The Callisto Protocol Takes Inspiration: At last year’s Geoff Fest, Glenn Schofield and I discussed the gore system, spiky walls, and batteries of The Callisto Protocol. What I had seen and heard left me eager to learn more about the sci-fi horror game that is not Dead Space but is rather like Dead Space.
So, I got to attend a 20-minute demonstration of some new Callisto deliciousness at this year’s Geoffscom and then spoke with Striking Distance Studios’ chief technical officer Mark James about what I’d seen. Naturally, we discussed amputation, 3D printing, and Shaun of the Dead.
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The Callisto Protocol Takes Inspiration
The Biophages, the game’s fancy name for horrific zombies, have a new mutation that causes them to spontaneously release a swarm of writhing tentacles from any region of their body. If you don’t “shoot the tentacles,” as was inscribed in blood over a standard dead guy who was slumped against a wall, every bad guy you fight has the potential to mutate into a deadlier version of themselves.
It’s terrifying to see a normal, shambling guy suddenly transform into a sick coral reef if you’re not fast enough with the trigger. And it’s a cool way to add some suspense to any zombie you think you’ve got under control.
According to James, one of their primary engineers in Spain came up with the idea for mutations by asking, “Well, why can’t I simply reverse dismemberment?” Viruses need a “mechanic that makes sense to the virus” to function properly.
It’s clear to me from James’s unexpected burst of excitement that this concept has the potential to grow into a fully-fledged system somewhere during the game’s development “After that, it’s really awesome! Now that we’ve successfully dismembered the body, we can use the various attachments to generate new meshes from the various parts. It was brilliant.”
To add to the overall “reverse dismemberment” concept, enemies don’t always modify unrelated parts of their bodies. “So, in the presentation, I blast off a guy’s limb or head, and he quickly regrows it. The enemy’s regeneration depends on the extent to which you’ve changed their anatomy via dismemberment “James elaborates. If you haven’t severed an extremity, your mutation will be “standard,” but otherwise, “the mutations are as diverse as the amputation.”
James informs me that director Glenn Schofield is receptive to suggestions from everywhere in the company when I question whether other crucial parts of the game have also resulted from “lightbulb moments.” “We used JIRA to keep track of ideas for tasks related to creating scary situations.
We keep it going to this day, with input from all departments; “the man explains. If their proposal is accepted by Glenn and deemed “that’s pretty fantastic,” it will be included in the game. Interspersed throughout the talk I watched Jacob beat up a number of bad guys with his stun baton, evading blows less as you would in, say, a Souls game and more like a boxer, with his shoulders down and his head, arched just out of reach.
In place of the conventional roll and sprint, you get something more similar to a brilliantly animated bar fight, complete with a certain degree of messiness to the melee. James tells me they put a lot of time and effort into something called “motion matching,” which he describes as “sort of like a velocity-based movement system.”
James explains that the team was inspired by Die Hard’s John McClane in the spirit of “he doesn’t know why he’s there, but like, he’s just trying to escape and get out” while designing the game’s chaotic gameplay. I mean, it’s not hard to imagine Jacob squelching about the space station in a bio page bile slick.
The crew aimed to create a space station where the slinking along dark halls and the pouring of slime were both realistic. James calls it “the type of sci-fi where the steps are evident and the increments are little – a near future step.” He emphasizes that the game’s eerie atmosphere isn’t based on any fantastic elements, but rather has a semblance of plausibility, as if something similar would occur in the year 3000.
James says they “looked at a lot of space station concepts from NASA and stuff like that” when designing the environments we’ll be exploring in the game. Before continuing to dump information, he labels it as “generative design” and tells how one of their first was “How might we 3D print a building?”
James explains, “So if you really look at our design, our struts have these types of geometrical support systems that actually are 3D printed.” “So, we considered sending 3D printers, which can produce items extremely tiny in size, to the moon. Our environment artist approached the task of creating these corridors and other spatial features in modular design parts as if putting together a genuine spacecraft, as they wished to accomplish with the manufactured 3D items they used.”
Naturally, by the time Jacob is done with them, many of the game’s hallways are covered in blood. And I’m confident there’s plenty of black humor sprinkled throughout the game we’ve seen over the months, like the absurd death sequences in which Jacob is cut in two by giant rotor blades or the way a gigantic mulcher pours blood after you’ve hurled a bio page into its mouth. I was wondering whether the developers intentionally included these humorous touches in the game.
I’ll tell you about a chat I had with Glenn a while back,” James continues. He responds, “I sort of wanting certain things to be extremely amusing and whimsical,” and I respond, “We were talking about Shaun of the Dead, which is a really bizarre picture to argue about this.” Even falling down a sewage pipe was seen as “tongue in cheek” and a way to lighten the mood and relieve pressure on Jacob. “We yearned for more opportunities for levity. For the simple reason that I believe people would give up if they are constantly put in a state of dread.”
I applaud the use of humor in the face of terror. In my view, if a horror game tries too hard to be frightening, it ends up being tiresome. Mind you, it doesn’t have to be slapstick humor; the odd occurrence will do! It also seems that The Callisto Protocol uses mild, somewhat unsettling respite amongst all the blood and violence. As much as I’ve liked reading about and seeing gameplay for The Callisto Protocol, I can’t wait to get my own hands on it. Please hand over the controls and take me to outer space.
Final Words
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