Star Wars: Dark Forces - Development

Development

Development of Dark Forces was led by Daron Stinnett. The programming was led by Ray Gresko, and the graphics and storyline by Justin Chin. Production began in September 1993, at a time when the first-person shooter genre was very popular. The developers of Dark Forces wanted to adapt the format into an adventure game. To do this they introduced puzzles and strategy, along with a Star Wars plot. Originally Luke Skywalker was intended to be the main character in the game, however the developers realized that this would add constraints to gameplay and storyline. Instead a new character, Kyle Katarn, was created.

Dark Forces was commonly called a Doom clone, but the game makes significant expansion upon the gameplay features present in Doom. The new gameplay mechanisms that were not common at the time of release include the ability to look up and down, duck, jump, and swim. The usage of multiple floor levels is another technical advance in the first-person shooter genre. To produce these new features, the developers wrote a game engine from scratch. The Jedi engine can create gameplay and graphical elements such as fully 3D objects, atmospheric effects such as fog and haze, animated textures and shading.

Stinnett indicated that the developers wanted these elements to be part of an "active environment", and features were included to create this: "ships come and go at the flight decks, rivers sweep along, platforms and conveyor belts move and much of the machinery functions." The Dark Forces soundtrack uses the iMUSE system to create interactive music using the Star Wars soundtrack composed by John Williams. There is also full speech and sound effects in stereo.

The Dark Troopers in Dark Forces were created specially for the game by Justin Chin and Paul Mica. Chin notes that they were designed as a more advanced enemy when compared to standard stormtroopers: "Instead of just beefing up the stormtroopers, I designed them to be more efficient. I wanted something more terrifying and more omnipotent." Three designs for the Dark Troopers were produced for Dark Forces. Lucasfilm licensing department initially rejected two of the designs for looking too much out of character, so Chin produced new designs which were ultimately approved.

Dark Forces was ported from DOS to Apple Macintosh. This presented several challenges for the developers. LucasArts requested the game to be produced for both DOS and Macintosh with the same system requirements, specifically the random-access memory (RAM). The Mac OS runs a graphical user interface which uses up RAM while DOS does not, meaning the Macintosh version has less RAM available for Dark Forces to use. Aaron Giles, who was the Macintosh programmer for Dark Forces explained that to resolve this problem the memory had to be managed more efficiently.