Title: FPI: Jarek Kolář - Vietcong, Pterodon, BadFly Interactive ...
Date: 23 February 2020
Author: Michael Petr
Source: https://visiongame.cz/fpi-jarek-kolar-i-badfly-interactive/
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And that was the first Vietcong?
Well, it was the first Vietcong, but it wasn’t supposed to be Vietcong at all, because once in LA at the E3 conference, we were having dinner with TakeTwo, and one guy started talking about how he could get a license for Rambo and would we want to do it?
At the time, I did not know who Rambo was. I just knew that the carousels sold T-shirts with a guy who had an RPG over his shoulder. But otherwise, I did not see the movies. So I got the Rambo three-part collection of VHS tapes and we started working on the design.
Originally it was a book, then a movie and the first part is about a Vietnam veteran coming back to America and having some problems adapting back to society.
Well, we thought, “Hey, what if we make it about how Rambo learns to be Rambo?” So we started doing the Vietnam War, where Rambo becomes Rambo, but after about half a year of development, maybe less, ... we found out that TakeTwo was not going to get the license for Rambo.
Our designer, Zdeněk Mezihorak pointed out: “Making a Rambo game with no Rambo is quite stupid.” So we consolidated the design a bit and focused on authentic rendering of the special forces units that were active precisely on that Central Highland.
So we made a unit of soldiers who were given names, functions ... an interesting fact, those names appear in Rambo. In the movie, when Rambo first returns to America, he looks for the members of his unit and talks about them, and our soldiers have those names. So every member of Rambo’s unit appears in our Vietcong game, except for Rambo upon which our Vietcong game was based ... but no one noticed that.
We set out to do authentic Vietnam. Zdeněk did a huge survey and a lot of research. The Internet was in its infancy. At that time, Google did not exist, so he had to gather materials. He bought a lot of books from Amazon and for about half a year he studied it and got superb information.
We watched lots of different Vietnam movies, both documentary and Hollywood. We read the books written by Vietnam veterans; I also read those books.
We had contacts with people who do simulations. They wear uniforms, walk around the woods with airsoft guns, and play soldiers. We had contacts with people who are weapons experts. They told us exactly how to shoot. We also got a person who is Czech and has Green Beret and Ranger training. He told us exactly how the units work, how they move, and how it should be done correctly. So all the design decisions that we made in that game were trying to get within the framework of creating authenticity in that game. Which I think was one of the main features of the game and the players appreciated it.
We thought Vietcong was new, original and believable, unlike previous games which were based more on Doom and Quake where you ran at some unregulated speed and shot with a lot of weapons.
That development was quite demanding: we had to make a new engine. We did have the Flying Heroes engine, but its capabilities did not match up with what we needed for Vietcong; it couldn’t be used one-on-one. So we had to rebuild the engine.
It was necessary to create the jungle, so we sent two graphics artists to Vietnam to take pictures there. Back then, as I say, there was no Google, so it was impossible to just find a lot of material. Today, there would probably not even be a need to go there in person.
But thanks to going there, they shot a lot of material and video documentation. Their Vietnamese guide had experienced the war himself. They talked about his war experience; he showed them tunnels and other things that we know from the movies—but they then documented it in real life. So then the graphic designers had a lot of material and we put it together to make it an interesting game.
It was quite a success, even if some missions were not completely balanced. It was not 100% quality, but considering it was our first big game like this, I think it went well.
You had a lot of things in-game there. Like a map in your inventory that you had to physically pull out. The radio operator reported the next mission to you. The path to the goal was shown by Nhut, the scout ... Do you feel sorry that other games do not use these innovative gameplay devices of yours? That other games were not more inspired by you?
We tried to do all the elements in the form of animation. I think that is a completely valid style that is good for those games. The fact that some games don’t use it doesn’t bother me at all. They are probably different games, or they have different needs and I’d like to make games in which they will be, and I’m glad that thanks to that, my games are unique.
In Vietcong, we tried to make everything absolutely immersive, so that the player really felt like he was in that situation. We had a minimal HUD that could be turned off completely in both single and multi-player. (Note: (HUD=Heads Up Display, showed aiming sight, remaining health, remaining bullets)
One of the great challenges for the Vietcong was: How to make the story interesting? Traditionally, film media has its own language of how it tells stories. There are cuts, cameras, and actors talking in the shots, but this is not quite what I think games need. It is much better if the game tells the story through what happens it it, through what the player himself experiences and does. The story must adapt to the game mechanics and its structure.
Vietcong had a walkie-talkie—the radio operator wears a walkie-talkie. So we were able to take advantage of the fact that the player/commander of the unit always goes to the radio operator, he tells me that the base is calling. So I take the receiver from him, and the receiver then tells me what’s going on. Instead of a cut-scene, the headset tells me everything, and at the exact moment when I need the player to know. Plus I have the unit there so every character can help tell the story and create the atmosphere. In the end, it worked out that way for us and I think the experience was quite interesting.
That is the way for games to tell stories. If you want to watch animated sequences, you should watch Netflix which is higher quality and you do not have to hold the remote — just sit or lie down. When you are playing a game, you could better spend that time playing, so I think that is the way to tell stories in games.
You made two DLCs (DownLoadable Content) for Vietcong. One was kind of a prequel and the other was from the other side...
Yes. There were two data disks, but only one was official. The second one was Red Dawn. It was a free data disk/update where there were a few missions in cooperative mode. We did it partly with the community, and partly with our designers and game artists.
