factor 5

Super Turrican [Beta – SNES]

As we can read on Wikipedia, Super Turrican was developed by Factor 5 and published by Seika for the Super Nintendo. Factor 5’s Super Turrican plays similarly to Mega Turrican and shares a similar visual style, but the game has a different set of levels and features a freeze beam in place of the original lightning whip. DEC noticed some reference about the beta version of Super Turrican on the Factor 5 web site (http://www.factor5.de/secrets_super_turrican.shtml) and several other web site relay this information when the already known version was planned to the Wii virtual console. 

Animal Wars [PS3 – Cancelled]

[Page updated: 27/06/2015 with vidoc, images & development history]

Animal Wars was a tactical RPG for the Playstation 3 in development at Factor 5, Inc. between 2004 and 2006 with Sony Computer Entertainment on board as its publisher. It was planned to be released some time after Lair, which launched in August, 2007.

Factor 5’s Quirky War Game Made By 4 People

According to one former employee, work commenced on the title in 2004, “roughly around the time” pre-production on Lair began. It came about as a result of the multi-game contract Factor 5 signed with Sony to produce a number of games exclusive to their platforms. Until the deal expired, the company was set to have every project of theirs fully funded by the publisher, pending their approval. Every title worked on during this partnership was slated for release on PS3 only and Animal Wars was one of them.

Join The Fight Propaganda Poster - Animal Wars Concept Art - Sony Factor 5 project

Whereas Lair exhausted a great deal of the developer’s resources from beginning to end, Animal Wars was a considerably smaller project, ongoing in the background for a number of years. Its team was comprised of no more than 4 workers total: 2 designers, 1 dedicated artist and a single programmer. The game was so low down Factor 5’s list of priorities, that every developer assigned to it was at some point repositioned to work on Lair and/or other proposed titles.

Early concept art:

Early character exploration:

Animal Wars was set in “an alternate WWI universe with anthropomorphic animal characters”, one developer recalled. The assassination of “the Archduke Birdinand” (a parody of historical figure, Archduke Franz Ferdinand) in the game’s opening served as the catalyst for the great war its campaign would have centered on. The event would have ignited a global conflict between various nations of animals (e.g. felines, bears, foxes, etc.).

Character art:

Its developers were hoping to build a unique story-driven experience out of Animal Wars. They had envisioned a rich world with great attention to detail and even went about creating propaganda posters and vintage style newspaper covers for inspiration:

The enemy faction consisted of a coalition between ‘Boarmandy’ (boars), The Black Paw (a rogue cat organisation responsible for Birdinand’s murder), bear soldiers, and the main villains, an army of wolves lead by the evil ‘Isegrimm’. An explosive introductory level was set to portray a savage air raid on a city inspired by London, as perpetrated by boars in ‘Big Bertha’ attack blimps. Players would have then found themselves following the exploits of a canine in an aviator jacket, the planned protagonist; although, other playable characters were being explored, too.

Among the various mission types mulled over during pre-production was one which would have flipped the scale of battle on its head and saw the player taking up the role of a mouse. From this perspective, regular soldiers would appear as humongous titans by comparison, as the mice performed daring espionage operations. Ultimately, this ambitious stage idea never got as far as being prototyped.

Mouse Mission Concept Art - Animal Wars Cancelled Game

One source likened its gameplay, of which very little was completed, to Valkyria Chronicles. It was intended to be a strategy RPG with a turn-based battle system and a unique oil painted art style.

The graphics were like Valiant Hearts but in 3D” – former Factor 5 developer.

Its concept of anthropomorphic warfare was deceptively innocent on the surface. Early sketches, for instance, depicted a number of particularly violent scenes, including a dog soldier posed atop a decapitated pig. Its artistic direction leaned dark in this respect, though it had yet to be determined how explicit the final product would be.

Sam The Soldier Dog Concept Art - Animal Wars PS3

In what was said to have been a big contributing factor towards Sony’s willingness to fund it, the title was leveraging the work Factor 5’s people had previously done on the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games. It called upon their experiences moulding that game’s blend of ground and air vehicular combat, which the publisher was very keen to capitalise on. Boats and amphibious tanks would have featured, too.

As explained by one of our sources, a central part of its concept was that each of the vehicles would have, in some form, integrated attributes associated with different animals into their design and functionality:

“For example, I worked on making a jeep that would always land upright no matter how crazy you drove it (cat landing on all fours).”

Why Sony Pulled The Plug On F5, Inc.’s Pet Project

Among the few that contributed to Animal Wars throughout its lifespan, the enthusiasm for it was in abundance. One ex member of Factor 5 even took to NeoGAF some years later to exclaim:

“It was fucking amazing looking and was way better than Lair so it made all of us sad it got cancelled.”

One of our sources echoed these sentiments, saying that its apparent independence from Factor 5’s higher ups was much to its benefit:

“I was more excited about Animal Wars than Lair because it was a smaller team and upper management left it alone (upper management interference greatly contributed to Lair’s failure).”

