Gaming Blend: So essentially – one of the things I noticed is that you sometimes call Timesplitters Rewind Timesplitters 4. In a way it feels like this community project is a test-bed of sorts for Crytek to see if this goes over well and maybe gauge interest to do something larger?
Michael: Not really. What they're actually doing is they're giving us the opportunity to work on Timesplitters, and what I'm working on is saying, 'Okay, Crytek let us prove ourselves to you'. Like, let's do this as a multiplayer only title, which is Timesplitters Rewind in its current state. And then post release, of course, we'll release the other characters, the other maps and stuff like that... everything that's left out. We don't want to take eight years – like, I love Black Mesa Source – but like Black Mesa Source did to work on a project. We don't want to take eight years; we want to be able to get this into people's hands as quickly as possible, without sacrificing quality.
Ultimately, Timesplitters Rewind will be like the Timesplitters HD Collection and if Crytek gave us the torch, like, said 'Okay you've proved yourself worthy: here work on Timesplitters 4' then I would absolutely be thrilled to work on that ASAP.
[Phone rings]
Michael: That was my phone.
Gaming Blend: No problem.
Michael: [Chuckles] …but right now they're not really positioning themselves to say 'Here's Timesplitters 4' but what they are positioning themselves as 'Here's the torch for working on a Timesplitters game, but we'll see how well that goes out. If you do well... maybe we will work something out, in terms of Timesplitters HD Collection.' because that's my ultimate goal, working on the HD collection and then maybe go from there.
A lot of people have asked about outsourcing the single-player stuff and all of that. If we outsource the single-player stuff to the community, which would probably speed up the process, but we have a very strict system as to what goes into the game, in terms of quality. 'Does this stick?' 'No it doesn't.' 'Then let's do this again'. Quality is very important to us, we're actually kind of obsessed with it, where we don't really want to release anything unless we have something amazing that we can show you. That's why we try to keep things as simple as possible.
With Training Grounds, we show the textureless map, or the textureless version of it, and then we showed you [the map] with placeholder textures, because we need something to look at and play all day, and then eventually we'll show you Training Grounds with the textures we've been working on.
We're basically still looking for more texture artists. We've got people allocated in those areas of development. So we've been telling everybody, once you finish the summer tracker, which is gonna be finishing models that we're working on right now – in terms of characters and weapons – we're gonna focus entirely on Training Grounds. Because we kind of want to be able to say that we can meet that deadline of December and say 'Hello everybody, here's Training Grounds. Let's play together!' and kind of go from there. We're still a little skeptical as to whether or not we're going to be able to make that.
That's why I've got everybody allocated working on weapons, assets and stuff like that. And Sean is working on Training Grounds all by his lonesome. Jerome is working on Ice Station and I believe he's working on Temple... he's working on two maps. We're a very small team working on multiple resources, not able to pump out everything as quickly as possible, without sacrificing quality. If we were able to focus on this full time, then yeah absolutely. I tend to go on rants... I do apologize.
