#pseudo interactive

Posting these here because AFAIK they’ve long since disappeared off the internet anywhere else. These are the handful of screenshots I still have of Inertia (later - and only briefly - known as Full Auto), the original game that Pseudo Interactive was working on for Microsoft before this was cancelled and the contract to create Cel Damage as a launch title for the original XBox was signed (PI was the first 3rd party developer to be signed to create an XBox launch title). Which... also got cancelled by Microsoft, and then picked up and put out by EA instead.

Anyway, this was the title PI was working on when I was hired back in 1997 (when the entire company was four guys working out of David’s mom’s house). It was using a then pretty damn revolutionary real-time physics engine coded by David Wu (who’d worked briefly at Origin Systems in Texas before returning to Toronto to open his own game studio, along with two engineer and one musician friend of his). The vague idea behind the game was that the player was driving around on (and sometimes in) an alien planet at some nebulous future time, and the planet was infested with vehicular and robotic opponents. Also, your car had guns you could customize (yeah the guys were heavily inspired by Car Wars, I still remember their excitement at getting to meet and talk to Steve Jackson at GDC one year).

The game had a lot of problems, such as not being sure if it was more of a race game, or car combat, or a first person shooter (except for you being a car instead of a being), or something entirely different and unique. At one point David had to essentially rewrite the vast majority of the code, because so many things had been changed and/or added on (there was a tendency for him to create a simple feature such as animated textures so the world wouldn’t be as static, only to come in the next day and find out we had used animated textures to make a conveyor belt and a river and oh, hey, David - can you make it so this sliding texture has a physics effect on vehicles? Great, perfect, thanks!).

It suffered from a lack of direction, basically. It was also the most fun thing I have ever worked on in my life (yes including working on Cel Damage afterwards, plus some additional game demos after that). I still regret we never got to finish and publish it. I still miss working with the game editor and engine we used for it.

Some favourite memories:

See the screenshot of the blue car and the walker robot? It’s cut off at the top of the screenshot but there’s a sort of scorpion tail/reverse ostrich head bit on top of the robot that is an articulated arm with a gun on the end. That’s one of my levels - I can still remember what a HUGE GRIN I had on my face while play-testing that level. I’d encountered the walker robot, slammed into its legs with my car, and even while it was tumbling through the air from the impact the robot’s AI was driving the arm to try to continue facing me and shooting me.

Working on a different level, there’s a bit where you encounter what’s essentially a large bulldozer with a scoop on the front. I programmed the AI (using a very simple AI wizard, basically) that when it detected a player it would try to get close to them. If it was close to them it would raise its scoop and try to ram into them. If it was rammed into them (forget if that was also distance based or a sensor on the front), it would slam its scoop up and down. Play-tested the level, I’m driving through a darkened underground area, suddenly a big dozer slams into the side of my car, jamming my vehicle against a wall, and then pounds its scoop up and down on me. I loved how we could create such seemingly intelligent hunting behaviour using very simple AI rules.

Probably should've played this for our alternate channel, but that was before it existed.

We have multiple gaming channels btw, so if our playlists include one of the following channel names:

1. Game Nite (this content is for everyone, the general viewers)

OR

Фидбек по “Guacamelee!”

В апреля 2013 года (а на ПК – в августе) канадская Drinkbox Studios (Chris Harvey, Ryan MacLean и Graham Smith из Pseudo Interactive) выпустила платформер с сильным акцентом на мексиканскую стилистику. Честные предупреждения о риске вызова приступа эпилепсии (вкупе с рекомендациями коллег по цеху и сильно противоречивыми отзывами) не оставили моим коллегам ни малейшего шанса пройти мимо этого…