Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

Errrr, no...

IO has grown quite a bit, we're still working on other franchises.

Oh definitely. We've got to give it some work though, but it will continue. There's some pretty spanking news coming out about that soon, we'll have to see where that goes. But for now this is the biggest product we're working on. We've got about 100 people on the team, and as such this is the biggest we've had at IO so far, as well as expanded with some outsourced people as well.

Around 12 hours. We aiming for not more than 16, not less than 10. We're also conveying a story. We've done one thing which is hurtful to the gameplay time - we've got quite a lot of checkpoints. It's quite forgiving. In memory terms, it's super expensive to do that, but I think you'll feel better.

Yeah.

If you've played Freedom Fighters you'll be right at home. It's still the same simple one-click to send one guy/all the guys control system. There's a follow mode called 'mimic' because they try and do as much as you can, like if you sneak or you're hiding behind something they will try to do the same thing. The 'fire at' mode is highly context sensitive in the way that if you fire at geometry they will lay down suppressive fire, if they find soft targets in the area, like cars or people they will try and do that. We also use a lot more destructible cover in Kane & Lynch.

One thing that happens when you make a game that goes from the start to the end without any break is that we don't have any menus. We don't have anywhere you can buy weapons or equip weapons or anything like that, but we're in a situation where we want a lot of weapons. Yes, I want rocket launchers and sniper rifles and all of that, so we can't just put them in crates or dead enemies or whatever. The thing we do most is look at how to best use the crew members, so instead of weapon select we have a system where if you get close enough to them you can see their inventory. Some of the guys won't give you their stuff because they really hate you. Some of them are much easier to deal with. Lynch in his psycho mode won't give you his shotgun, for example.

I'm not quite sure. This one has the problem of being near the end of the game...

Don't go there. Not our decision.

Shhhhhhh! Let's be frank about it. Let's blame somebody else! [laughs] To be fair a lot of people like it that way as well.

It did not [laughs]. Unless you do a demo simultaneously at end of development... It's a pain to do demos when you're wrapping up a game, because you've entered submission and there are so many other things to sort out.