Interviews// Jacob Minkoff - Lead Designer - Damnation

SPOnG: You've said that Damnation will sacrifice graphics over speed of game-play (a personal favourite equation of SPOnG's). Is this still the case? And why do you think that this sacrifice of one over the other will be necessary for much longer?

Jacob Minkoff: Well, first of all, I want to clarify one thing – we’re not sacrificing graphics as a whole. The biggest thing we’re doing is skewing towards responsiveness of control over fluidity of animation. Our worlds and characters are still lush with detail as only the Unreal Engine 3 can achieve, but our characters are capable of accomplishing their acrobatics with much more immediacy than would be possible in real-life. When you look at a game like Assassin’s Creed or the new Prince of Persia, they are clearly focused on fluid, realistic character movement.

In their case, they are sacrificing responsive, split-second control for a feeling of weight and realistic climbing animation. As a result, their characters can take as much as a second or two to respond to the player’s input. This is totally fine for the type of game they are making, but when you introduce fast-paced multi-player action and ranged shooter combat into the mix, responsiveness takes more and more precedence over realism.

For instance, when you’re sprinting really fast in real life, and you suddenly decide to switch direction 180 degrees, inertia is still going to carry you in the direction you were going for a few feet. It might take as much as two seconds to turn around, cancel your momentum and start getting up to speed again in the opposite direction. It could be a good three or four seconds until you’re running in the opposite direction as fast as you were before the direction-change.

We could easily have animated Damnation in this fashion, and it would have looked beautiful and fluid, but it would have been extremely unresponsive. The player input to the analog stick on the controller may take barely 1/10th of a second, but it would take 20 times that amount for them to see the character respond.

All games which involve controlling a human character encounter this issue at some point: do you give the player immediate responsiveness to their input or do you have a character that feels realistic and weighty?

In Damnation, we struck a balance between the two, but it is a balance that is heavily skewed towards responsive control. Our goal was to make a fast-paced shooter that feels like Quake III with acrobatic platforming instead of jump-pads.

Fast-paced gameplay - especially the competitive multi-player shooter gameplay that Damnation supports - requires responsive control that allows your player character to turn on a dime. Player input needs to be instantly translated into on-screen action. In my opinion, we nailed it.

Damnation is, without question, the fastest-paced acrobatic platformer I have ever seen. From our innovative camera to our Ballistic Prediction system (that automatically tweaks the player’s jump towards climbable objects rather than requiring pixel-perfect precision), everything about Damnation’s character animation and control is about creating an extremely fast-paced, responsive experience.

As for your question about the future, I can’t imagine a time when this will no longer be an issue, as long as players are still controlling virtual world simulations via a mechanism that allows them to input commands faster than the finest Olympic athlete could perform them in real-life. As long as you can flick an analog stick from left to right faster than any human in earth’s gravity could turn 180-degrees, there will always be a question of realism versus responsiveness.