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.
