StuntMANIA!pro Tech review: Blurring the line in casual gaming

The incline of the casual gaming market has been taking massive strides in recent years, many small studios have started to ride the wave to success by releasing highly addictive easy to pickup and go titles. So much in fact that some of the big names in the industry most notably EA, Ubisoft, and Take 2 have started to walk in lock step with the recent phenomenon.
Having Turret Wars and now Stuntmania officially filed away as Sector3′s successful attempts at the casual gaming market, the formidable Animation and Visual effects studio can now fully pursue their passion of their gaming division. This in itself is quite admirable given the small size of the group. One of the many reasons they were able to accomplish this from their grass root efforts with Director, was the use of Unity, a mac based game engine that has opened up the world of affordable game making as well as introducing Sector3 to the casual games market beyond puzzle and card games. Not that there’s anything wrong with puzzle and card games mind you, but there’s a lot more variety of fun that can be had by just about anyone. In this tech review, I had the opportunity to lure Creative Director Seon Rozenblum of Sector3 away long enough to get some answers of their recent hit title StuntMania!pro.

The fun is in the details

Stemming from an initial proof of concept for one of the five car models used in the game, StuntMANIA!pro is a fast paced 3D car stunt driving game, where you perform def-defying stunts utilizing the environments to your advantage. The development time was quite short as expected given the nature of casual games; the mere 3-month stint has become a labor of love for the developers.

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Having no A.I. counterparts to overthrow and outrun, one would think like I did at first, that this would be a shortcoming of the game, but essentially that would go beyond the scope of the title that is intentionally centered on exploration and free form stunts. But it can’t be helped to wonder how the game would open up by allowing multi-player options, which fortunately hasn’t been ruled out by Sector3.

So what’s innovating about the title? Why would you as a causal or even a hardcore gamer want to pick up this title and play? While you wouldn’t expect Unreal 3 like levels and environments, you would expect an enjoyable and fun experience that can be had in 5-10 mins stints, and this is where the title works in spades, by giving the player ability to fully explore the levels and perform trick stunts while racking up points in any manner you wish, it can lend to very addictive game play, which is the mantra of casual game design.

Using the right tools

Sector3 utilized Unity as their main engine of choice, the versatility of the off the shelf Mac based engine allowed the developers to quickly realize their vision which was essential for them to have a reasonable turnaround time. Seon spoke highly of their development of StuntMANIA!pro while using the engine by stating;

“Unity is both the quickest game prototyping engine I have ever seen, as well as it being on its way to being one of the most advanced featured game development IDE’s available in the industry.”

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Which is quite a testament for the young engine as the developers of Unity pride themselves on providing an easy to use environment teeming with robust features thus opening up game development to practically anyone with an idea; seems like a rather suitable fit for causal game developers. He went onto to say;

“We (Sector3) developed our first ever game in Unity (a marble madness prototype) in less than a few hours after having NEVER launched the app before!”

Along with Unity they used a combination of Lightwave 3D, Modo, XSI, Digital Fusion and Photoshop in their pipeline for all asset creation. The hardware used was a mixture of Macs and PC’s consisting of Core2Duos, XPpro 32bit, 4GB ram, NVidia 9700GT. And for testing, a 17″ power book and a G4 eMac were used which is logical, since they needed to test the playability of StuntMania on a variety of processors.

Quality in the design

Although Stuntmania!pro isn’t the most graphically enhanced game in recent memory, the cars and level design does bring back great memories of classics such as R.C. Pro-Am back in the hay days of gaming. But don’t be fooled into believing a casual title can’t offer up stunning visuals, as the developers are on the verge of offering up some advancements in this area with features such as camera motion blur, camera bloom, and real-time soft shadows including environment shadows, which is pretty impressive.
Each vehicle boasts a 1000-1300 polycount which includes their wheels. The environments consists varying counts between 6500-12000 polys with higher counts promised in the next v1.4 build. Texture wise the sheets varied between 512×512 to 1024×1024 using a combination of color/diffuse maps, normal maps, lightmaps and alpha maps for transparency and glows.

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The vehicles design decisions ranged mainly with weight, balance and suspension not focusing on real world physics since it would’ve jarred the playability and most importantly the fun of the title. For instance Buzz and Truk were coded with bouncier wheels, due to their size, Flame has tighter suspension to allow more traction when climbing walls and performing various feats and as Seon puts it;

“Trike is, well, crazy to drive… the single large back wheel makes driving Trike a lot of fun as it really doesn’t adhere to many real world car dynamics.”

Sector3 and their vision

Sector3 has a somewhat unique philosophy within the studio, they would establish a title and continue to add additional features with point upgrades, essentially providing their customers with new engaging material and bug fixes all free of cost. Seon expands on this further by stating;

“What this means for our customers is that we are always committed to updating, expanding and refining our games to increase their longevity. Our customers get total value for money because they get new and exciting updates on a regular basis.”

This is great incentive to provide within a small group of developers, it keeps everyone within the group on their toes and enthralled in the excitement of developing the game that essentially leaves nothing on the cutting room floor.

Sector3 has positioned themselves to be committed to their gaming division as the months roll on, with the pending release of Stuntmania!pro v1.4 hosting new features and game play and the much anticipated release of Turret War 2.0 hosting the long awaited Multi-player component, you would think that would keep them plenty busy, but as it were they currently have in production a third title based on the multi-player real-time battle genre due out before the end of this year. And wait that’s not all, in addition to the aforementioned 3 more titles are also in development which will begin to roll out the second quarter of 2008.

I would like to thank Seon Rozenblum and his team at Sector3 for taking the time out to conduct this tech review.

Tito A. Belgrave

Related links:
Sector3
Stuntmania!pro
Unity 3D