Penny Arcade Expo and a new website

Hopefully everyone noticed that the countdown on the site (with the 3D images) was counting down to today... and came back to find that there was a killer brand new site in full effect. Explore, enjoy, return - this is the new hub for Dark Sector WWW.DARKSECTOR.COM

Also, in other big news, Dark Sector will be playable by the public for the first time ever at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle this weekend. If you are attending, please stop by, check it out and let us know what you think. It's just a small bite, but it should definitely whet your appetite for the full course meal (not sure why the food analogy, but it works). Dark Sector is going to be in D3's booth at the show, not sure of the booth number, but you will find it.

And just in case anybody missed the 3D screens that were up on the site (they will be added to the new site soon) you can find 3 of them here

IGN also posted a short preview of our showing at Games Convention in Leipzig... you can find that here

So... that happened...

OK, first off, sorry for teasing big changes to the Dark Sector site that didn't actually end up happening. We had some DNS problems that just got resolved, so things are back on track.

If you go now to WWW.DARKSECTOR.COM you can see the new and cool stuff.

Sorry, our bad.

Keep your eyes on...

WWW.DARKSECTOR.COM tomorrow and you might just see the start of something really cool...

I'm just sayin...

Final Box Art

Just a quick post. We recently let the final box art loose upon the internets and have been getting some great feedback. Thought we would go ahead and post it up here as well:


Thats all for today. And don't forget about the Forza 2 car contest in the post below. Let's see some great entries.

We need a car for Forza 2!

As we said in the last post, August is shaping up to be a big month for Dark Sector, so we thought we do something fun to kick it all off.

We have been really digging on Forza Motorsport 2 and keep seeing all these awesome custom cars floating around in the game and on the internets - and we thought to ourselves "Hey, we need a shiny, new Dark Sector ride". Unfortunately we neither have the time nor immense skill to make something that would compare to what we have seen out there.

So, we are reaching out to you - Dark Sector fans, Forza 2 junkies and the gaming community at large - to make us a killer Dark Sector ride. And to reward you, we will be giving out some limited edition XBOX 360 faceplates (like the one over there to the left). Here's how it works:
1. Make a sweet Dark Sector car in Forza Motorsport 2
2. Take a picture of it and post your best image to the Flickr group here.
3. At the end of the month, we will select the 10 best entries and the winners will get a faceplate
4. Hopefully you will gift us (or sell to us cheaply) the car so we can use it in the game

To help with inspiration, we posted some Dark Sector logos and images to that same Flickr account, so you have some reference.

So that's it... the blog contest to kick off August. Any questions or comments just post em below.

E3, a New Look and More

So, I know it has been a while since our last post, but give us a break... making a game is hard work. In all seriousness though, Dark Sector is coming along amazingly and we are just about ready to really give everyone a deeper look into the game itself. To celebrate we put a spiffy new image at the top of the blog (hence the "new look").

We just finished E3 (very different than previous years and pretty much everyone is still trying to figure out what to think of the show itself... will be interesting to see how it evolves next year...) and we got a ton of great coverage and feedback on Dark Sector, a bunch of which you will find posted or linked to below


IGN video interview with Producer extraordinaire Josh Austin


GameSpot Live E3 stage demo with our very own Sheldon Carter


Gametrailers E3 interview with the all-appearing Sheldon

There are a bunch of other videos on those (and other) sites, so please go take a look (would have embedded them all here, but didn't want to bog everything down).

August is shaping up to be a big month for Dark Sector - we are definitely in the home stretch and feeling good. Keep your eyes on this space and around the web because there are definitely lots of cool things coming soon.

Vegetable Abuse

Working in a talent-based industry is an experience in and of its own – this becomes even more apparent when you line an empty room with plastic sheets and pulverize a variety of fresh produce to capture the sounds of breaking bones, splattering blood, and tearing flesh. And all this happens on a Tuesday afternoon. Along with insightful commentary provided by sound designers Dustin and George, Digital Extremes is proud to present the results of a Foley session that left the 17th floor of an office complex smelling like cabbage…

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For the longest time I had wanted this recording session to become a reality. I would keep watching the 'making of' videos for various games and movies and thinking that I really wanted to do something like that. Plus, we'd have a library of gore sounds to draw from whenever we needed them. Pretty much a win/win.

