House of the Dead: Overkill developed with BlitzTech

Blitz’s game middleware BlitzTech has been announced as the tech underpinning Sega and Headstrong’s House of the Dead: Overkill.

The developer has been building its cross-platform technology for over ten years, and started licensing it to selected external partners last year.

“When looking for a development solution for the creation of House of the Dead:Overkill, we needed something that would allow us to do our job efficiently, simply and with results that would blow away our competition," said Steve Pritchard, Headstrong’s development director.

"BlitzTech gave us exactly that with its tightly integrated, cross-platform, networked development solution, where all of the dev components are arranged around an asset database, with each component sharing the same core interface and tools systems. It was critical to our progress for all team members to be using the same tools, so they could quickly and easily view, investigate and manipulate assets created by other disciplines; assets that, when checked-in, immediately propagated across the project.”

“Having used BlitzTech on House of the Dead: Overkill, we at Headstrong would not hesitate to kick off our next project with the same tools and environment, and this time we would look forward to exploring its cross-platform capabilities," he concluded.

Blitz’s technical director Richard Hackett added: “We’ve been developing and using BlitzTech for years internally. In order to be able to provide the necessary high quality of support to an external studio, we had to establish workable systems and it’s a tribute to this effort that Headstrong were able to hit the ground running using BlitzTech.

"It is getting harder and harder for studios to justify the overheads and time required to develop in-house tools and technology, and with the latest console transition our continued investment in quality game development tools and customer support is really paying dividends. We have been able to evolve BlitzTech into an industry-leading middleware solution.”

More information about the studio’s use of BlitzTech can be found in the next issue of Develop.