Interviews// Godfather Blackhand Producer: Joel Wade

SPOnG: You get to beat down plenty of people in this game to maintain your gangland authority, but what other types of missions can you engage yourself in?

Joel Wade: Since the original version we’ve added a truly massive amount of new content including three full new story missions, and ten new hit missions. Enhancing the Sollozzo/heroin story from the movie, we’ve also added four new neighbourhood drug fronts that must be infiltrated and firebombed, a new favor system that lets you perform mini-favor missions for Don Corleone and other family members, and even finding dirt and blackmailing the Police Chiefs in each of the five territories.

Of course if you ever need cash there is always a nearby bank to heist or racket truck to hijack as well, or you might even spot a common mugger that can be “liberated” of his funds.

SPOnG: What were the main challenges in creating an immersive game for the Wii platform, using its unique controller?

Joel Wade: Designing for the Wii controllers was incredibly fun for our design team - moving to gestures for combat was instantly more immersive and gratifying by its very nature. The biggest challenge for us when designing gestures was choosing just the right amount of move variety available to the player at any one time so that when you move one of the controllers it would feel both responsive and accurate.

We had so much fun with the controller possibilities that we mo-capped a bunch of exclusive moves to fit some of the gestures we’d developed, like the open-handed smack and pistol whip. At the end of the day, we really wanted players to feel like the Wii controller was designed with the Godfather in mind!

SPOnG: Will the game world include more environments and larger areas to do business in?

Joel Wade: There are several big new areas in the game. Destroying the enemy family compounds by assaulting and blowing them up have always been some of the largest battles in the game, and big fan favourites. We’ve completely redone all four of the rival compounds to make them even larger and more challenging with alternate entrances and vast new layouts including a giant mansion on a hill for the most fearsome of them all- the Barzini Compound. In addition we’ve added two new giant “transportation hubs” (a massive shipyard and a rail yard) as well as a penthouse hit that requires you to battle over the rooftops to force a rival mobster to swan-dive from the 20th floor.

SPOnG: Could you explain a little about the research you had to undertake for the motion capture, in order to make the Wii remote functionality as best as it could be?

Joel Wade: The easiest approach for a developer of an existing game would be to figure out which gestures would work for the existing “button” actions, and swap the inputs. We knew that for the game to be successful we had to get the combat feeling just right, so decided to turn this approach “on its head” as it were. We actually went around asking people to show us how they would throw a punch, or swing a bat. When we felt we had a good sample, we actually re-mocapped most of our moves… …we wanted to make it feel as close as possible to seeing “yourself” throw jabs and charged attacks. We eventually even added a bunch of new moves that suddenly made more sense for the controller… for example the overhead smash with a baseball bat, and the garrotte neck snap… just to name a few.