En före detta Dead Rising 5-utvecklare berättar om det nedlagda projektet

Under vårt besök på DevGAMM i Portugal nyligen, så träffade vår spanske chefredaktör David Caballero flera framstående personer inom en rad områden - med fokus på spel. En av den är svenske veteranen Marie Mejerwall, som varit i branschen i över två decennier i flera tunga roller, inte minst som game director och lead game designer.

Hon var tidigare inblandad i Dead Rising 5, vilket tyvärr aldrig släpptes, men vi passade på att fråga henne om det, och om det fanns något särskilt hon gillade med projektet. Hon säger att det utvecklades med Unreal Engine 5 och fortsätter:

"What I loved about Dead Rising 5, as it was cancelled, I was on the NPC team, so I made all the boss fights. And I loved the variation, the tiers of the enemies. So we both had the typical kind of zombies that are not very intelligent, that will grab you. But then we also have a little bit more advanced, semi-more advanced enemies."

Dead Rising-serien har enorma mängder odöda fiender överallt, och Mejerwall förklarar upplägget med minibossar som vi tyvärr aldrig fick uppleva:

"So the ones for Batman, for example, would be a typical thug. We had the equivalent also in Dead Rising, what we would call that. And then we had the armored version of that. And then what Dead Rising does really well, that I really love, is they have the mini-bosses. And it becomes a kind of tenant unit.

It's not as common to have it that pronounced in games as we do in Dead Rising. And they were a ton of fun to do, and the way that we designed them was that you should be able to drop them almost anywhere. So they shouldn't be dependent on what kind of terrain or map that you were having, because they could move around."

De större bossarna skulle dock ha egna arenor såklart, och hon fortsätter med att avslöja lite om hur de skulle ha fungerat:

"Whereas the biggest bosses that I also worked on, they already had their very unique arenas. And it could be stuff like one boss fight that I designed was in a temple environment, where over the course of the fight, the temple breaks down more and more.

And it gets more and more intense. And the boss gets more and more angry doing more and more stuff. So we really had a wide range of different enemy types. And richer variation. It was really fun to work on that game, and I'm really sad that it never got to see the light of day."

Du kan kolla in hela intervjun med Marie Mejerwall härunder, hon hade flera intressanta anekdoter att dela med sig av.