Topic: The Making of Hogs of War
Anonymous A started this discussion 6 years ago #83,784
As gaming legend would have it, Toru Iwatani, whilst racking his brains one day for new videogame ideas, decided to order a pizza. He picked up the first slice, opened his mouth to take a bite, and was suddenly hit with a flash of inspiration – sitting on his desk, and still warm from the oven, was the face of Pac-Man. An icon had been born.Hogs Of War started life with a similar, albeit slightly more domestic, eureka moment. “Our managing director had just watched Babe,” explains Adrian Carless, Hogs Of War’s senior designer. “He came to work the next morning and said, ‘We have to do something with pigs.’ We’d already been batting around the idea of updating Worms and doing it in 3D. So, those two ideas were kind of married.”
This was back in 1998, at Gremlin’s original headquarters on Carlisle Street in Sheffield. The studio, formed in 1984 by Ian Stewart and Kevin Norburn, off the back of a computer shop they owned called Just Micro, had already scored a few hits on the PlayStation with Loaded, Motorhead and the Actua Sports series. Now comprising of around 60 staffers, working on multiple games across three floors of office space, Gremlin committed a sub-section of 15 developers to create Hogs Of War. Carless, a designer and producer who’d joined the company in 1992, was put in charge.
“I think it was just one guy who did all the rendering for all the cutscenes,” he explains. “Code-wise, there were maybe two people doing the programming and the editing. Everyone had to wear a lot of different hats, it being such a small team. If someone had a good idea, we’d try and get it in the game.
“When we started, there were some questions being asked internally. Some people weren’t fully convinced that Worms could work in 3D, with things like aiming in the distance and indirect fire. So we put together a bare-bones demo – no pigs or anything, just cubes on a mesh landscape – and prototyped the interface. The next thing was making a physics engine and ensuring we could get things right like humorous bouncing and lots of nice chain reactions, so you could blow up this pig and he’d fly over there and interact with this thing, and so on.”
On the PSone, however, not everything Gremlin imagined was actually possible, or practical. After initial concepting, Carless and the Hogs Of War team realised they’d have to compromise.
“We initially wanted to make the landscape deform and break apart, but limitations of the PlayStation meant we couldn’t do that,” he explains. “Then we went through a few iterations of the art style. We wanted players to really relate to their particular army, and to be sad when they lost one of their pigs. But the textures are reasonably low definition, so that proved problematic, trying to make the characters appealing, and funny and readable. The PlayStation looks like the Stone Age now compared to modern day stuff.”
Memory was always the problem on the original PlayStation – talk to any developer from back then, especially someone who worked on a high-end, 3D action game, and they’ll tell you that getting all the objects and animations on-screen, without the game crashing, was a nightmare. Hogs Of War was no different, though it did present one unique challenge.
A reliable method of circumventing the PlayStation’s small memory was to load and unload areas as the player passed through them. If you play the original Tomb Raider, you’ll notice that between every large platforming section or battleground, you pass through a narrow, winding cave. This is to keep you busy, inside an easy-to-render kind of playable waiting room, as the game unloads the section behind you and loads in the one in front. But Hogs Of War took place on massive, open plains. There were no small corridors to act as holding areas. Plus, enemies had to remain in-world and in view at all times – unlike other action games of the period, which saved memory by spawning bad guys off-screen, Hogs was constantly handling several character models, spread across an enormous map. Searching for a workaround, Carless and team plundered the Gremlin back catalogue.
“All the hogs themselves had to be resident in memory all the time, but all the voiceover stuff could be streamed off the disc on the fly,” Carless explains. “Gremlin had worked on Actua Soccer by this point, and that had a sprightly audio engine that enabled the game to constant streaming commentary. Hogs Of War partly re-using that tech. Animation, also, could be streamed. If you needed a death animation you could get it off the disc. If you needed a specific weapon animation, it’d be off the disc.
“Even the engine, like the way stuff would roll on hills, like grenades, some of that came from Actua Golf. The memory on the PSone was tiny, but that made you think in a different way. ‘We could repurpose this, we could change the palette of that.’ It made you think creatively.”
