page_title: Safecracker (video game)
section_title: Production
hierarchical_section_title: Safecracker (video game) / Development / Production
caption_attribution_description: Animated version of De Kroeg.jpg (Used for Dutch Village Pump)
context_page_description: Safecracker is a 1997 puzzle adventure game developed by Daydream Software and published by GT Interactive. It casts the player as a security professional, whose goal is to infiltrate the mansion headquarters of a safe manufacturer and break into 35 of its unusual models. Each safe is guarded by a different type of puzzle, including sliding tiles, anagram codes and translations from braille. The player's progression is nonlinear: the mansion can be explored, and its safes unlocked, in multiple orders. However, the game must be completed within a 12-hour time limit.
  Safecracker was conceived in 1994 as the debut title by Daydream, one of Sweden's first major computer game developers. After signing with Warner Interactive Entertainment in 1995, Daydream began to develop the game with Macromedia Director and QuickTime VR. Expensive Silicon Graphics machines were purchased with Warner's funding to create the visuals; musicians Rob 'n' Raz were hired to compose the soundtrack. However, corporate upheaval at WIE led to costly delays. GT Interactive ultimately bought the publisher in 1996 and purposely slow-walked Safecracker's release and promotion.
context_section_description: Daydream Software began development of Safecracker by creating thorough blueprints of the mansion and its rooms on paper. Objects inside the building were similarly drawn on paper ahead of the modeling stage. Nigel Papworth wrote that he "raided the local bookshops and bought up all the books [he] could find on antique furniture and Victoriana" for inspiration. The plan was to build the game's visual assets on Macintosh computers with Strata StudioPro after the concepting phase. However, Daydream soon deduced that the agreed-upon budget and deadline for Safecracker were unworkable with the developer's existing personnel and technology, according to Papworth. Hoping to speed up production, Jörgen Isaksson suggested that the team develop Safecracker's graphics on expensive Silicon Graphics workstations instead. Daydream felt that these machines and their software "offered an unbeatable combination of speed, quality in modeling and rendering". The company persuaded Warner Interactive Entertainment to pay $50,000 for three workstations and a server, which made Daydream one of Sweden's top three buyers of Silicon Graphics computers. As a result, the graphics-production setup for Safecracker consisted of SGI Indy machines, for modeling the visuals, and a single SGI Challenge server. All of them were used for rendering.
  For Safecracker's design, the team adopted a nonlinear approach because they were "allergic" to linear gameplay, Papworth later said. While researching adventure games in preparation, Papworth catalogued his dislikes with the genre and shaped Safecracker accordingly. This resulted in a scheme to make the basement and first floor fully traversable from the start, and the second floor unlockable after a relatively short time. In this way, Papworth noted, "Only the end task would be dependent on most of the clues having been already solved", which prevented Safecracker from becoming a series of roadblocks. Nonlinearity proved to be a challenge for both the designers and programmers. In an attempt to prevent the open structure from confusing players, the team included "exact instructions and advice" in the starting sequence, Papworth explained. Papworth used each room's theme to determine the design of its puzzles: for example, the music room contains a jukebox-inspired safe. He recalled creating roughly "80% of the safe designs in the first 3–4 weeks" of production; the rest were handled by other team members at later times.
  Safecracker was developed primarily on Macintosh hardware with Macromedia Director and QuickTime VR. The latter software, which displays virtual-reality panoramas, had not yet been used for many games. It was one of the selling points in the Warner Interactive deal: Papworth remarked that the team hoped to "be the first developer to use [3D rotating panoramas] in a full sized game." Daydream worked initially with a beta edition, as QuickTime VR was not launched until July 1995. To create Safecracker's visuals, Daydream used its Silicon Graphics computers to build wire-frame 3D models with programs from Alias Wavefront, including PowerAnimator. Each modeler consulted a collective to-do list, from which he would "pick an object ... and write his name beside it", according to Papworth. This list cited the relevant reference pages in Papworth's books. Texture maps were drawn on Macintosh computers with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Once a textured environment was lit, the team inserted a camera to render 12 images in a 360° radius, and the results were image-stitched into a rotatable panorama with QuickTime VR.
  During production, Daydream legally had zero employees, and instead hired Sombrero staff and outside freelancers on a contractual basis. Team members assumed multiple roles. Leif Holm and the new hire Fredrik Jonsson modeled environments and furniture; Holm simultaneously managed aspects of Unix programming. Papworth, alongside his other jobs, textured environments and arranged objects inside them. Isaksson modeled and coded, but also compiled the team's visual assets into QuickTime VR an
caption: Daydream Software created rotatable 360° panoramas (like the one demonstrated above) by stitching together 12 still images of each room in QuickTime VR.