Phoenix Point Development Update – Behind the Scenes

If you’d like to learn a bit about the people working on Phoenix Point, Snapshot Games’ upcoming spiritual successor to the original X-Com games, the latest development update introduces us to a number of developers and shares plenty of photos. Here’s a taste of what you can find there, and if you want the whole thing, you should click the link above:

Last week I (UV) took a trip to the studio in Sofia. Whilst there, I had the opportunity to walk around the entire studio and look at what each and every developer was working on. Below is a summary of my tour, along with descriptions of what everyone is working on.

This is by no means a complete list as everyone was very busy and I wasn’t always able to catch everyone sitting at their own desk. It does however highlight the size of the team and how all of the parts come together as a whole.

We start at the beginning – the entrance to the studio. In reality, the team has become so large over the last year that we have now split between two different floors. But this is where it all began. The main floor, where the Phoenix Point Backer Builds were created.

First stop on our tour of the art team room is Elena, one of our animators. She is currently working on the animations for the queen. The queen has a lot of legs, all animated independently. They have to be able to climb over any terrain and obstacles as she moves.

Fun fact: When you hear the queen scream in the Backer Build…. that’s Elena!

Next we have Victoria, another of our animators. Victoria is currently working on the animations for *REDACTED*. It’s a shame I can’t reveal right now what she’s working on. What I can say is; it is something that we haven’t shown yet, and it is really creepy.

Here, Mario, one of our technical artists, it working on the organisation of different weapon types within the game. Bave (one of our game designers who has worked with Julian for many years) and Julian himself join the discussion. Organisation of assets is very important for a project this size with so many different people working together. Good organisation means that everyone can always find the assets that they require, even if they were created by someone else.

Miron is one of the veteran programmers at Snapshot Games. He worked on Chaos Reborn. Currently assigned to provide programming support to the character team, he’s working on the code of human animation.

While the animators create all of the different animations that a character requires, it comes down to the programmers to make sure those different animations all trigger at the correct moments.