It's been crammed down our throats for years now. Current-generation games development is expensive. So expensive that it stops the little guy from getting the resources together to compete against the big guy.
But is it really? One small start-up based in Canberra, Australia, would beg to differ.
Prophecy Games are currently at work developing Under Pressure, a third-person action game for the Xbox 360 and PS3. It's being built on the Unreal Engine 3, it's got a unique pitch in terms of gameplay mechanics, and it's…currently being developed by eight people.
Under Pressure is a new VR exclusive take on PowerWash Simulator, with a more tongue-in-cheek take on the popular pressure washer gameplay.
Anthony Perez of Gamer 2.0 writes:
"Since life as we know it is impossible without its existence, water is said to be the bringer of life. In the game you've probably never heard of until this moment, Under Pressure is a game about water. Lots of water. Unfortunately, this brand of water brings life to the dead. And while zombie games aren't new, Under Pressure developer Prophecy Games is.
With a ragtag group of former designers primarily from Irrational Games (now known to most gamers as 2K Boston of BioShock fame), Prophecy Games is attempting to create a commercially successful third and first-person shooter for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 despite having less than $500,000 as of just a few weeks ago. And these days, most games cost tens of millions to develop."
I just read this and it sounds absolutely awesome. Just the story of a scrappy little company with a lot of volunteer work putting together a game for the 360 and PS3. It's nuts.
From the article:
Prophecy are promising that the game world - consisting mostly of a sunken ship that’s a mile long - will be almost totally destructible. And that destruction will be persistent.
Example: early in the game, you set off a grenade on a staircase. It’ll warp and shred the handrails on the stairs, and three hours later, if you return to that staircase, those rails will still be warped. Another, more ambitious example is in the game’s use of water: being set underwater, if you blow out a window, a section of the ship will flood. You can check this out in a rough, early tech demo below:"