Julian Streets, the Fox of China
February 8th, 2007 by Pierre-Alexandre Garneau
You may think Julian Streets is just another English playboy coming to Hong Kong to take advantage of its exotic pleasures and booming economy. After all, many others came to the English colony for that reason in the last decade — since the end of the war and of the Japanese invasion. Business is good, with all those Chinese entrepreneurs fleeing the now-communist China.
You wouldn’t be the first to make this mistake, but Julian Streets is much more than that: he’s also the Fox of China, gentleman burglar. He steals from the rich — corrupt English officials and triad leaders — to give to the poor. And the cut he keeps for his expenses is quite reasonable, too.
In Julian Streets, the Fox of China you’ll experience the thrilling life of Streets: go anywhere in the Hong Kong of the 50s, climb any building, jump from rooftop to rooftop, steal from the corrupt government, fight the triads! Can you save the lovely Miao Ping and stop the nefarious plans of the mysterious Mr Cracknell? Come back each week for a new episode!
Assassin’s Creed meets Crackdown with More Panache!
In this game you play Julian Streets, an athletic gentleman burglar. The game is played from a third-person perspective in an open map of Hong Kong circa 1955. You can go anywhere, by foot or by car — really anywhere. Streets is a skilled climber who can climb any surface with protruding elements like window sills, large bricks and so on.
The game rewards creativity; missions don’t have predetermined path to follow to succeed. You can decide to go through the front door, the back door or through an open window on the third floor. You can use your environment creatively too: throw a bottle to attract attention, turn lights off to hide, etc. You choose the approach you prefer. The game gives you an interesting problem to solve, and lets you figure your own way to solve it.
To further let you personalize your experience, Julian Street will increase skills as you play. The more you use an ability, the better you’ll become at it. Increasing your athletics skills will let you jump farther, run faster and climb to harder to access locations. Bettering your combat ability will make you deadlier hand to hand and barehanded. Becoming more skilled at driving makes cars run faster and withstand more damage. Improving your stealth lets you hide better in shadows and use better disguises.
Indeed, this game will have you rely on your stealth in addition to your wits. Barging through a well-defended location is likely to bring your death. You’ll have to avoid detection, whether by hiding or by using clever disguises, to reach your goals.
Each mission — a new one each week — will have a primary goal and secondary goals. While you need to successfully achieve the primary goal to complete the mission, secondary goals are optional. Achieving secondary goals increases your reputation, and so does stealing a lot of loot and avoiding to kill enemies. A higher reputation means the population is more likely to help you by giving you information and special gear.
Episodic Content
Just like pulp fiction stories, this game will be set in episodes. Each week, at the same day and time, a new mission will be released, adding about one hour of fun. Players will want to return each week to play the new adventures of the Fox of China.
Adding missions at such a rapid pace will be a development challenge, but it’s feasible with good preparation. Using an open world helps a lot: the overall environment can be reused each episode, only adding mission-specific elements.
Having multiple small teams work in parallel is essential. If a new mission takes 3 weeks of work, 3 teams working simultaneously on separate episodes can release a new one each week. And of course, you’d need to work a few weeks in advance so that slight delays don’t jeopardize the schedule.
It’s a very ambitious project requiring a hefty budget, but the payoff could be worth it. If a TV show like Heroes can release movie-quality shows each week, I don’t see why games can’t follow a similar model. Having millions of players eagerly anticipating new episodes each week could create quite a phenomenon around the game.
Telltale Games are currently trying out the episodic model with the adventure game Sam and Max (they aim to push out one “episode” per month), and from what I’ve seen, it works pretty well for them so far. Of course, adventure games thrive on novelty, so it might just be the best genre to pull it off ; who knows how much novelty we’d be able to add to a stealth-action game such as this each week?
A project like Julian Streets would require quite a lot of head-scratching at the start from the designers, though, just to define the basic set of actions that the player can do… since it’ll be these actions that will define every single future mission. So if you forget to put in, say, a way to swim, then you’ll never be able to ship a mission that requires swimming.
And on the flip side, if you put in too many player actions, then every level has to be built according to these possible actions and it can become really hard to design sensible missions. So if you decide that Julian is able to bash certain doors down, well, you have to decide the resilience of every single door in the game.
Well actually, I guess that if you actually shipped code patches with the weekly missions, it could theoretically be done, but code patches and consoles still don’t mix very well. Maybe it’d be feasible on PC?
But yeah, lots of head-scratching in perspective on this one… which is why I’m really scared of trying to build any sandboxy, freedom-oriented game. When you basically have to think about *every* situation that could break your mission, and the player can generate a million different situations… x_x
Code patches are actually fairly easy with the new console generation — Xbox 360 games get patches all the time. That said, I agree that this project would be a bit too ambitious to try the weekly model with. Julian Streets would be an awesome game in that format if pulled off correctly, but it sure would be hard to pull off. But hey, that’s the nice thing about this blog: I get to come up with cool concepts outside of too many real world constraints
As an aside, there are now firms selling detailed 3D models of all the streets in London. You could create a GTA-style game set in London and save a lot of modeling time with this. I’d seriously consider this if I were to create that type of game. A GTA clone set in real London with a new mission each week could be a lot of fun