In part one of our look at the origins of the PlayStation Move Sharp Shooter, we saw how the peripheral began life as a side project at Guerrilla. In the second part, we learn how the Guerrilla team received valuable help from their friends at Zipper Interactive.

Guerrilla’s proposal for a Move-based peripheral was sent to SCE Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida and the Sony Product Design group, who circulated it among other studios for input. The proposal met with very enthusiastic reactions. “When we saw the foam-board-and-duct-tape mockup, we were like ‘Cool, let’s make that!’” Sony Product Design Manager Ennin Huang recalls.

It wasn’t long before Guerrilla was contacted by developers from other shooters like SOCOM: SPECIAL FORCES, Time Crisis: Razing Storm and Dead Space: Extraction. Zipper Interactive Game Director Seth Luisi, who’d already been looking into a Move-based control scheme for SOCOM: SPECIAL FORCES, took a particular interest in the project. “Seth strongly felt that a gun peripheral could bring an additional level of immersion and realism to the table,” Guerrilla Game Director Mathijs de Jonge says. “Like Killzone 3, SOCOM: SPECIAL FORCES was still in its early stages, so the timing made sense for him as well.”

With each iteration, the design evolved away from the StA-11.

The Zipper team suggested several highly useful additions to the gun peripheral design. “For instance, they wanted players to be able to reload without taking their hands off the navigation controller,” Mathijs explains. “This could be solved by adding pump-action mechanism to the fore grip. Also, they noted that many tactical shooters, including SOCOM: SPECIAL FORCES, featured weapons with multiple modes of fire, which would require the inclusion of a fire selector switch.”

With basic shape and functionality hammered out, the gun peripheral entered the prototyping phase. “Every six weeks, a new plastic gun peripheral would arrive from China for us and the team at Zipper to comment on,” Guerrilla Lead Concept Designer (and resident weapons expert) Roy Postma says. “And with each iteration, you could see the design come into its own more. The style of the weapon became more neutral, less Killzone-specific.”

Early black prototypes of the Sharp Shooter were a little too realistic.

Enhancements included a more ergonomic angle for the fore grip, an adjustable and collapsible stock instead of the foldable one, and overall weight reductions to facilitate prolonged play. “Sadly, some features fell by the wayside during this process,” Roy says. “We originally wanted to have an ammo counter display above the stock, but it just proved too costly.”

The colour of the weapon changed too, evolving from the gunmetal grays of the original design, to a jet black version, to the more neutral grays of the final product. “From a legal and marketing perspective we had to impose some constraints,” Ennin says. “The black version looked very menacing, but it would have violated most countries’ gun laws.” Even the first grey prototypes proved difficult to get through customs, as Mathijs found after a demonstration at a conference.

Meanwhile, the teams at Guerrilla and Zipper experimented with Move control systems for their respective games, figuring out sensible settings for dead zone, aim assistance and controller sensitivity. “Initially we wanted to map a lot of in-game actions to player gestures as well,” Mathijs says, “but that turned out to interfere with player aim too much. So we restricted it to short, simple movements like thrusting the gun peripheral to perform a melee.”

The final production prototype in all its glory.

The gun peripheral went into full production in the run-up to Killzone 3‘s launch. Early hands-on reports of the device – now dubbed the PlayStation Move Sharp Shooter – were almost unanimously positive, with many reporters expressing pleasant surprise at how solid and natural the peripheral felt during play.

“In terms of control methods, nothing feels more natural than the sheer simplicity of ‘Point, Aim, Shoot’”, Ennin says. Mathijs concurs: “The peripheral made Killzone 3 immediately accessible to people who had never played a Killzone title before. Some reporters even stated that they preferred to play Killzone 3 with the Sharp Shooter instead of the DualShock 3, because they felt more immersed. That was a huge compliment for us.”

But it wasn’t until the week before Killzone 3′s release that Mathijs realized his other goal for the Sharp Shooter had also been achieved. “I was watching the PlayStation commercial for Killzone 3 and the Sharp Shooter and I suddenly realized, you know what – Kevin Butler looks absolutely badass holding that thing! That’s when I knew we’d fully achieved what we set out to do.”

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By now you’ve probably read a thing or two about the PlayStation Move Sharp Shooter – like the fact that it has a digital trigger, a pump-action grip, and an authentic form factor. But did you know that it originally started life as a side project for Killzone 3‘s game director? In this two-part article, we look at the origins of the Sharp Shooter and the people behind it.

It all began with a Helghast soldier using a PlayStation Move controller.

“We were at a game convention where the Move was being demonstrated,” Guerrilla Game Director Mathijs de Jonge recalls. “We had several Helghast performers walking the show floor, and one of them decided to have a go at the Move demo booth.”

For Mathijs, the image of a big, intimidating Helghast soldier waving about an innocuous game peripheral just felt off. “I could scarcely imagine him playing a game like Killzone that way,” Mathijs says. “He looked like he should be holding something resembling a weapon – something with a little oomph to it. A peripheral that not only played well, but looked cool at the same time.”