That first data disk was called Fist Alpha. It went very well. We already had the technology, we already knew how to do it. So I was able to plan it relatively easily. Everything was set up and the production was going, I would say—flawlessly. Those DLCs are generally such, I would say, a production delicacy. Because everything is ready, all the challenges and difficulties of development are behind us and we can focus only on the content. That was exactly the case with this DLC.
We finished the original Vietcong sometime in March, then six months of work on Fist Alpha was planned, and then we began preparatory work for the sequel.
So we began development of Vietcong 2 at the end of 2003, the and it started in full in January 2004.
So you did not have much time, because the Vietcong 2 game came out in 2005?
The original plan of our publisher TakeTwo was that we would make Vietcong 2 very quickly and start churning out a new volume every year. So it was already thought that there would be Vietcong 3, Vietcong 4 and so on. From the commercial perspective, we had such a plan.
Unfortunately, we decided on a lot of technological and design changes, which required a lot of time. In our original plan, we had allocated 12 months for development ... then in those same 12 months, we added re-writing the render code, the physics engine, the AI, and the multiplayer engine.
We also moved to a completely new style of gameplay. Because the original Vietcong was in the jungle with the unit, and because we saw a Call of Duty game that had nice shooting and was very atmospheric, we thought we’d do it for the Vietcong as well. So we put Vietcong 2 in Hue city. The Siege of Hue during the Tet Offensive in 1968, was amazingly iconic.
Vietcong 2 was supposed to have two campaigns: one for the Americans and one for the Vietnamese. These campaigns were to connect and meet each other in different ways. In addition, the whole thing was supposed to be monitored by the figure of a journalist who was supposed to film the whole thing; this would create the sequences that he filmed. It was all very ambitious. Unfortunately due to the many technological modifications, the game itself and its development came quite late, so some of the design decisions were not fully implemented.
For example, the rendering pipeline ... it came so late that we did not even find out that the graphics, the way we did them on the computers that we had at that time, would not work on most of the computers that the public had. Vietcong 2 ran on the best computers, but not so well on most of the average ones. Vietcong 2 came out in 2005; I think players were able to play it maybe two years later but of course, no one knows about the game later.
You said that you started with the idea that you would put out one new Vietcong game every year. Why did the publisher suddenly lose interest in it?
During the development of Vietcong 2, there was one significant change at the publisher. A new label, 2K Games, was created internally in 2004. That meant huge changes in the internal workings of the whole company, the whole administration, and the producers who looked after the teams that made the games, so it moved from England to New York, and a lot of people there was a new ...
The people we worked with on Vietcong One and Fist Alpha were no longer with that company. They went elsewhere. We suddenly lost the people at the publisher who supported Vietcong.
For 2K, Vietcong 2 was simply an unfinished game, so we finished it, they published it, and there was no more interest in creating something together. Considering how intensively we worked on that game, with a lot of overtime... it was a huge strain on the whole team, but thanks to internal changes in the company, over which we had no control, ... [no one at 2K really knew how it was affecting us]. As the owners of Pterodon, we were frustrated with that just as the Internet and digital distribution came along, which was a complete turnaround in how it worked. So right before that, we decided to dissolve the company.
My original understanding was that Pterodon went to Illusion Softworks. But you disbanded and only some people moved?
Well, we disbanded by sending everyone to Illusion Softworks. We stayed working on the games, but it was not our business anymore. There were several reasons for this. One was this frustration and the second reason was that although we still had a third project with Illusion, at that time they already had two or three rather ambitious projects underway and did not want to start another one.
The new XBox 360 and PS3 consoles were knocking on the door, where graphic performance multiplied. The emphasis on graphics and content meant it was necessary to have much larger teams; it was no longer possible to make a game with such a small team as we had at Pterodon.
Even Illusion Softworks was not large enough to start another game. Pterodon’s only chance was to get involved in the projects that Illusion had split up.
We (Pterodon) tried to negotiate with other investors, but there was not much time for that because we found out at the last minute and we did not want to risk bankruptcy or running out of money because we had the responsibility of paying salaries to 40 people. And so we became part of Illusion Softworks.
And that is when you started working with the Moscow Rhapsody team?
Well, that is not quite true. Most of the Pterodon people started working on the Moscow Rhapsody team, and a few went to Mafia II. Michal Janáček and I were assigned to support the team in Zlín, working on the game Enemy in Sight. I moved to Zlín for almost a year and we worked there. Sadly, the path forward for Enemy in Sight’s game development was already set, and it’s completion would have been very complicated considering that even the internal teams in Brno were not doing the best, in the end, the development was consolidated and I closed the Zlín branch, and some of those people and I moved back to Brno to support Mafia II and Moscow Rhapsody.
About Enemy in Sight ... it is in our archive as a cancelled game, but you are the first person to tell us that you did something on it. Could you tell us a little bit about the game?
Enemy in Sight was Illusion’s answer to Bohemia Interactive’s Operation Flashpoint. This means huge terrain, soldiers, vehicles, mission editor, ... simply the diversity that Flashpoint has, or maybe modern ARMA. So Illusion also tried to create this. I think development began in 2000 and ended in 2006. It was a very ambitious project, but technologically it was really difficult. And at that time (2006), Illusion did not have enough programmers and graphic artists to work on so many projects. So the least viable projects — ceased to exist.
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