User blog:LordTBT/News:Redwall: The Warrior Reborn gets a release window, & more



Yesterday, Soma chief Chris Skaggs popped over to the Redwallabbey.com forums for a Redwall: The Warrior Reborn question-and-answer session with fans, where quite a few revelations were made.

One of the biggest? We finally have an expected window in which to expect the game's release:

"You can look for the release of episode one of The Warrior Reborn within 12 months or less," Skaggs said.

Previously, Skaggs had indicated that the plan for the game calls for six of these chapters or episodes.

This first episode is to be called "The Scout."

"The Scout is single player and story based," said Skaggs. "It tells the tale of how a young mouse who is forced to flee to Redwall Abbey when the village of Lilygrove (which was seen in The Corsair's Last Treasure) is attacked by Sea Rats."

"The Scout is best understood as a stealth-adventure game," Skaggs added. "We do have to treat combat and violence as a special matter and one way to do that is to make it expensive. But this is also a practical consideration as we want to get the WORLD right before we dig right into combat so frankly we're putting off any serious combat mechanics until at least episode two."

In describing developmental obstacles thus far, Skaggs stated "...I've had a bear of a time building a sense of geography and ecology that meets the descriptions in the book and still makes sense in the real world where water flows downhill. We've had to make an elevation map of the entire region to just figure out what areas are higher elevation than others and it's been a really difficult (though arguably unnecessary) problem to solve. Still - if that's my one contribution to the Redwall universe I'll feel ok."

Some have questioned Brian Jacques' approval of the existence of the game, as he famously denounced video games, and we've touched on the Jacques family assisting in some other posts, however Skaggs addressed this criticism head-on: Jacques knew about it.

"Mr. Jacques was fully part of the original contract deal that started this project. Basically video game technology had evolved a great degree between the mid nineties and the double-oughts and he became comfortable that a game COULD finally capture the heart of his stories," said Skaggs. "As an odd twist of fate, our original partner on this deal was just a few days from flying to Liverpool to sign his deal when Mr. Jacques suddenly passed away. Needless to say, that DID throw a lot of dust in the air that had to settle out but the bottom line was that he was on-board before he passed and we've continued to work with the Jacques' family to make sure this game stays true to the spirit of Redwall."

Additionally, Skaggs talked about some of the tools and software they're using:

"For character modeling we've bene using 3D Coat a lot which we really like. And those get animated primarily in Maya. We're using a PBR pipeline for materials and textures (not sure I'm saying that right) which we think has a lot of untapped opportunity to be used in stylistic settings where it's typically held up for the high-realism stuff. SpeedTree is making...well...trees and we're using World Creator for terrain. We were very excited for Gaia as a terrain tool for a while but in the end we found we couldn't seem to quite get the control we needed for level design so we moved away from that," he said.

All-in-all, a great deal of information here. Skaggs also said a "significant announcement video" would also be forthcoming. We look forward to it!