Hi. This is Sean Kennedy, Associate Producer on Red Faction: Guerrilla and today I’m going to share with you the origin of the sledgehammer our hero Alec Mason always carries with him. From the beginning of the project we knew players needed a weapon that allowed them to get up close and personal with our destruction system. A weapon that never ran out of ammo and most importantly, a weapon that would free players should they ever become trapped by falling debris.
Becoming trapped by debris resulting in the player not being able to advance in the game is what we call a soft crash. Soft crashes are something every developer has to avoid because it will cause the game to be rejected by the hardware manufacturers for release. As you can imagine in a game where everything can be destroyed the number of possible soft crashes is endless, so we needed something to prevent these.
Early in development we gave the player a laser, but this really didn’t work out. The destruction wasn’t meaningful enough and being a weapon of that type it felt less personal. Being a laser, players could destroy structures from a distance, never having the tactile feel of being up close to an object and breaking it apart piece by piece by hand. From there the laser evolved into a sonic shotgun. This was better than a laser, but again didn’t give the feel, look, and reaction we wanted. While the player could be closer to the destruction and see visibly more impressive destruction, it still lacked the personal feel we were looking for. Also it ended up being dubbed the ‘leaf blower’ since you were essentially just blowing pieces of debris around and overall it looked rather goofy.
After toying around with weapons of this type we decided a melee weapon was the way to go. With a melee weapon the player feels as though they truly have the power over destruction since it gives you a more tactile experience. Once we decided to go with a melee weapon our work was not done however, since we had to decide what shape that weapon should take. Logically we first thought of a pickaxe since it is often a tool people associate with a miner. For those who remember, the pickaxe was also part of our iconic logo for the original Red Faction. However this idea was killed on the drawing board when we realized the pickaxe would not do what we hoped it would for us. A pickaxe has a fine tip and a smaller impact radius and doesn’t have the power we were looking for. With the pickaxe dead, we brainstormed what other tools a miner would use and that’s when we found the answer we were looking for: a sledgehammer.
The sledgehammer answered all of our questions. The sledgehammer is highly destructive, and gives the player a true feeling of power over the environment. Once a gamer picks up a controller and takes the sledgehammer to their first building and experiences the destructive power they have in their hands, it’s an amazing feeling. From this point on the sledgehammer became the official melee weapon of the game always to be carried by the player and has become our new iconic image for the Red Faction series.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this look into the creative process behind our selection of the sledgehammer and look forward to picking it up yourself and tearing down Mars piece by piece when the game ships this June.
- Sean Kennedy, Associate Producer
