Primal Carnage is a dino-MP game, influenced by everyone’s favourite dino movie, Jurassic Park. The game has already been released and in order to find out more tech details about it, as well as Lukewarm’s future plans, we contacted the development team for an interview. What a better way to start our freshly Interview section than focusing on indie devs, right? Well, off we go.
Lukewarm is a small group of indie developers from all over the world who banded together over the internet and Primal Carnage is its first title. Now we know that most of you had this question in your mind the moment you saw Primal Carnage: “Man, imagine if that game was developed on CryEngine 3”. Well, we did ask Lukewarm about its opinion on other engines, however the team did not comment on that as they didn’t want anyone ‘running around saying that Lukewarm Media says that Unigine and CryEngine suck‘. Fair enough, a diplomatic answer, though we’d expect indie devs to spill the beans and be more… straightforward than playing it safe. After all, most PC gamers want to know – from the developers themselves – what they think about most major game engines.
As for choosing Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, Lukewarm had this to say:
“We chose Unreal Engine 3 because of its flexibility and rich toolset for developers. It’s a battle hardened engine and we wanted a platform that could bring the best of Primal Carnage to life.”
But why did Lukewarm invest on an MP-only title? The reason is simple. Lukewarm is a small studio and didn’t have the manpower to develop a proper SP game.
‘We wanted to focus our efforts on one section of Primal Carnage and get the core gameplay feeling great‘ Lukewarm told us and added. ‘We’ve definitely looked into single player, but given the small size of our team, we lacked the manpower to develop single player and multiplayer in parallel. As of right now, we have no plans for a single player campaign for Primal Carnage as we focus on improving the multiplayer experience of Primal Carnage‘.
Lukewarm is also investigating all tech issues that plagued its title. The team has been working with Nvidia to fix all SLI and 3D Vision issues (tip of the day: there is already an SLI profile for it in the latest GeForce beta drivers). In addition, the team is will be tweaking the game’s netcode and will open a lot more local servers internationally. Good news then, as we’ve been experiencing a lot of latency issues.
And back now to some more tech stuff. One of the great graphical features of Primal Carnage is its bendable vegetation, something that looks stunning and has an impact on the gameplay itself. Bendable vegetation is a feature that Lukewarm is proud of, alongside dino’s animations.
“We’re really proud of the dinosaur animations we were able to pull off. They’re definitely in a class of their own. The interactive foliage in our game is also very cool, plants and trees will move slightly as your character brushes up against it. This effect not only looks great, but it can also reveal enemy positions.”
As for choosing this kind of game, Lukewarm told us that it was because they wanted to play – and obviously create – the ‘dinosaur game that everyone wanted but nobody ever made‘.
Needless to say that Lukewarm’s employees are PC gamers themselves. Therefore, it was natural to get an ‘unfriendly’ vibe from them towards consoles. Moreover, and as you’d expect, they are quite happy with the rise of crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter.
“Everyone at Lukewarm Media is a PC gamer, a lot of us come from the PC modding community. Console gaming is neat, but they are rather limited as to what you can do with them. Kickstarter and Greenlight are great ways for smaller games to get the recognition and funding they deserve. A lot of really interesting titles are able to see the light of day because of those services.”
Last but not least, Lukewarm plans to support Primal Carnage for a while, making it the best game they possibly can. When asked about new character weapons or dino attacks, Lukewarm did not comment, though it stated it will be supporting it with new content (the free “Get to the Chopper” DLC, a pack that provides an additional game mode and a few maps, is the start).
Primal Carnage is available for fourteen bucks on Steam.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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