Hi Gordon,

Not sure I have time to review them all, but are there are some in particular you'd like feedback on?

Very interesting behind-the-scene stories there everyone! Every game developer in the world has gone through that cycle of "Ok I'll make this a little bit hard (for me)" and then find out it's like a hundred times too hard for regular players. Including us on the original missions.

And wow, full custom character editing, wow, that is truly awesome! Looking forward to that. A new level I can hardly imagine - at this point it's pretty much a new game. "Hit & Run 2" anyone? ;-)

I will definitely try your mods ... once I can find one of the copies of the game I know I still owm. Doh!

Tools were most internally developed at Radical, the "pure 3d" game engine. I remember also using Maya as a 3d editor,

@frogz2007

Yep that pre-alpha build was vefore the changes, had the "toon shading."

The trimming of L7 was for scope reasons, to make the workload more manageable for the artists.

I scripted and designed all of the missions, though programmers of course were heavily involved in prototyping and game up with some core gameplay ideas and functions (e.g. "knock things out of the car").

What I do remember was spending a lot of time tweaking and tuning the missions in the later levels - as the difficulty curve rises, there is little margin for error. My friend Richard Mul was also a great help there; before this he was on the Black Box (EA Downtown) team that produced a great Need for Speed revival on the PS2. His experience was invaluable in the final difficulty tuning tweaks. Sadly, he passed away not long after the game shipped.

Pretty sure that is a bug. Either we missed it, or caught it too late to fix.

>>To add to Jake's question, was there ever meant to be a Level 8 and Level 9 at some point in development?

No, I think that was just leftover directories from a programmer setup, they probably didn't know how many levels when they made the setup.

>>Also if i can ask, why was Level 7's richside blocked off?

Also: time. I don't remember exactly when we had the idea of L7 Halloween-themed level, but I remember it was super challenging to get in at all. The only reason it made it was because the team loved the idea so much, it was a real labor of love. Some of the details still b*** m* away. Did you ever notice the smoke coming off spinning-car-tires is different in this level? It peters out into little ghosts! And on grass little bones are churned up. All the halloween cars and everything that was all from the team especially the art team (the ones who had to do the work!) but the couldn't stop themselves.