Welcome to the fourth blog on Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock.

I’m Simon Harris, the Executive Producer for BBC Worldwide on the game which means the project is my overall responsibility. It’s my duty to ensure all aspects come together to make a great game and that the game is true to Doctor Who. This means working with the developer, Supermassive Games on the design, art and programming and working with the Doctor Who team in London and Cardiff to ensure that everything looks and feels as it should.

Last night was the culmination of the last year’s work. The game went live for PS3 on the Playstation Store across Europe, Australia & the US yesterday and last night we held a press event with our partners Sony to celebrate the launch.

SCEE (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) kindly shared their central London office with us for a press launch event in their bar. We were thrilled to have so many journalists attending including The Times and the Guardian together with a multitude of independent gaming and Doctor Who fan sites. I got to stand up and provide a little flavour on the journey we have taken with Supermassive Games, Sony and the wider Doctor Who team to create the game. We shared a couple of video compilations of game footage and then I took questions from the floor. Finally, they got to go and play the game on PS3 and PS Vita whilst of course having the odd drink and a bite to eat.

Feedback from the journalists was really, really positive and now I get to wait with the team for the first reviews to hit.

It’s been an incredible journey building this first Doctor Who title for BBC Worldwide and it’s been great fun sharing our progress with your via this blog. I hope you all enjoy the game and please send your feedback to our twitter account @DoctorWhoTEC and hashtag #doctorwhotec.

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The wait is over! We are very pleased to announce that Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock will be available to download globally for the PS3 on the PlayStation Network from Wednesday, May 23rd and at UK retail outlets from May 25th. We really appreciate your patience as we’ve been making sure the game is perfect for all you eager fans!

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Welcome to the second blog on Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock. I’m Simon Harris and I am the Executive Producer for BBC Worldwide on the game, which means the project is my overall responsibility. I need to ensure that all aspects come together to make a great game that stays true to the Doctor Who brand. This means working with our developer, Supermassive Games, across areas such as design, art and programming. It also extends to working with the Doctor Who teams in London and Cardiff to ensure that everything looks and feels as it should.

For this blog post, I thought I would give you some insight into the monsters that will be appearing in the game. This goes alongside our first gameplay trailer, released today, which showcases them.

Choosing the monsters for the game turned out to be a more of a complicated process than you would imagine. Initially, when Supermassive put in their design pitch for the game, they had chosen the four monsters they would like to see, both as Doctor Who fans and from a gameplay point of view. However, at that time they weren’t aware of the new monsters that were going to be shown in the new series, which was just about to start on the BBC. Given the high level of security we place on information about the show, there were some great discussions where we had to talk very cryptically about a specific monster. We had to balance this with trying to understand what the design team at Supermassive wanted to achieve – we didn’t want to include the new monster if it completely broke the gameplay plans. Thankfully the design change felt good and The Silence was added to the monster line up. I’m not going to tell you which one got cut, but I can promise it will make an appearance in a future game.

Having settled on our monster line up: the Silence, Cybermen, Silurians and the Daleks, work started on the detailed game design on how they would challenge the Doctor and River. We also had to start modelling the characters for the in-game graphics. Accuracy is vital, and it was essential to have the models looking like they do in the show. It was great to start working with the Doctor Who teams in London and Cardiff to ensure our dimensions, the shaders (the technical term for an aspect of the graphics which give a texture a look and feel to it such as steel or cloth) and the colours were all entirely correct.

It was during this process that something slightly surprising happened. The art team at Supermassive were getting really positive feedback on how the monsters looked, which was great, and the Doctor Who team then asked if we could make some changes that deviated from the reference photos. It turns out that there were a number of small tweaks which the team would have loved to make to the designs of the monsters on the show, but had been unable to for various reasons. At this point they saw the opportunity to make these tweaks in our monster designs. Of course, we were more than happy to include these amendments. So, whilst you’re watching the trailers or playing the game, send a tweet to @DoctorWhoTEC if you think you know what the tweaks we have made are… We would love to see how eagle eyed the fans are!

Having got our standard monsters all approved and looking great, we turned our attention to the game “bosses”. As all Doctor Who fans know, there is always a leader or central character driving the troops forward and so we wanted to see if we could create some monster leaders that really utilised the technology and visuals we have at our disposal working on PlayStation 3 and PS Vita.

The team at Supermassive spent a huge amount of time looking at all of the references of the monsters from previous shows and games, as well as the massive amount of books, webisodes and other content available. The team then proposed two new versions of existing monsters which would become the finales for our monsters. This was a pretty nervous time; we wanted monsters that felt as scary as they do in the show and matched the scale of the locations and environments we were creating for the game. Creating a new version of a classic Doctor Who monster is a big ask – they have to be carefully detailed and you must establish exactly where they sit within the canon of the show. Thankfully, the Doctor Who team loved what we were suggesting and both of our new monster versions were approved and are in the game. There is a tiny sight of one of them in our new monster trailer; again, tweet @DoctorWhoTEC if you think you know which one it is…

So, just an insight into some of the thinking and things that happened to get our monsters into Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock. I’ll be back soon with another blog detailing more information on what goes on behind the scenes of making our game.

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Okay, so, here we go… the first blog post on Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock. I’m looking forward to writing more of these blog posts over the next couple of months as we move towards launch.

Developing anything for Doctor Who has to be done right. The show has such a following that we need to be certain that everything the game does fits with the expectations of the fans. So far, we’ve said very, very little about the game. This trailer just has the barest hints about the core of this story. What is The Eternity Clock? How is it related to the Doctor? How is River involved in this?

I’m afraid this post isn’t going to answer any of these questions; we’ll leave that to future posts and the game itself.

We’re very excited to be working with Supermassive Games as they’ve already delivered some great titles for PlayStation, such as Tumble, Start The Party and Start The Party: Save the World. The team are huge fans of the show and they’ve been great at bringing the key essence of Doctor Who into the game.

Working on PlayStation Vita, as well as PS3, is a real privilege and its unique set of features has allowed our designers to cut loose and we’ll tell you a lot more detail about how we’re using those features in a future post.

So, I hope you enjoy the trailer and look forward to sharing more details with you in the future.

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