Blast Factor: Advanced Research Coming Soon!

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all the comments!

sectionz:
It’s an expansion to the original Blast Factor; you’ll have to purchase the core game to get BF: AR. Honestly, if you haven’t had much practice playing the original, you’re going to get your ass handed to you in BF: AR. I haven’t got any specifics about pricing, Sony marketing takes care of that, but I’m figuring it’ll be in-line with other large expansions, i.e. cheap.

Rothgar/MrCamo:
We’ve reworked the tipping detection code completely; it’s real similar to the original but without the false triggers, much improved. I hear you about the tipping changes for the MP expansion, what happened was that we found older controllers got worn and slightly loose, causing false triggers. We increased the filtering to fix this but this decreased the sensitivity. For BF: AR, we took a SIXAXIS and threw it around the office until it rattled. We had to throw it around a _lot_, those things are tough! Using that for testing we’ve now got some very clever adaptive filtering to deal with stick noise, which means better sensitivity and less false triggers.

SadSkepticalFan:
I hear you about all the missed dates and promises for demos. The thing is that there’s an _army_ of people involved in getting these PSN games and demos out to you guys, even with small developers like us. I can only speak from our experience (we’ve done this 3 times now, 4 if you count localization for Europe), but when a game is getting close to completion (i.e. 1-2 months) Sony QA starting testing. These guys work really hard (around 2000 hours for BF: AR) and they will find _everything_! When they reckon it’s ready, they do a full week of intensive (regression) testing making sure any old bugs haven’t been re-opened. If all is good, then the game goes to a different division, format QA, who perform another independent week long series of tests. If any problems are found, then the game has to go back to the start of this 2 week process, that’s what causes some of these delays. Everyone at Sony knows (and works weekends to make this happen) that you guys want the games, but sometime unexpected problems appear, and they don’t want to you to pay good money for buggy software.

jigglywiggly:
The bosses alternate between specimens, spawning different (harder!) enemies, changing tactics and moving faster. The specimen 7 boss is hard! Randall, who was playing the game in the video above, would say the specimen 6 boss is pretty hard too!

Also, the ‘expansion available’ is a notification from the server that got turned on a little early along with the server code to handle the monthly high scores.

gardea:
Long story, there’s some more info about this in the BF: AR over at IGN (http://ps3.ign.com/articles/807/807900p1.html). There’s a website (http://www.us.playstation.com/beyond/welcome.html) for applications, you’ll want a nice looking demo on the PC, and a design doc. Schedules, budgets, and previous industry will help a lot too.

milhavoc:
Nah, not really, we started on BF: AR several months before we knew about SSHD. The games are pretty different, even if they use a similar control mechanism. We wish the guys from Finland every success!

Hope this helps answer some of your questions.

Cheers,
Andy