F1 2010 Interview Part 1

20 Sep 2010 at 03:30:53 by John Robertson

IncGamers recently had the pleasure of chatting to Steve Hood, Chief Games Designer on Codemasters’ upcoming F1 2010, and Paul Jeal, the game’s Senior Producer. 

How long have you both been involved on this project?

Steve Hood: For me it’s been a year and a half, I joined around March of last year.

Paul Jeal: I was there from the beginning; August 2008 was when we started putting the high level game design together.  The rest of 2008 was just all about the design and then the whole coding team became free in December 2008 with the aim being to put the body together, with a car driving around a track with a few other bits and pieces.  So, depending on whether or not you include that pre-production period, we’ve been in production for 18 months to two years.

There have been a number of rule changes within F1 during that period, what was it like trying to incorporate those as you go?

PJ: Chaos.

SH: It makes me laugh because almost every morning someone would be on the internet sending an email around the design group saying ‘guess what, they’ve changed this rule now or this has gone, KERS has been banned or refuelling is out’.  We already have to work flat out on the project anyway.  Like, when we were doing all the pit crew sequences and factoring in refuelling the stops were a lot slower obviously, then that was dropped before the season started.  It’s a pain but it certainly keeps us on our toes.

PJ: It does help that we’re both massive fans of the sport.  F1 is such a gossip related industry that very rarely was there anything that happened that completely surprised you.  I think the biggest annoyance with the development was that we always had to allow for 26 cars, just in case a new team entered.  When they didn’t it was good from a technical point of view ‘coz it gave us some free memory but, still, if we knew there would only be 12 teams from the start we could have probably got something else in the game.

Being big Formula 1 fans, what were the elements you really wanted to get right in order to create the best experience possible?

SH: First and foremost, the thing for me was making sure it was actually fun to drive the cars around the track.   Fun for me isn’t doing two-thousand miles per hour down the straight or being able to kick an afterburner on, it was having that consistency where you can drive the car around the circuit and, once you get used to it, you get into a rhythm and start shaving a second off, then half a second and then tenths off. 

After that, it’s about being able to transfer that into the race so you can actually do the things you see on TV such as plan a pit stop or know that you’ve fallen behind someone and then slowing gain the ground back.  It was all about things being very subtle and that’s a really difficult thing to get right because the cars are so quick.  In many racing games it’s about that flat out one or three lap race where everyone is going ‘banzai’ trying to win. Whereas we wanted to slow the pace down a little so you’ve got time to think about pit stop, is it safe to pass, have I got enough fuel left to finish the race – those kinds of things.

PJ: Yeah, definitely the car handling first.  Anyone who has played the Geoff Brabham series knows that a consistent handling model - where you can study an opponent, find his weakness and exploit them – is a fun experience.  When you’re following a guy for seven or eight laps and you finally overtake them, that might seem a bit weird to some people who are used to overtaking four cars a lap, three cars a corner or whatever.  It really is a different racing experience.

Also, Steve alluded to the strategy elements on top of [the handling model] in addition to the A.I. and not being to do a lightning start and, despite starting last, be at the front after the first corner.  That was quite key to us as well.  And I think multiplayer also, for multiplayer sometimes games offer a different experience to single player.  If we’re doing weather, damage and pit-stops in single player it absolutely had to be the same in an online race.  To make a different experience for the player in an F1 game would have been a little bit weird.

Most real-life F1 races last for one and a half to two hours, how difficult is it to scale that experience down for players who may only want to race ten or twelve laps?
SH: I’m please you said ten or twelve laps because that’s twenty-percent race distance for most tracks.  So what we’ve done is allowed players to play short races, so they can do one or three lap sprints if they want, like you see in all the other racing games but really, as far as we’re concerned, everything kicks off at twenty-percent. 

Twenty-percent allows us to implement the rule that says if you’re in a dry race you have to use two compounds of tyres so it means there’s a pit stop involved, fuel comes into play as well.  I think that’s bang on the money as it doesn’t take that long, it’s about twenty minutes for a race.  It’s great for online as well because you know everybody has a pit stop, the weather can change over time and you can start the race on a different compound to everybody else; tactics really come into play then.

PJ: Yeah, there’s no need to always do one hundred-percent races.  Although it’s very cool when you see the clouds moving and it starts to darken, maybe it takes forty minutes for a rain drop to fall with the dynamic weather system, or perhaps it doesn’t rain at all.  Twenty-percent is the minimum I think, like Steve said, you’ve got tyre wear and you’ve got to do a pit stop and plan when to do it.  One lap tyre wear is not scaled so much so if you’re more conservative in your approach to your tyres - and keep your engine revs down - that allows you to control your pit stops more and exploit the weather.  Players will get more out of it when they experience slightly longer races, just because that’s what F1 is about.

Formula 1 is a very technical sport; would you say the game is aimed squarely at the hardened racing/racing game fans?

SH: I honestly think we get both sides of the camp.  With Anthony (Anthony Davidson - former BAR, Honda and Brawn GP test driver and current BBC Radio 5 Live F1 commentator) coming on board, he’s basically steered us down a path that, while it makes us more authentic, it makes it easier for the player as well. 

For example, whenever you mention Formula 1 games to people they always say ‘Oh, setting your car up – I don’t understand all of those things’.  What we’ve done is set the cars up so they’re immediately competitive with all tracks, allowing you to go out and challenge the frontrunners.  Then, once you’ve got used to the game, you can tweak certain areas to best suit your driving style or the weather conditions or the car you’re driving.  What we’re trying to do is make you feel like the driver and there’s a professional team around you that are setting the car up; making it both more authentic and more accessible at the same time.

PJ: At its base level it’s fun for both camps to play but you’re hardened F1 is going to get slightly more out of it.  During a race they can dial the engine revs up or they can dial them down to save on fuel, they have the ability to adjust the wings and increase/decrease down force, they can manage the eight engines across the course of the season.  Those are things that one set of players are not really going to care about but they’re not going to be massively disadvantaged from not doing it but you know that the hardcore fans are going to absolutely love it. 

I shaved off a couple of tenths off the other day on Bahrain; every lap I was altering the wing angles, putting the engine revs up and down – I think I finished in eleventh in the end but it was much more intense, I think there was sweat pouring from me by the end. 

SH: *Laughs*. That’s because you had a crash helmet on.

PJ: *Laughs*. Crash helmet, suit, boots; it was great.

It was great despite finishing in eleventh and outside the points?

PJ:  Absolutely.  The team I was driving for, I think it was HRT, were so massively enthused by the result and I had the media asking questions, my reputation in the paddock went up. Something we set out to achieve from the beginning was that finishing eleventh, fifteenth, even twentieth sometimes felt like a good result and we try to give the player as much reward as possible for finishing in those positions. 

Read part 2 of our interview >>

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