern next gen title and enough depth and hidden features to keep the most hardened gamer involved long into the night. It has already been publicized that the game has 50 story mode and 50 puzzle mode levels, it is worth pointing out that the story mode has 4 levels of difficulty (easy to insane) and both modes have an A,B,C score rating. To finish all the modes of the game on the hardest setting with an “A” rating is a challenge indeed. Added to that are the single player survivor mode and the multiplayer games, which means there is a lot of game here for the money.
The ‘secret’ of making a game like this is simply that we started playing the game as soon as we could, using ‘cardboard counters’ for the characters (before we had modeled the trappers) and we developed the game from there. We believe it is easy to tell which games have been played a lot while they were made, and which have not.
Working in this way meant we could try out all our ideas for the levels (the blocks and the trappers were all tested in ‘cardboard’) then lock down all their features before modeling and animated them. There was very little wastage anywhere on Polar Panic. A good example is we realized that while the 2D character designs are great, we needed to reshape them in 3D, as everything in the game needs to fit into a grid — you will notice the flamethrower trapper became a chubby round fella rather than the more flamboyant character of the illustrations.
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4 Responses to “PSLS Presents – The Making of Polar Panic”
Excellent information here! I hope there’s a demo for this title, since I usually skip out on sokoban-like games…Hoping this one is different enough from the normal attributes of this genre!
Ditto on the demo – these PSN games are great when I need a break from the huge deeply involved games I have, and are great for puzzle elements, which I enjoy a lot. I like what he said about them play testing it as soon as possible, I have found a number of games where as I’m playing I wonder, “did these guys ever play this crap?!” (like Bionic Commando, the new one).
BigWoopMagazine don’t get me started with Bionic Commando. I keep thinking to myself “maybe one day I will pop it back in and the controls will back a little bit of damn sense” Anyway Polar Panic looks like good potential. I had made it a habit to buy every game on PSN to support new devs and had to fall back with so many releases as the PS3 has grown in popularity and content. I look forward to picking this one up from the looks of it though! And great article PSLS. Your interview scoops are were it is at!!
Just to let you guys know, Polar Panic is out on the 22nd of December on PSN and there will be a demo. We hope you enjoy it!