Under vores nylige besøg på DevGAMM i Portugal mødte vores spanske chefredaktør David Caballero en række markante profiler fra forskellige områder, med særligt fokus på gaming. En af dem var den svenske veteran Marie Mejerwall, som har været i branchen i over to årtier i flere vigtige roller - ikke mindst som game director og lead game designer.
Hun har tidligere været involveret i Dead Rising 5, som desværre aldrig blev udgivet, men vi benyttede lejligheden til at spørge hende om projektet, og om der var noget specifikt, hun særligt holdt af ved det. Hun fortæller, at hun husker, at det blev udviklet i Unreal Engine 5, og fortsætter:
"What I loved about Dead Rising 5, as it was canceled, I was on the NPC team, so I made all the boss fights. And I loved the variation, the tiers of the enemies. So we both had the typical kind of zombies that are not very intelligent, that will grab you. But then we also have a little bit more advanced, semi-more advanced enemies."
Dead Rising-serien er kendt for at have enorme mængder af udøde fjender overalt, og Mejerwall forklarer her opsætningen med mini-bosser, som vi desværre aldrig fik lov at opleve:
"So the ones for Batman, for example, would be a typical thug. We had the equivalent also in Dead Rising, what we would call that. And then we had the armored version of that. And then what Dead Rising does really well, that I really love, is they have the mini-bosses. And it becomes a kind of tenant unit.
It's not as common to have it that pronounced in games as we do in Dead Rising. And they were a ton of fun to do, and the way that we designed them was that you should be able to drop them almost anywhere. So they shouldn't be dependent on what kind of terrain or map that you were having, because they could move around."
De større bosser ville naturligvis have deres egne arenaer, og hun fortsætter med at løfte sløret for, hvordan de var tænkt til at fungere:
"Whereas the biggest bosses that I also worked on, they already had their very unique arenas. And it could be stuff like one boss fight that I designed was in a temple environment, where over the course of the fight, the temple breaks down more and more.
And it gets more and more intense. And the boss gets more and more angry doing more and more stuff. So we really had a wide range of different enemy types. And richer variation. It was really fun to work on that game, and I'm really sad that it never got to see the light of day."
Du kan se hele interviewet med Marie Mejerwall nedenfor - hun havde flere interessante anekdoter at dele.