Restricted Area Developer Diary part 6
Sia' Garrett' Manzari, 2004-01-21

Restricted Area is an isometric action RPG set in a 2083 on earth in a somewhat post-apocalyptic world. Jan Beuck from developer master creating is writing a deveoper diary for German site MGW and RPGDot brings you the english version of. This sixth entry was originally posted on january 14th 2004 at MGW. Thanks to Daniel for the cooperation!

After a long break I return with a diary entry! In the meantime, so many very important things happened, so I will have to stick to the most important only...

The German dubbing

After the script for the German version was done (approx 60 pages), we went to the Toneworx Studios. We chose Toneworx, because they are spezialized in games and have a lot of experience from more than 100 games, like Command & Conquer: Generals, the Harry Potter titles and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and also the guys at Gamigo recommended them to us. Jörg and Heiko, the founders of the Studio (and former managers of publisher GT Interactive (Mortal Combat, Unreal)) introduced us to our director Sven Stricker. Sven, who already directed the German dubbings for the Lord of the Rings movies, enjoyed his work and showed great intuition. Martin and me attended the whole recordings to explain the roles to the actors and, if necessary, give background information for the dialogues, which are not easy to learn in a non-linear game. It was very interesting to get to know the people from whom we only knew the voices from the casting before.

While the NPCs were dubbed by more or less well-known actors or commercial actors (e.g. Axe and Saturn), we wanted to outbest any other project regarding the main characters. We signed the best possible cast with the German voice actors of Arnold Schwarzenegger (for Johnson), Angelina Jolie (Victoria), Jennifer Love Hewitt (Jessica) und Jet Li (Kenji). Overall a great experience, but also very exhausting.

PS: By the way, the highly appraised Deus Ex 2 German voice recordings were also directed by Sven Stricker at Toneworx...imitators!

An important visitor

On december 1st we left our highly unrepresentative 2 room office in the old brick house at the Hamburg city park and moved directly to the center, on the corner of Spitalerroad/Kurze Mühren.

And the following monday only we had our first guest...Justin Stolzenberg from PC Games honored us with his presence, and we showed him the current build of the game on a beamer. He recorded a small portion of the presentation with a special device...you can find it on the preview section of the DVD & CD of PC Games 02/04. After his visit, two more followed: Editors Arnd und Kai from Germany's biggest gaming website Gamigo.de came over and changed their last summer's first impression from 'good' to 'very good'. There were even visitors from abroad coming: Editors from Austrian site GamingXP.com visited us...

The publisher problem

On october 13th it finally happened...we signed a publishing agreement for Restricted Area. 4AM Entertainment did the best offer and seemed to be an acceptable partner, even though they did not have the reputation like Take 2, Atari or Ubi Soft. A mistake, as it occured a little later only as already the first guarantee payment, that was due with the signing of the contract, never arrived; instead we only got more and more absurd excuses.

I don't want to go into detail too much, because that are interal affairs that should not be dealt with in the public in my opinion. So, with the beginning of the week, we are looking for a publisher again...only this time the interest in us is much bigger as we had hoped. Whether it is the many positive press reports or the fact, that almost finished games without a publisher are rarely to be found, I do not know, but I am positive, that we will have a new and better publishing partner and thus can make the scheduled release date in march 2004.

The current status

In the meantime, the game itself is getting more and more finished. There still is a lot to do, for example the final three levels have to be done completely, but the rest are only small things, like balancing and testing, testing, testing...

If all goes as planned, the first beta will arrive by the end of the month. Then we only have to do small things, improve balancing and test, test, test...

till next time,

Jan

Former diary entries: