ASR Developer Diary #3

Sonic City Blognik has updated with the 3rd Sonic & SEGA All Stars Racing Developer Diary. Steve Lycett of Sumo Digital returns again to talk more about the game’s concepts that derived from his trip to SEGA Japan’s offices. This time Steve reveals that the All Star Move’s came from a suggestion from the guys over at Sonic Team when Steve was asked “Where are the SuperStar moves?” Steve explains that they hadn’t thought about that as they originally planend for it to be a normal racer but after the discussion the idea get’s included the game.

‘Where all the SuperStar moves’ we get asked. Well, at this point I refer to my earlier diary, at that time the game was a pure racer. There were no weapons or special moves, it was all about lines and drifting. ‘We loved those in SST, you should have them in this’. Every so often on games, you have a ‘Eureka!’ moment, and this was one of them. We reply that we’d not considered it, but it wasn’t out of the question…

And thus were born the All-Star moves. Back then we went ‘Well, we could use this to get players back into the race, so they can take revenge on anyone who’s knocked them about on the track’ and now, well they’re something very special. Each character has their own All-Star move, they’re all things that our slightly insane design team figured would be impossible to do in a racing game!

Steve and his team also did plenty of rounds around SEGA’s various game development studio’s to discuss including various character’s and tracks to which each one gave them the ok.

The day goes on, we go visit AM1, who let us play House of the Dead EX, a game we’ve only seen announced a week before! You’ve likely seen we’ve got Zobio and Zobiko from this game, as they’re in the Halloween trailer.

We’re not done there either. Next we’re off to see AM2. Once word gets round who we are, we’re extremely privileged to be asked what we think of Tokyo R-Tuned, which at that stage wasn’t even totally finished. We’re led into a maze of wires, with cabinets that are plugged into all manner of development kits, and get to be, I suspect, the first westerners to play the game. It’s amazing by the way. Not only did we leave with the things we wanted, we were also offered levels from R-Tuned if we’d like them…!

Next we’re off to AM+, Yu Suzuki’s SEGA division. Sadly Yu was out of the office, but here again we’re invited to play SEGA Race TV for our thoughts. It too is excellent We leave with the promise we can have Ryo Hazuki – thus making a lot of Shenmue fans happy we hope.

Check out the full diary entry over at the Sonic City Blognik.