Painkiller: Battle Out of Hell Wrap Report (Action)

Technology Painkiller Battle Out of Hell continued with the PAIN Engine developed for and during the creation of the base game. While the engine had a strong feature set at the outset of the development and was reasonably stable (it had recently been debugged for the launch of Painkiller), we knew some areas were weaker than they could be. For one, we had a new crop of hot video cards launching (the Radeon X800 and GeForce 6800 boards) with promising new features to support. Furthermore, the base Painkiller had evolved over the course of its development to encompass an increasingly larger focus on multiplayer. We wanted to continue to enhance and re-think portions of the tech in both these areas. Thus this is where most of the specialized engineering resources went during the cycle.

Because we were working with a short schedule and from a known game, the overall concept... and the final product stayed pretty close to form.

Because Painkiller is a very data-driven game, the engine is treated somewhat separately in each game release. Therefore, as we made changes to the core engine for updates and to support new content for Painkiller, these enhancements became part and parcel of Battle Out of Hell. Of course the line between engine and game gets blurry sometimes - and not every game can be made this way - but for Painkiller, it works pretty well.

Assisting in the development of both Painkiller and Battle Out of Hell was a solid layer of middleware hooked into the engine. The wonderful physics are due to the judicious use of the Havok system. The Miles Sound System and Bink tools / codec / library provided support for sound and movie playback. GameSpy was also used for multiplayer, supporting matchmaking, CD keys and the like. And for scripting, we use Lua.

Development Timeline Probably one of the greatest weaknesses of the Battle Out of Hell project was the short development timeline, which was because we opted to decide on precisely the launch order of the next products in the Painkiller line-up and we continued with some community support activities during development. All told however, we were only looking at six months of core development, with large blocks of time being taken up for updates, demos, even a change of offices at People Can Fly, and the like. In the end, we chewed up nearly two months just in other areas while we were working on the Battle Out of Hell game.

Despite the obvious shortage of time, we were working with known technology and tools, and almost all of the exact same development and production team members from the base Painkiller game. Communication internal to the People Can Fly team and between production and QA at DreamCatcher with them was solid from the start, and we roughed in a schedule quickly. To keep things in check, we managed the scope of the game and content changes very closely to our schedule making changes along the way as needed. We also compensated for lack of time with a crunch period at the end of the development cycle, ultimately finishing only one week off the mark for all languages, with several versions reaching store shelves before their planned date as time was recovered during manufacturing.

Changes and Enhancements Because we were working with a short schedule and from a known game, the overall concept of the Battle Out of Hell expansion and the final product stayed pretty close to form. There was no real time for a lot of feature changes or new upgrades. While it may not sound that exciting, in many ways, keeping close to the concept and planning is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you are working off a strong base to begin with and your gameplay doesn't need to evolve and find it's 'fun factor'. In fact, a few of the elements in Battle Out of Hell were previously discussed and dreamt up during the development of Painkiller.

Even though we did not make too many changes, there was some evolution in the multiplayer code that went beyond the original scope. Because of the continued interest in the game from a multiplayer standpoint, we had mapped out a plan of refining the code base and offering new content for players well into late summer. Along the way, particularly after looking at feedback from the various content drops, the interest level in seeing more from the multiplayer continued. With the ramp-up to the CPL winter event, the recently announced CPL World Tour, the push from the online community and the team's desires, Battle Out of Hell shipped with a host of multiplayer improvements and deeper code reworking. The end result from version 1.0 (Painkiller) to 1.5 (Battle Out of Hell) is quite solid in terms of not only content, but also in the smoothness of play.