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Running along with DICE in Sweden, Electronic Arts brings the First Person Platforming experience back into the mainstream.

CGSociety :: Production Focus
5 March 2009, by Paul Hellard

'Mirror's Edge' is an action adventure rather than a shooter or pure racing game. With the possibilities of the movement being in first-person, the DICE team presented the animators and level designers with a challenge to come up with fun geometry and hazards that could show off and add to these possibilities. The synergy between advanced movement and geometrical shapes lends itself to gameplay that is very close to traditional 2D platforming games. So in some ways it is a 3D platforming game seen through the eyes of a person = First Person Platforming.

"We had to figure out how your eyes and brain compensate for your body moments, so there was a lot of trial and error before getting the right look on all the moves."

Johannes Söderqvist, Art Director of the Mirror’s Edge game, tells CGSociety much of the early thoughts on the production of ‘Mirror’s Edge’ were about making the opposite of ‘Battlefield’.

The production team wanted to remove the focus on vehicles and guns and develop an extension of what people could do physically. Söderqvist says the EA and DICE team wanted to ‘put the person back in FPS’.

They wanted to do this on rooftops in a modern city. “We started out with actual existing cities but soon realized that we could create something much stronger, and tailored to our needs if we created our own un-named city."

"We have all seen rooftops but most of us have not spent time there. Doing death-defying stunts in these types of locations through the 1P view of Faith’s eyes is kind of dreamlike,” said Söderqvist.

The core mechanic of ‘Mirror’s Edge’ is about taking the 1P experience further with a focus on improving movement. Early on, DICE developed prototypes to try out all the new moves and experiment with what you could do in different types of geometry. “Everyone who tried it, got a kick out of the fact that we were able to do what many thought would be impossible,” says Söderqvist. “Later on we had a more fleshed out level that we showed to journalists and used in focus testing. Again, the response was very positive. Then we released screenshots and trailers and it got a lot of interest.”

The characters
Faith is a strong independent young woman with a complicated past. The city she lives in is a conformist society with lots of surveillance of its citizens. The city is a nice place to live because it’s clean and provides everything you would need. Faith sees through the façade and has chosen to stay outside of the society. Criminal activity is low, but it does exist. All electronic communication including the internet is heavily monitored, so communication has to be delivered physically.

Faith is a courier, a ‘Runner’, and takes on the jobs she finds, delivering packages for the criminals. She is content with staying outside society, neither a ‘good’ citizen nor a serious criminal. This is what she is doing when the game starts off but soon she finds herself mixed up in something bigger and she is forced to pick a side.

Johannes Söderqvist has been around CG for a long time. From about '87 to ‘92, he was creating graphics for the Atari ST DemoScene. "Back in the day there was no school available that dealt with these things, at least not if I wanted to stay in Sweden," he says.

"I am self taught and just spent a ridiculous amount of time absorbing everything I could that related to CGI and graphics for games. I got into working full time with games in ’96 together with some friends from the DemoScene. We created one game for Sony called 'Kula World'. After a few years of ups and downs I started working for DICE in 2001. I started as an artist and worked my way up through 'BF2: Modern Combat', got on 'BF2142' as an art director and then 'Mirrors Edge'. I have learned a lot on the way, lots of hard work but amazingly challenging and rewarding at the same time, as it should be."