Developer websites are often little more than advertising placements for their current titles, but one or two take the time to engage with their fans and actually say something interesting about what they're working on. A very good example is Bizarre Creations, currently running a weekly diary on the development of Xbox 360 driving title Project Gotham 3. Last week's instalment featured a stunning screen of a New York tenement building, chosen to refute claims that an image posted on the previous week's diary was a one-off render. Bizarre are getting used to this kind of response though - a screenshot of some tarmac shown in the first diary entry managed somehow to cause controversy - was it in-game tarmac or specially rendered tarmac? Was it a road surface of truth or dispicable hardware aggrandising hype?
Whatever you think, it's worth coming for the highly detailed descriptions of gameplay and graphics elements, such as:
"When you zoom right up to the back of your car, you can actually see gases being vented from the engine! You notice heat haze at the back of your car's exhausts! It ripples the air around it, and gives the impression of heat blasting over the back bumper of your super car. It's simply awesome."
This level of detail, both in the screenshots and in the descriptions, really doesn't susprise me, and I'm inclined to believe both. I visited Bizarre Creations several times while they were developing Metropolis Street Racer - the Dreamcast forerunner of the Project Gotham series. I saw the thousands of photographs and hours of video footage taken by the artists of the game's locations: San Francisco, Tokyo and London. I also saw Managing Director Martin Chudley hunched over a development machine for hours, intricately tweaking miniscule elements of the handling engine.
There is a subtle often abused line between pride and hype. It is always good to see a developer getting it just about right.
