#Jedi academy lightsaber combat series

Dark Forces II had been a first-person game, so the team wanted to allow players to still play in first-person while designing primarily for third-person gameplay.

This led to some finicky work when it came time to design the game's lightsaber combat.

'We went through a lot of weirdness to get there but the engine already had a rudimentary third-person tech, it just set the camera back and we added in a bunch of scripting and traces to manipulate the camera to make it feel more natural to do a cinematographer type thing where if you know back up into the wall it moves the camera up ' 'There was some weirdness,' Monroe admitted. But after hacking some third-person tech together, they revealed they could continue Kyle Katarn's Jedi journey he'd begun in Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight.

#Jedi academy lightsaber combat series

They mention that during their initial pitch to LucasArts, there had briefly been discussion that they'd be returning the Dark Forces series (which Jedi Knight technically falls in) to being a first-person shooter. Those generalist tendencies helped the team transition from being an exclusively first-person game developer to a third-person one. 'There was just more for you to do and I personally have not been in an editor in I donвЂ™t know how long an itвЂ™s something that you really miss.' 'I still love it and I love the people I work with and I get to meet a lot of cool people at different studios,' he explained, 'but.I would be working on the narrative, I would be working on catchphrases, I would be retexturing, IвЂ™d talk to our artists, I would help with artвЂ¦' Like we build the levels and do whatever, but somebody else is doing Hollywood-level lighting and somebody is else is a scripter that has you know 20 years of experience doing it so we kind of spread a lot of those tasks out so it means a lot more communication has to happen.'Д«iessman pointed out that when he started at Raven, the company numbered just 13 people. A lot of times now weвЂ™re a little more segmented.

'I built levels, I was in charge of the design team but I also had to light levels, I was scripting, and we were doing all the continuity of everything and we were helping Eric make sure that when the dialogue went it, that it all made sense give what we had to change around.' 'One of the things we talk about is back then, we wore a lot of hats,' Foster explained. When asked about the biggest differences between working on Jedi Outcast and their current work in game development, the team of veterans agreed that in the last 17 years, their roles in the game industry have become far more specialized, and their work on Jedi Outcast stretched far beyond their official titles. Here areВ a few select stories that writer Eric Biessman, game programmer gameplay programmer Mike Gummelt, lead designer Chris Foster and lead programmer James Monroe shared about the original game's design concepts that highlight how much game development has changed, and how the team shipped a cinematic Star Wars game with the tech they had at the time. To mark the game's rerelease, A handful of Jedi OutcastВ developers (who are still at Raven working on Call of Duty games) dropped by the GDC Twitch channel to share some classic stories from developing the original 2002 game.