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| First Look: Negative Space |
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| by Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik |
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| Posted on October 3, 2004 |
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Seriously! has managed to snag an exclusive first look at Negative Space, Khaeon's latest game, currently in early stages of development. Read on for more about Khaeon's current project...
In March 2002, a small group of Dutch game developers released some early screenshots of a game named Living Sword. The team became known as Khaeon Games, and Living Sword was recently released as Alpha Black Zero: Intrepid Protocol. Khaeon showed how an amazing and dedicated team could turn a relatively ancient game engine into a game with an engine rivaling that of much larger game studios, and could pack in hour upon hour of content to boot. Unfortunately, the game's release was marred by several mistakes, including a delay of almost one year between the game being completed and its release by publisher Playlogic.
Borrowing a line from Chumbawumba, Khaeon pressed forward with a brand new project, Negative Space, yet again taking old technology and doing some amazing things with it. Negative Space is an isometric 3D shooter that puts you in command of a small squad of infantry. Think along the lines of the squad-based element of Alpha Black Zero facing the zerg of Starcraft and enemy counts similar to those in Serious Sam, with some Warhammer 40k and Aliens thrown in, mixed with plenty of programmable vertex and fragment shaders and bloom lighting, shaken well.
You can find an in-depth background on the story and characters of the game in our previously posted background article, but the story can be summarized as this: "The Presido," a governing body over humanity, has been expanding farther and farther into space, and some of its outer worlds have encountered hostile alien life forms. What follows is an intense conflict with The Presido attempting to learn more about the alien life forms as well as fight them off, maintain their establishments, and reclaim fallen worlds.
The demo build I was able to play started off with a very impressive cutscene. Entirely rendered in-game, you are given the background of your assignment, and if you can pay attention without being distracted by all of the eye-candy, more power to you. My first impressions reminded me of the opening cutscene of starcraft, exactly the type of resemblance Khaeon Games was going for. The cutscene presents you with your squad and some other non-combat members of your team in a last-minute briefing before your landing craft takes off from the ship towards the planet surface. Essentially an outpost was attacked by alien bugs, and your marines are sent in to find out what happened.
When your actual mission begins, you are looking down on your squad of four marines, in control of the lead marine. Switching between squadmates is simple, and issuing commands to your squad takes just a couple keypresses. As with Alpha Black Zero, the fact that the game uses Serious Engine technology isn't apparent at all. The graphics are top-notch, and the bloom lighting looks great, especially when it's below you and to the sides as you're walking across a platform. However, the one aspect of Serious Sam that becomes obvious rather quickly is the large enemy counts. You're swarmed non-stop by alien bugs (think Starship Troopers). My squad did a pretty good job of fending them off, and it was a blast to feel all four squad rifles thundering through my subwoofer as alien after alien went down in a mess of yellow blood.
Another element that was common in between the fighting was the need to unlock closed doors. Instead of having to search around the levels for a key or a code to open the door, you have to hack the security on each door. This is where Negative Space surprised me; instead of some other games such as System Shock 2 where when hacking it's just a random click-fest and luck, Khaeon came up with an interesting way of hacking the doors. Once you walk up to the door, a small panel replaces your map and scrolls lines of numbers. On each line several numbers are highlighted, and you have to key in the highlighted numbers from each line until the door unlocks.
Negative Space looks very promising, especially for a project this early in development. Although I was only able to play a single level, it was very well put together, with a lengthy high-quality cutscene leading into it and a well-rounded amount of action, door hacking, teamwork within my squad, and audio updates from the squad's ship in orbit. Negative Space has a lot of potential to being a fun game that puts a new perspective on the excellent elements of games such as Starcraft and Aliens. The game is currently in early development and Khaeon is in the process of finding a publisher. More will be known about the timeframe of the game's development and release once a publisher is found.
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