Greedy Car Thieves

[harry1985]

Developed by an independent team from Poland, Greedy Car Thieves is an upcoming action driving game that takes its cues from the classic top-down GTA games. Multiplayer action is the primary focus, allowing players to free roam around the city in a slew of game modes including Free For All, Bombmatch and Race. A map editor is also available.

Even at this early stage, Greedy Car Thieves is already showing some real promise for an independent game, and its contemporary take on the old-school GTA games is commendable.

Greedy Car Thieves is currently under development, but a free multiplayer beta is available for download on its official website for PC and Linux. I interviewed one of Greedy Car Thieves’ lead programmers Wojciech ‘maxest’ Sterna to find out more.

Tell me a bit about yourselves. What are your backgrounds? Do you have any previous experience in developing independent games and do you have anything planned after GCT?

We are a group of people who mostly know each other from the internet. At the very beginning the only people involved in this project were myself and chomzee as the lead programmers. We know each other from high school and were lucky that we followed different fields of computer science. I am fascinated with computer graphics and real-time rendering, whereas chomzee’s specialities are physics and networking. So as you see, we complement each other perfectly.

With the experience we had gained in our previous projects (IceWar and FreeShoppa) we felt we were ready to start making a game we have had in mind for quite a long time. As the game evolved, we found artists over the internet who have helped us reach the point we are currently in. We have some nice plans for what we’re going to do after GCT is done but we wouldn’t like to reveal any details yet. We need to finish GCT first.

How long have you been working on this project for?

Work for this project initially started around summer 2008. I started development, totally from scratch, of a 3D game engine based on OpenGL and Direct3D9. A few months later chomzee started doing physics and networking. Up to summer 2009 we had been working independently before merging our work together.

Greedy Car Thieves was clearly heavily inspired by the early 2D Grand Theft Aauto games. What made you base your game on this engine, and why do you think people still like to play from an archaic top down perspective?

We spent many, many hours playing the multiplayer mode (via LAN) of GTA2 and had a huge amount of fun. Unfortunately, the networking in GTA2 is really screwed up (due to the very slow and deprecated DirectPlay engine). This was the main reason for creating Greedy Car Thieves. We were also able to implement some really nice graphical effects because graphics hardware has evolved so quickly.

We must say it is not without significance that the game has an old-school top-down view. With this constraint in mind we could attribute many optimisations in all aspects, i.e.graphics and networking. It is also much easier to develop a top-down shooter than, for example, an FPP (first person perspective) game. We think that people still play top-down games mostly due to their dynamism and simplicity. They are usually light-weight games which download fast, load fast and play smoothly. They are particularly enjoyable during boring lectures!

Since the original GTA games are available for free on the official Rockstar website, what do you feel Greedy Car Thieves can offer that is unique?

Greedy Car Thieves is definitely much more diversified. At the moment we have 7 game types available, more (real) weapons, power ups and destructible objects. Not to mention the pleasing graphics with real-time 24-hour day-night cycle including dynamic normal-mapped lighting, shadows and water reflecting the environment. The graphics serve as a great addition to the gameplay. We are also proud of our networking system which allows dynamic play with minimum lag.

The IGCD community has added Greedy Car Thieves to its car database – did the vehicle designs take inspiration from any licensed cars in particular?

We really appreciate the fact that somebody liked the game so much that they devoted time for “reverse engineering” which cars our artists were inspired by. Our car-makers admit that many of the guesses are correct although some of them are mistaken.

What has been your biggest challenge during the development process?

Definitely keeping the code clean. Even though there are only two programmers in our team, it is not that easy to keep consistent, well-organised code. So far we have been quite successful in this field.

Greedy Car Thieves is obviously constantly evolving in its current beta state. What does the future entail for the project? Will we be seeing a single player portion and additional multiplayer modes, for example?

Yes, we are planning to develop a single-player game mode. With regard to the multiplayer, we have already implemented two new game types since the last game release: “Race” and “Bombmatch” (Counter-Strike players may be familiar with this concept). We have also received quite interesting ideas on new multiplayer modes. We will definitely consider them and it is highly probable that there will eventually be more than 7 multiplayer game modes in the final version.

Do you have a projected release date for the final version? If so, will there be any fee?

We hope to have finished the whole game (single-player and multi-player) by July 2011. As for the fee, we would like to sell the single-player mode (along with the multi-player) via digital distribution sites at a very low price, something around 5 EUR/USD/GBP. Additionally, we would like to release the multi-player totally for free but enriched with adverts.

This way players wouldn’t have to pay anything for playing multi-player and we could have money for developing further games (and we have some really nice ideas, this time much more original). To be honest, this is how we would like to see our games in future – free with adverts. We believe this would be comfortable for both parties, i.e. us and the players. We will see.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to seeing GCT develop...

[harry1985]

Lijkt me echt een vet spel dit. hopelijk net zo leuk als gta 1 & 2 destijds. moet wel zeggen dat ze dit netjes voor elkaar hebben gemaakt. Ben benieuwd hoe het zal zijn als dit uit is...

[Kai-ShockWave]

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