Interviews// Rebellion's Eric Miller

Eric Miller: And how do you judge when you’ve released your invisible dart at the right time? Was your power okay? These are not things that cannot be overcome, obviously, but ultimately we sat there and thought about whether we had the time to implement it right. You don’t want to do it if you can’t do it right, after all.

The unfortunate reality was that we didn’t have the time to have Kinect support. But I wouldn’t say that it means it’s never going to happen. Much like the PS3 and the Wii, darts on Kinect would be a great experience, and made for it specially. I don’t see why we wouldn’t do it in the future, but I can’t tell you if we are! [Laughs]


SPOnG: I’m just curious as to how you specifically approached designing the controls for controllers. In contrast, it must be quite easy to decide how you should treat the PS Move and Wii Remote in terms of throwing a dart, right?

Eric Miller: Well, we had to look at it from the point of view of how pro players actually throw a dart. Ideally, we tried to replicate that in the best way possible - now on a pad, that’s a obviously bit difficult to do as you’ve not got something in your hand that you’re throwing.

We tried to break it down, in a sense, of the specific motions that you do when you throw a dart. So you move to grab the dart and hold a button to lock to your target. Now that’s a feature that kind of kind of comes over from the motion controllers, but we felt it made sense to do that here as well, rather than just pushing a button.

Then we had to think about where the power comes from in the throw. Is it the push forward? Yeah, but do you hold a dart like this [holds imaginary dart at aiming angle], then do this [motions a push from held position]? No, it’s more about pulling the arm back and then pushing forward.

So it’s a combination of judging how far you pull your arm back, and how fast you can push it forward. Push slowly and there’s no power, push it too quickly and you overpower the dart. It’s probably more a question for a professional dart player than it is for me, but the way we analysed it was about the muscle memory.

What we did on the pad then, is how far you pull the stick back, to a little degree combined with how fast you push it forward, will determine the power of your shot. How off you are on the horizontal movement determines your horizontal accuracy as well. So a lot of psychological thought went into the idea of a very simple motion [laughs].

The irony is that some people will sit there and think ‘Oh yeah, it’s kinda like Tiger Woods isn’t it?’ [Laughs] It actually took three months for us to find the right values for throwing, the amount of dead zone you need - because when you look at the physical travel map on a thumbstick, there’s only so much there that you can move around, right? And if you want to do half-power, that’s really tricky to get right.

See… I think the problem with thumbstick games is that a lot of players end up thinking they’ve done well, when the controller is actually saying that they really haven’t. People will believe their own head over whatever we choose to tell them, or in this case what the thumbstick is actually registering.

And so it was a balance of trying to cope with the perception of players versus what the actual numbers were, coming back from the controller. A lot of the time you might start a game off by going ‘well, I’ll put the power at 50% and that equals the power of 50%,’ but it doesn’t work like that [laughs]. There are many other variables at stake!


SPOnG: Last time we spoke you were working on Aliens vs Predator at Rebellion - obviously there’s been a bit of turmoil at the company as of late. Do you know what the status of the company is right now?

Eric Miller: [Laughs] Well… [long pause] I guess I should clarify that I’m still an employee of Rebellion - Redoubt is our casual label. With regards to what’s been going on, I don’t think I’m in a position to tell you, sorry. But… speaking on a personal level, I was the assistant producer on AvP, in charge of multiplayer.

I can absolutely say that we recognise the community feedback that has been received since the game’s launch. There have been several statements from Rebellion in our public forums acknowledging those comments - in fact, I was the one that posted those, acting as the company spokesperson on that matter.

There have also been several statements from Sega as well, but beyond that I’m not at liberty to say anything more.