How Splash Damage crafted Dirty Bomb into a modern online shooter for Western hardcore fans

Above: The Bushwacker has a handy auto turret he can plop down on the map.

Image Credit: Nexon

Alphonso: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why Nader is in this test version. Don’t get me wrong, I have her in my squad as well. But there are definitely a few. Generally the easiest thing to do is play support. Then you learn the maps and see what the better players are doing. Our degree of support, though, a lot of people aren’t used to it. They want to just go and kill people. So we have both.

People like the assault rifles, so we make sure we have characters who have that. There’s the guy with the minigun. If you can get into position, he can basically lay waste. It just depends on people’s play styles. We try to figure out which way to play that the best and cater to that.

GamesBeat: The graphics do look good, but did you cut any corners there to make it move so fast?

Alphonso: It’s really, really scalable. Competitive FPS players want framerate. You can dial it way back, because some people just aren’t happy unless they have something like 600 frames per second. I can’t tell the difference myself, but that’s definitely the case. Something we’d like to do is increase the banding even more. If you have a really good rig, you could do even more with the lighting to make it look better, but also have it perform well on the high settings.

GamesBeat: Some free-to-play shooters have done very well in Asia, like CrossFire. How do you get this kind of game to catch on more in the west, where Call of Duty is still the dominant game.

Alphonso: It’s an easy answer if our game does really well. But honestly, I’m not sure. I do think our game is a hybrid. It has a lot of the underlying structure from that kind of game, coming in part from working with Nexon and their expertise in the area, mixed with our western sensibilities and this different business model. I think we’re in a good spot, but ultimately the players will tell us. If there’s something working better or worse than something else, that’s what we’ll cater toward.

We know what we’re doing for the next couple of months. Beyond that, if people say otherwise, we have no problem with changing.

Above: Dirty Bomb’s modes include protecting a rolling vehicle.

Image Credit: Nexon

GamesBeat: Is there something obviously different about this, to you, compared to some of the earlier shooters like Combat Arms or CrossFire?

Alphonso: It’s very different. Our game is still very western in mentality. We play a lot of stuff like Hearthstone. You see the cards in there. That’s similar. I think we’re closer, really, to a western game than an Asian game. That’s where we’re coming from. We want to cater to that audience first and foremost.

GamesBeat: Does this require a huge development team, or a big post-launch team? Where was most of the team based?

Alphonso: In Bromley, South London. It’s a suburb. Hence setting the game in London. As far as team size, the team isn’t going to scale back. In fact we’re probably going to put more people on it. We want to be able to adjust to what the community wants. We have a huge day coming up, when it’s finally a permanent thing we need to support.

We’re taking it up and down. The team works in bursts. Right now, for instance, we don’t have a lot of environment artists on the project. The levels are pretty together. It’s mostly coders and designers, the people who can start making calls once it goes live. Then we’ll figure out what we need. If we want to make a lot of new maps, we’ll bring those artists back on.

GamesBeat: Was Nexon an easy choice for publishing?

Alphonso: I wasn’t involved with the choice, so I can only speak to how well I think it’s gone. But their expertise has been really good. Given that it’s Nexon America that we’re dealing with, they understand western games. It’s been a really good marriage.

Above: Dirty Bomb has a standard assault rifle gunner.

Image Credit: Nexon