Developer Spotlight:  Collision Course with Jonathan Faith
Developer Spotlight:  Collision Course with Jonathan Faith

Developer Spotlight: Collision Course with Jonathan Faith

Collision Course is a stunning looking CRYENGINE-powered game currently in Early Access. We talk to Jonathan Faith from developer team Crynosaurs about the time-travelling dinosaur adventure, how development has progressed, why they chose CRYENGINE, and what’s next for the game.


Hi Jonathan! Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us about Collision Course for people who haven’t heard of the game?

Collision Course is an open world sci-fi adventure game set in a prehistoric backdrop. To stay alive you’ll be forced to deal with hungry carnivorous dinosaurs, stranded survivors, malfunctioning droids, and a hostile ecosystem. The finished game will include a story mode as well as a survival/sandbox mode.  

The survival game genre has really grown – what attracted you to the genre? And what influences have gone into the game? 

The game won’t be exclusively focused on survival like typical survival games. The final game will be single-player and story driven, with some aspects of RPG games along with survival elements.  We’re aiming for more of a scavenging type of survival as opposed to just crafting from primitive materials.  We feel this provides more of a realistic survival experience. The major influences have been the Crysis and FarCry series, JP Trespasser and realistic survival games like The Forest.

Dinosaurs are awesome. Which is your favorite dino in the game?

I’d have to say the Utahraptors. They are hard to see, hear, and are sometimes found in packs. They really bring the game to a jump scare level. 


What’s your favorite gameplay moment in the game so far?

For me it was the first time I randomly encountered a fight between a T-rex and Stegosaurus in the forest. I had tested it hundreds of times but seeing it happen in game randomly in the dense morning fog was pretty inspiring. 

How long have you and your team been working with CRYENGINE? How did you get together?

We’ve been working in CRYENGINE since the first Sandbox, almost 10 years.  The original idea for the game is about four years old, but we only teamed up about a year and a half ago. We actually met on the cryengine.com forums!

Hey, that's awesome! The main purpose of the forums is bringing like-minded devs together so it's great to hear it worked out so well for you guys. Why did you choose to go the Early Access route? 

Early Access can support the development process and provides gamers with something to play immediately, at a lower cost than the final game. We can get feedback instantly from our players as to what they’d like to see and report bugs or gameplay and balancing issues. It’s helped a great deal already.


How has the experience of going through Early Access been? 

Early Access has been excellent for us. Our release went well and we’re growing at a steady pace. We’ve also polled our fans to give them a say as to what they want to see next. We plan to do more polls in the future too.

Why did you choose CRYENGINE to develop your game?

It was the engine that really wowed the planet, and that initially attracted us to it years ago. Overall it’s a nice, integrated package with just about everything we needed to make our game. It fits really well with the type of game we’re producing. When Crytek opened up the source code and introduced the “Pay-What-You-Want” licensing model, we knew we had the chance to create the game we always wanted.


Which CRYENGINE features have made the difference for your development?

First of all, we are nature lovers. Whether it be fauna or flora, we know CRYENGINE does it best. Secondly the current code base of GameSDK (5.2.3) has many native features that are needed for an FPS game, although they do need a little tailoring here and there. This allows us the time to focus our efforts elsewhere, like adding new features. This is especially useful for us being a very small team. Finally, having full source code access is huge. There are so many examples to learn from, tweak and build on.


Has the CRYENGINE community helped you during the project? 

Over the last 10 years the community has been a major source for us to learn the ins and outs of the engine. More recently the documentation has greatly improved, reducing the reliance on the community for troubleshooting issues. We still have hang-ups from time to time that would really set us back, if not for members from the community who have overcome similar challenges before and were willing to share that knowledge. 


What are the next steps for the game? 

We’re always working on adding new items and dinosaurs, but in addition we’re looking into creating a reliable mission system so we can add in some story or lore to the game. Our current missions are placeholders to give the users an objective if sandbox survival isn’t their thing. In the future we hope to grow the team and find an experienced and passionate CryENGINEER to join us!

Thanks Jonathan!

Want to find out more or interested in working for Crynosaurs? You can follow Collision Course’s progress & get in touch with the developers on their website, on FacebookTwitter and you can also check out the game on Steam

- Your CRYENGINE Team