Hello from a Hit & Run designer

Hi! I'm Thunder Gives Me Glee. It's awesome to hear you've found the community now. Thank you for helping in the development of my favorite childhood video game ever. I've been playing this game since release. And each time is a fun time.

awesome to see a former staff member of the development team recognise a community like us, who still play their game after 12 years. welcome aboard.

i do have one question though, if you don't mind me asking: was the rich side + power plant actually intended to be a part of level 7 at first? why was it cut? this is definitely one mystery us players have been wondering about for a long time, and to finally have it answered would be fantastic :)

Thanks for taking the time Noviwan to respond to the Alien "Auto"topsy bit! It's kind of interesting knowing that the whole team collaborated on that, and it's history certainly sounds interesting! Out of curiosity, I assume Level 7 was re-worked in order for these type of missions to work better? As two other users have pointed out, very early screenshots seem to show that Level 7 was fully accessible at one point, and the music trigger for Stone Cutter Hall can still be reached in Level 7 through some glitching or map swapping (complete with an entirely new classical music track that's otherwise never heard in-game). I feel as if the decision to block off Level 7 stemmed from this new mission concept, but were there perhaps other reasons for the Level being trimmed down (perhaps to make it more unique to the other two Evergreen Terrace maps)?

Are there any missions in particular that you remember designing? You have me a bit curious on what missions you helped designed and I'd love to just hear the names of ones you helped develop. How was the mission "work load" divided during development? I feel like it's rather different from how we currently handle things, and I'd love to hear if you could give any insight on how this went.

Thank you once again!

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.

Hi, Noviwan! I wanted to say; Thanks for helping in the creation of Hit and run! I was wondering, because you mentioned how the graphics changed near the end of Road Rage's development; Is this what you're referring to? This is an alpha build for RR found on an Xbox dev kit.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ftGR_rTIdw

@Noviwan
Repeating my Question: "Will you try User mods like "Some Challenge mod", "Chase sedan Paradise", etc?"

@frogz2007

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

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

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