The whole process from concept to creation probably took less than a week, and things moved along quickly. After finding a suitable location for the recording, it was just a matter of getting the gear set up and letting loose. We had put some thought into how we were actually going to set up the session, but it turned out that a single microphone is all we really needed. We chose the C1000S as our source recording microphone as it's good at picking up what's directly in front of it, and it blocks out a lot of the background noise. Plus it already had a semi-decent splatter guard in place with its wind filter, and our selection of mics was limited. My biggest fear was that we were going to capture more of the hammer impact than the actual 'splatter', but it actually worked out pretty well.

As you can see from the video, our 'mobile recording rig' is an Mbox 2 recording interface running on PC with Pro Tools LE. It got the job done.

We hit up a local market down the street from the office to pick out the days victims, and it was a lot of fun to browse through different fruits and vegetables, wondering what type of sound they'd make with a full velocity hammer ripping through them. I wish he had the video camera with us at the time, merely to capture the look on the market guy's face at the completely random assortment of items we were buying.

Over the years I've entertained many questions concerning my profession; mainly, “how do you make sounds?” It is a mystery to many people how this whole sound design process works, and I think one of the major misconceptions with the game side of sound is that we use mostly prerecorded CD libraries. It’s true that libraries do come in handy, and I'm definitely not saying they're useless. They're a great time saver, and you can create some truly unique sounds from recordings you wouldn't be able to easily obtain on your own (ie. recording a lion). They also help to beef up some of your own recordings. With this video though, I wanted to show that a lot of time is also spent 'out in the field', gathering and collecting our own selection of sounds. Many of the same processes for creating those big budget Hollywood film sound effects hold true for game sound design.

After reading over some of the comments posted online about this video, the ones that stuck out the most were the ones that expressed an interest in becoming a sound designer. If in any shape or form we've managed to inspire the next generation of great sound designers, then mission accomplished.

Dustin Crenna
Sound Design

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A lot of the fun in sound design is recording your own unique sounds to work with. That was probably one of my greatest motivators to get into sound design, as it allows you the most control from concept to integration. The ability to work with technology to capture fruit and vegetable sounds can be very entertaining as well.

Quite often in professional circles there is much discussion about technique and tools. The important thing to remember is that the recording equipment you use is really only 20% of the battle. WHAT you record is probably the single most important determining factor in a successful sound design project. That, along with the ability to ‘think outside the box’ will allow you to come up with new ways to use sounds that you normally wouldn’t think of using.

It is an interesting exercise to just close your eyes and actually pay attention to the sounds around you. We take hearing for granted because it does its job in the background, without our noticing it. Quite often our eyes will tell us that we can’t use a particular object to create a sound when in actual fact it will work really well. The trick is to be more aware of our hearing rather than sight.

This session was particularly fun to do because it not only allowed us to get some really cool bone crunching, neck snapping, and blood splatter for Dark Sector but also enabled us to make different sound combinations from everyday items.

Enjoy!

George Spanos
Sound Design

Gameplay Footage, Near Death Experiences, and Happy New Year

So things keep moving right along with Dark Sector going into this New Year. It has been a busy couple of months since my last post, and we are all stolked about the progress we are making and the coverage that the game has been getting.

Steve and I were in San Francisco at the beginning of December to demonstrate the game to some of the online press. In spite of a good number of drinks, we managed not to pull a “Jaffe” and kept it together through the whole event. Steve did a few on-camera interviews that are linked below.

The surprising thing about the event was the gameplay video that came out of it. Essentially, our good friends in Marketing wanted some “b-roll” footage of the game that they could use as a back drop for Steve’s interviews. It was a bit of a last-minute request, so we cut together some stuff from the actual demo. As it turned out, the video was released by itself and I think that, combined with the teaser trailer, you can get a pretty good feel for both the gameplay and atmosphere of Dark Sector.

