inFAMOUS – Trophies and Stunts

Hi all, I’m Chris Heidorn, Software Engineer at Sucker Punch Productions. With inFAMOUS shipping in less than a month, you guys are probably starting to wonder about what types of trophies and stunts (yes, there will be stunts) will be in the game. Well, I’m here today to give you a brief inFAMOUS trophy and stunt lowdown.

So, we know you all love stunts and so do we at Sucker Punch. The testing team here had the super fun job of coming up with some cool ways Cole could take down and kill enemies by doing a combination or sequence of events. To do this, the team relied upon their experiences playing the game everyday and noting where there were enemy setups and likely systemic behavior in the story missions and mini-missions that allowed them to pull off these cool stunts.

They created a list of 40 or more such combos, as we called them. We also enlisted the Sony test team for their list. Between the two teams we had a candidate list that totaled more than 80 stunts. To choose the best stunts for inFAMOUS, I created what I called an experience monitor. The experience monitor basically “listened” for raw attack events, such as an electromagnetic blast attack, and would record these events in a ring buffer. As enemies got damaged, the details of their damage would be associated with the raw attack event. In the end, we ended up with over 20 pretty cool stunts that we can’t wait for you guys to experience.

One of my favorite stunts is the environment kill. This involves making clever use of the environment to take down or kill enemies. If there’s a propane tank or a vehicle near some enemies, shoot at them until they blow up. If the blast takes down the enemy, you score this stunt. What’s fun about this is luring the enemies near the exploding device and using it to your advantage. What fun! You would think the enemies would catch on to this, but they just keep coming back for more! One of the harder stunts to pull off is the melee finisher. With this one, you must take down or kill at least 3 enemies in a row with Cole’s melee attack. You must do this quickly, since you only have ½ second between each kill in order for it to count.

So, for trophies, we have a number of different categories which are:

• Game, story and mini-mission completion
• Collect all dead drops and shards
• Traversal
• Stunts
• Power-Based
• Karmic decisions

The “Get Off My Cloud” trophy is probably one of the easiest trophies to unlock. The idea here is to use one of Cole’s powers to knock an enemy off a high location, such as a rooftop, and deal him damage that kills him when he hits the ground. Perform 100 of these and you unlock the trophy. Another fun trophy is the “Red Baron.” Blast enemies into the air and kill or take them down while they’re in-air. Do 100 of these and you’ve unlocked this trophy.

Anyway, we’ll leave the rest for you to uncover on your journey with Cole through Empire City. Enjoy and stay tuned for more inFAMOUS news!