Introduction

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Developed by: Surreal
Published by: Psygnosis
Release Date: June, 1999

Update: Aug 13, 1999 While we’re all eagerly waiting for the August 20 Street Date for the highly anticipated “Drakan Order of the Flame”, Psygnosis is inviting everyone to participate in a new contest, “The Drakan Search and Win!”. It’s easy. All you have to do is to collect seven previously unseen Drakan images.

The seven images will be spread across 14 various online gaming media, retailer and technology partner web-sites. The first 100 people to download and email Psygnosis the title captions on the new images will receive a collection of cool products. Five randomly-selected winners will win limited edition, autographed lithographs by Hugh Jamieson, the concept artist for DRAKAN. The grand prize winner will receive a DRAKAN game autographed by the development team at Surreal Software and an autographed Hugh Jamieson lithograph.

For more information on how to enter, “DRAKAN Search and Win” and to obtain the list of the 14 websites, go to www.drakan-game.com/search

Here is one of the seven new images – Drakan Search and Win Image #4. Go get the rest!!!

We recently put the development team at Surreal under the third degree about their upcoming game Drakan. Stuart Denman and Alan Patmore, the lead programmer and lead designer of Drakan, were kind enough to answer a few questions about this fantastic looking third person game. Drakan features hand to hand combat, dragon riding, adventure, and more! At the end of this article, feast your eyes on some exclusive screenshots they sent us.

Majestic Flight

[FiringSquad] What are some of the main challenges you faced during development? Graphics? AI?

[Alan Patmore - Lead Designer] The biggest challenge was the ground combat system. Design, programming and animation spent months tweaking and tuning the AI and animations to create a combat system that captured the feel of real melee combat while still being fun and intuitive.
[Stuart Denman - Lead Programmer] On the engine side, the biggest challenge was to come up with a graphics engine that could handle both detailed close-range environments when Rynn is on the ground, and also be able to render vast landscapes from high above the ground. We also wanted features like being able to go into caves, and the ability to create overhangs, archways, and other cool landscape formations that you can't do with traditional engines.

A more tropical locale

[FS] What kind of graphics engine are you using? Will you be implementing any of the new texture technologies like Bump Mapping or S3TC?

[SD] Our engine and tools are completely custom. We've written the Riot Engine (the engine Drakan is running) over 4 years to be incredibly flexible and object-oriented. Object-oriented technology allows us to build effects and other AI in the game by creating generic, independent modules (entities) that can be connected together to create more complex behaviors. This means the designers are able to come up with new AI and special effects that the programmers never intended! The graphics renderer portion is built to handle both compact indoor environments and huge, expansive outdoor environments, all seamlessly in the same engine. In terms of texturing, the engine have all 16-bit and 24-bit textures, and supports multi-texturing effects like detail textures, shadow maps, and environment-mapped bump-mapping (the Matrox G400 is the first card to do this in hardware).