Despite this, none of the excitement held internally for the project could ultimately prevent its demise, as the relationship between Sony and Factor 5 began to sour.

Pre-vis. character models:

In the beginning, the deal between them was forged primarily so that the San Rafael studio would reinforce the PS3’s launch line-up with an original IP, which would later turn out to be Lair. Any other projects they were behind, Animal Wars included, were largely a show of good faith on Sony’s behalf.

Crucially, Lair was first scheduled to be available for the PS3 within its first few months on the North American market in fall 2006. However, its development encountered many hurdles; chief among which was the higher ups demanding the addition of motion controls and the team simply struggling to get to grips with the console’s then perplexing development environment. Factor 5 was already a company of limited resources, but Lair’s troubled life cycle lead to a number of departures mid-development. This left them unable to fulfill their end of the contract and thus, requested the game be delayed into 2007.

The publisher’s response was less than understanding. They promptly cut off all funding to Animal Wars and redistributed any monetary assets designated for it into Lair. The developers weren’t willing or able to self-finance the remainder of the project, resulting in its subsequent cancellation. The move also put an end to a number of other propositions, including a shoot ’em up called Virus and a reboot of Turrican.

One developer we spoke with detailed how the game had reached the prototyping phase when it was shelved, but never left pre-production:

“At the time, we had a working biplane, tank, jeep and 3rd person character working… We had a vertical slice of a damaged town that the lead character (a greyhound in WWI aviator outfit) and the tank was able to run around.  We also had a pretty massive terrain for the biplane to fly around (similar in size to what ended up in Lair).”

Prototype character models:

The former employee admitted that the prototype build suffered visibility issues, which they had not yet been able to resolve when development came to a close. These were caused by the dark colour palette employed by both its character models and environments, which would blend together unintentionally.

Wild Cats Scenario Concept Art - F5 Animal Wars

Animal Wars was never officially announced and its prototype materials were locked away by the management of Factor 5, Inc. during the company’s closure in late 2008.

Prototype models: 

Virus [PS3 – Cancelled]

Virus was a downloadable PSN arcade shoot ’em up for PS3 that was in development in 2007 at Factor 5 before its cancellation. It was to be published and funded by Sony Computer Entertainment, who had struck an exclusivity deal with the developer at the time they began to collaborate on Lair. When Lair turned out to be critically and commercially unsuccessful, Sony terminated their contract with Factor 5 and cancelled all of their joint projects. Along with a 3D Turrican reboot, Virus was one of the casualties of the two companies splitting. Both were cancelled in October 2007.

Virus is believed to have only been in development for no more than a few months and was planned to be a unique take on the arcade shooter genre. The game would have placed the player in control of tech support employees of various real life companies (including AT&T), as they endeavour to prevent oncoming viral threats from corrupting their networks.

This quirky, miniature sci-fi narrative was represented by a blue bar travelling down a hexagonal tunnel, revolving around it to shoot oncoming viruses. The player would have had to destroy these enemy forces to prevent the respective company’s network from going down. As you can see in the images below, the health of the network was represented by an icon on the HUD which turned from green to red.

Images: 

Turrican: Cyclone (Factor 5) [PS3 – Cancelled]

After finishing Lair, Factor 5 was working on a new Turrican game for the PS3, but as the partnership with SONY was later terminated when Lair was a critical as well as a commercial failure, the development of this new game was stopped. We dont have an official name for this game, and it’s labeled simply as “Turrican” or  “Project Cyclone” just because of the name of its artworks. Project Cyclone was put on hold still in early development and probably we’ll never see it again.

From the few artworks that remain, we can notice a character that looks a bit like an evolution of the one in Turrican and we can only wonder if this project was going to be a resurrection of the unreleased Thornado for the GameCube.

Thanks to Gone is Gone and Hey Hey for the contributions!

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F5’s Flight Project [Wii – Prototype]

In May 2009, Factor 5’s american studio was closed down, because (as we can read from the official F5’s website) “obstacles created by the sudden bankrupcy of Brash Entertainment for the continuation of operations have turned out too great to overcome in the current economic climate”.  The projects that were still in development should have been moved to the german studio, but it’s currently unknow if  they will be able to complete them or if those games are going to be cancelled.

2 unannounced Wii games were in development at Factor’s 5 as we can read from an interesting article over at GoneIsGone, one of which was a flight simulation game. From the few 3D models available from this “Flight Project” it seems that we would have been able to fly all over the world with different aeroplanes and space-crafts (probably an easter egg from previous F5’s Star Wars titles). We can speculate that this prototype was  developed from the concept of the – never released – F5’s Pilotwings for the GameCube and created with the Wii Lair Engine.

On December 2009, ShockingAlberto from the NeoGAF forum, posted some more assets from this project. One of the images has a different graphic style from the other assets, with a more cartoony / stylized characters. We can speculate that at some point in the development, Factor 5 decided to change the style of the game to appeal more to casuals and families.

It would be really nice to play a new flight simulation developed by F5 and we really hope that they could be able to finish and release this project.

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