With the technical end running smoothly, Gremlin could concentrate on giving Hogs Of War its colour. Dozens of levels were created and tested, then either iterated or thrown out.
“We’d build a few levels and see how they worked in regards to physics, then come up with a few changes and set-pieces to see how they’d affect things,” explains Carless. “Even swapping the starting positions for each team could change a poor level into something that was suddenly fun – if you put one team on a hill and one team down below, you’d have something. We worked hard on a lot of these little ideas and because our level editor was so cool, you could implement them quickly.
“There’s so much chaos in videogame development these days. And the game has to come out on this specific date because the publisher’s spent X amount on marketing, and if the release slips, that money’s wasted. Back then, though, if we looked at a game and it needed a bit of extra polish, we could do it – we could tweak it and change direction a little. Those were the fun days of game development.”
But business would still intrude on pleasure. With only a few months left in Hog Of War’s 18-month development cycle, Gremlin was purchased by Infogrames, the French holding company which had recently bought both GT Interactive and Ocean Software. Looking to capitalise on its investments, Infogrames conducted an appraisal of all the games in development at its subsidiaries. Hogs Of War, with its idiosyncratic sense of humour and bleak, WWI aesthetic, faced the chopping block.
“We were coming into the home straight when the purchase happened and it was touch and go as to whether Hogs would actually get released,” says Carless. “Infogrames was buying up companies left, right and centre and went through every game they now owned, seeing if they were viable. We were proudly British I think, and quite happy working up in Sheffield like we were. Disappointed probably isn’t the right word but… no, we were, we were disappointed to get lumped into Infogrames. We always wanted to make the next global smash but we enjoyed doing what we did. The whole output of Gremlin was a bit British.”
Infogrames, though, seemed to think itself invincible. The company’s practises would come to head in 2009 when, after years of financial difficulties, it’d be bought out by Namco-Bandai, but for almost a decade Infogrames expanded outward, spending hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring studios like Hasbro, Shiny, Eden and Atari. It was a reckless business model, but it’s probably what saved Hogs Of War.
“The industry was in a big boom back then and people got a bit cocky,” says Carless. “They thought they could sell anything – they thought they could sell blank discs.”
Nevertheless, Hogs of War had the go-ahead, and Infogrames even helped add a finishing touch. “The last thing that we had to do, before the game was finished, was record the voiceover,” explains Carless. “We were always pushing to get someone famous to do it, and when Infogrames got involved, they became instrumental in helping us get Rik Mayall. “This was one of the first jobs that he’d done after he had that quad bike accident and I’m not sure he was convinced of himself. He was a dark guy. After a near-death experience, I think he wanted to show everyone – and himself – that he still had it. The game worked well for him, I think. He was interesting to work with.”
Hogs Of War launched in June 2000, picking up rave reviews in Britain and Europe. Carless remained at Gremlin, by then renamed Infogrames Sheffield House, until 2002, when he left to work at Elixir Studios in London.
“I needed a change,” he explains. “When a company gets to a certain size, there’s that one moment where you pass someone in a corridor and you don’t even know who they are. It was all a bit weird. It used to feel like a family.”
For years, rumours circulated about a possible sequel, first for the PS2 and then for Nintendo’s 3DS. The fate of Infogrames put a stop to speculation, but for a brief moment, back in 2000, Hogs Of War 2 was real. Carless, who now lives in San Francisco, doing contract work on educational games and Android apps, was the man who pitched it.
“It was only on paper, but I travelled to Lyon to give a presentation, and people were actually on board with it. It was going to be an historical thing. Spartans, Romans, Celts… all that stuff. We had a lot of ideas. I think it would have been fun. But the bottom line was Hogs Of War didn’t sell like it could have. I don’t think Infogrames promoted it very well – it was a bit like, ‘We’ve bought this company, we’ll publish their game and then we’ll get them to do something that we want them to do.’
“Still, if someone phoned me up tomorrow and said, ‘Would you like to move back to England to work on Hogs Of War 2?’ I’d have to give it serious thought.” “This… is my BOOMSTICK”