The event got Mathijs thinking about an add-on for the PlayStation Move. “We’d toyed with the idea of designing a Killzone-themed gun peripheral before,” Mathijs says, “but with the introduction of the Move, that idea suddenly seemed a lot more feasible. The timing was right as well, because development on Killzone 3 was still in its early stages.”

Early mockups consisted of kitbashed gun peripherals from other platforms.

Mathijs voiced his idea at a Director’s Panel, where Sony Product Design Manager Ennin Huang was also in attendance. Having worked with the SOCOM team on the first Bluetooth headset for PlayStation 3, Ennin was heavily involved with the development of PlayStation peripherals. “After the panel, Ennin approached us and said he very much liked the idea of a solid, realistic-looking Move add-on,” Mathijs says. “He advised us to put together an official proposal and submit it to the Product Design team.”

For his proposal, Mathijs enlisted the help of Guerrilla Lead Concept Designer (and resident weapons expert) Roy Postma. “Mathijs wanted to design a gun peripheral that could represent the majority of firearms in Killzone 3,” Roy says. “We chose the Helghast StA-11 SMG as our starting point: like most weapons in the game it requires two hands to operate, but at the same time it’s quite compact.”

The first mockup housed the navigation controller in the rear grip.

Using foam board, duct tape and pieces of gun peripherals from several different platforms, Mathijs and Roy then constructed a mockup roughly approximating the StA-11′s size and shape. The mockup housed the navigation controller in the rear grip and the Move controller in the barrel, while a trigger mechanism in the fore grip connected to the Move’s T-button. This setup, however, proved impractical.

“When you play Killzone 3 on a DualShock 3 controller, you move around with your left thumb and fire with your right index finger,” Roy explains. “Our first mockup had it the other way around, making the setup somewhat awkward for right-handed people. So I went back to the drawing board to design a clip/fore grip that could house the navigation controller. I also moved the firing trigger back to the rear grip, where it normally resides on an StA-11.”

Guerrilla CEO Hermen Hulst tries out the revised mockup.

Instead of relying on a complicated (and possibly error-prone) physical pass-through mechanism to bridge the distance to the Move’s T-button, the trigger could simply be wired up to the Move’s extension connector digitally. This solution allowed Roy to add additional buttons to the body of the peripheral, saving players from having to reach for the Move controller in the barrel whenever they wanted to reload or swap weapons.

In the meantime, Mathijs worked on the proposal document, outlining the type of user experience he had in mind for the gun peripheral. “I wanted players to experience a sense of joy as soon as they picked up the peripheral,” Mathijs says. “It not only had to look cool and authentic, I also wanted it to feel like a weapon. It had to enhance the overall experience of playing a shooter on the PlayStation 3.”

Check back next week for the second part of Sharp Shooter Origins, in which the Guerrilla team gets help from their friends at Zipper Interactive!

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Greetings from the fabulous Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, CA, where we are in the middle of Insomniac’s 3rd Annual Community Day. Over the course of today, we have been letting fans get hands-on with Resistance 3 and Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. We’ve also been showing all sorts of cool demos and Q&As that we will be producing to bring you in the form of Full Moon Show podcasts in the coming weeks.

That said, today we are finally able reveal, due to overwhelming community demand, that Resistance 3 will support Stereoscopic 3D. Furthermore, for those of you who are enjoying the precision of the PlayStation Move motion controller with your copies of Killzone 3 and the SOCOM: Special Forces Beta, you will be delighted to know that Resistance 3 will also support Move and the sharp shooter. After KZ3 launched, we heard a massive amount of positive feedback, and were inundated with requests to support both Move and sharp shooter, so we’re glad to be able to finally confirm the news.

As you can see, our founder Ted Price and Resistance 3 Creative Director Marcus Smith are so pumped that they found 3D glasses and grabbed sharp shooters to pose for a photo (though we had to remind them that they need the cool high-tech stereoscopic 3D glasses to actually play, not those old “red-blue” ones).

Resistance 3 hits your 3DTV in September, so have your sharp shooter ready! In the meantime, if you want to hear about all the latest happenings at our community day, follow us on Twitter, (search for #InsomniacGames for some live contests!) like us on Facebook or check out eu.playstation.com for the latest news on R3. We’ll be posting audio and video from the event in the weeks to come, so keep checking in for all the latest.

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A couple of days ago I arrived at work to find what turned out to be the first PlayStation Move Sharp Shooter peripheral, with a post-it note stuck to it saying “something for the blog?”

Rather than write a blog post telling you what it is and what it does, I decided to fire up Killzone 3 and give it a try for myself, and you can follow that voyage of discovery in the video below.

While we don’t have a firm release date yet, I can assure you that the PlayStation Move Sharp Shooter will be in Europe in time for Killzone 3.

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