Interview by: Brandon Cackowski-Schnell

We took a few bumps here and there, but overall we are pleased with both the sales and critical reception that The Conduit received. Before development of the first game we saw that there was a gap in the Wii’s library, many people around the office enjoy playing first person shooters, and the Wii’s controls were perfect for the genre. We felt we achieved our goal to bring a fun and unique first person shooter to the Wii. We took all the feedback from the first game and analyzed it very carefully; especially in regards to the story, level design, and any issues people had with multiplayer.

We were able to look objectively at the first game and learned that our level creation in was not the right way to do it for the type of game we were making. For Conduit 2, we sat level designers next to level artists so it was a more collaborative process. We also were able to have the time to greybox levels early and playtest them to shake out any flaws and no-so-fun enemy encounters.

We also paid special attention to the story and hired an outside writer to come in and sit with the team to come up with a cohesive story. Our storytelling element is much stronger this time with more in-game elements instead of a CG head telling you something before each mission.

We also learned a lot on how to eek out as much as we could from the Wii using our Quantum 3 engine. A lot of work was done engine-side during the development of the first game and during our development of Tournament of Legends and Iron Man 2. Conduit 2 is the culmination on all the lessons learned by our talented artists. I’ve been personally impressed how improved the game’s overall look is when compared to the first one.

I’m going to defer this and the next question to one of the art leads on Conduit 2, Joe Hamell.

Joe: We really never thought about going with a more stylistic look for Conduit 2. We knew we were just scratching the surface of what could be done on with the Quantum 3 engine on the Wii and we were ready to take the art even further on C2. The Artist and ATG (Advanced Technology Group) had already worked on a ton of improvements at the end of Conduit 1; some of it came online too late for us to utilize it in the first title but helped us get a better idea of the Art direction we would take for C2. I think the relationship between the Artist and ATG; HVS tools and technology team that really made the look of Conduit 1 and 2. These two teams kept pushing each other throughout the two projects. The artist knew ATG would give them the best tech they could and ATG knew that the artists would push it as far as they could. Both teams believed in the other, and pushed each other throughout the entire development cycle and this allowed us to have great visuals without have to make concessions.

Joe: Let’s start with some the incredible tools that ATG provided for the Artists on Conduit 2. We had some great profiling tools that would let the artist see exactly how expensive each asset was in the game. It was invaluable to the Art team, we knew how much memory we had at all times and knew down to the shader pass how much something cost us in performance.

We had an improved lighting tool that allowed the artist to dynamically light a scene in real time on the Wii itself. These tools alone saved us months of development time and improve the look, environment size and frame rate of C2. We also had huge improvements to our cell and portaling system. This allowed us to do things with level design that we not possible in C1. Other optimizations allowed us to almost double the size of our normal maps, add a detail or noise shader pass to almost every surface, increase the number of advanced shader passes and increase the amount of detail in characters and environments. Even now, just finishing up C2 I feel like we ideas on how to make even more improvements, optimizations and enhance the visual quality even more for our next title.