Derek Carrol, Game Designer at FASA Studio, looks at Shadowrun’s development process, specifically the early prototyping phase.
Proving the gameplay on-screen in a borrowed engine (can you guess which one?) allowed us to go crazy with new ideas, many of which we ditched in favor of even better ones.
It’s a pretty interesting read, but the screenshots of the prototype build are by far the coolest aspect of this article. I guess you really could call Shadowrun a mod of Halo 1, at least the prototype build. (good call rapture!)
Tags: Derek Carrol, Halo, prototype
How can an in-house game dev team made of form Bungie employees (including HALO 1’s lead designer) go to FASA, make a shooter, and it NOT be influenced by HALO?
It’s neat to see that this game was at one time running inside the H1 engine. It will be cool to find more FASA-Bungie connections.
“If Counter-strike was a mod to Half-Life, Shadowrun is a mod to HALO 1.” ™ rapture 2006-2007.
Also, why would Microsoft _not_ reuse their game engine in some form or another? I look forward to seeing many more games pull from the Halo or Halo 2 engines
Good point.
It makes me wonder if we’ll see a “Shadowrun 2″ based on the Halo 3 engine. That would be cool.
I doubt it. At this point, they have their own engine in which they can prototype Shadowrun 2. I think they chose the Halo engine because many of the core group had worked in it before, and a lot of the basic gameplay elements already worked the way they wanted (grenades, momentum, fall damage, etc.).