On the flip side, the flight back from San Fran was crazy – Essentially, aside from ‘the pillow incident’, we mirrored the plot of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Our plane couldn’t land in our hometown of London (Canada, not UK), as a freak snow storm shut down the airport, so we were forced to land in Detroit. Unfortunately, Detroit was having wind gusts that, at the time, I was sure meant that a 30-seat prop plane was going to be my coffin. Once on the ground, we were told that we could be waiting in the airport for about 24 hours. So, we crashed at the Detroit airport hotel, then grabbed a car to take us across the border, and then hoped on a train back home. One and a half days, for what is usually 6 hours. Traveling sucks.

But, getting back to the game…. Another thing that came up recently was the decision for us to not do a PC version of Dark Sector at this time. Basically, this came from respect of our PC audience and the large number of PC gamers we actually have in the office. We have to focus our efforts on the console versions, and that would have meant that the PC version would be a port. Being the “victims” of a few games that took this approach ourselves, it just didn’t sit well.

It’s great to hear all the comments people have on the game. I know there is a plan to get a forum up and running on the site in the coming months – as soon as I have more details on that, I’ll definitely post it up. Speaking of more posts, we have made a resolution to post here a little more frequently.

Happy New Year from everyone here at Digital Extremes.

Sheldon

... the city by the bay

Just got done with a really successful press trip in San Francisco last week and the response to the game has been great.

Some links below to various articles (and some sweet footage to boot)



GameTrailers (check this out for a version of the footage above in HD goodness)

Gamespot (also includes a nice video interview with our very own Steve Sinclair)

1up

IGN ("... a crossing between Jack Bauer and Wolverine." - is that like our chocolate and peanut butter?)

More posts to come! And if you are reading this for the first time, or the 10th, be sure to click on the little icons to the right and subscribe. In the immortal words of Mr. Sparkle - "Join me or die. Can you do any less?"

New Trailer

The teaser trailer is out in the wild. Better quality versions available here and on XBOX Live Marketplace.

Some of the things you know about Dark Sector are likely right

Hi, I’m Sheldon Carter, the Producer of Dark Sector. I managed to bog down our Project Lead, Steve Sinclair, with enough work that I was able to screw him out of the honour of the first post on this Blog.

So, let’s get down to it: Everything you know about Dark Sector is probably wrong.

I liked that tag line just because of all of the mystery surrounding this project for the past months, but after the Game Informer article it’s not as true anymore. For us, it was pretty cool to finally be able to reveal so many of the secrets about the game, the setting, and to actually show the graphics and gameplay to the press. Even better was that it was really well received and it turned out to be a great article.

The build we showed Game Informer was not only cool because we landed the cover, but we also had a chance to focus test the gameplay with a few peeps in Chicago. Aside from re-learning that everyone except me seems to be playing Madden football (our focus test was during its release week), watching new players with the game gave us some solid insight on things to improve and to make sure there are visual answers to questions like:

- What did the trooper, who I just tore to ribbons with the glaive, have for lunch?

Yep – some guys want to see that stuff. Seriously, there was some great feedback that we have looked at and adjusted in terms of targeting, movement, and melee attack.

The story for the game is really starting to kick ass as well. I like Master Chief, and I like the testosterone pumped look of (Gears of War’s) Marcus Fenix, but I prefer a story arc and personality for the main character that is a little deeper. It’s pretty clear that character development is how television is consistently whopping Hollywood these days, and in a 15-hour game we have the same opportunity. Hayden Tenno is going through so many physical and personal changes through this story that I think we will be able to engage players’ minds as well as their adrenal glands.

The word from our marketing folk is that this Blog is for people not just interested in the game, but who also want the inside track on the type of stuff that happens in a game studio… I guess the only thing I can say is that we are starting a ‘stache off in the office this week. Basically, many of the guys (I suppose girls could get involved if they were so inclined) are going to grow moustaches. I’m not talking about anything fancy like a goatee (which is my signature facial hair) or a soul patch, or even cool handle bars. Just a straight up ‘stache ala Burt Reynolds. Everyone involved is putting up 5 bucks and he who lasts the longest without shaving it off, wins the pot. I’d post up some pictures once they all start to grow in, but for some of the guys on our team, this could take months! Either way - it should make the PR people squirm if they need pictures for press.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll try get some other members of the team posting – hopefully, with more interesting posts than me.

Sheldon Carter
Producer