Bridge It - Official Website

Set in the picturesque surroundings of sparse deserts and dense forests it is your task to strategically design and construct an engineering masterpiece. Watch in eager anticipation as unsuspecting motorists, heavy freight trains and tourist riverboats approach. Will your solution stand up to the test or will tons of mangled steel be sent plummeting into the river below?

Bridge It shows off the very latest in cinematic gaming. Based on Chronic Logic's award winning Bridge Construction Set (Pontifex II) and using the Auran Jet 3D engine running on NVIDIA's latest GeForceFX hardware it offers a host of real time effects that surpass many pre-rendered scenes.

Key Features:

• Advanced shaders - a suite of complex vertex and pixel shaders are used to push the limits of virtual reality and provide realistic water, sun flares and wind swept grass fields. Using shaders Auran adds pixel level details to improve on an already highly detailed environment.
• High resolution objects - the GeForce FX's high throughput allows the art in Bridge It to be of such quality that 100,000's of polygons are used for environment and game objects. This level of detail was once reserved for still renders but is now completely viable in real-time.

GCM:	Firstly, please get us started by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about the team behind Bridge It.
Josiah Pisciotta:	I am Josiah Pisciotta co-founder of Chronic Logic LLC. Bridge It is actually being developed almost entirely by a company named Auran. They have taken our game Bridge Construction Set and improving the graphics and streamlined the user interface.

GCM:

For those unfamiliar with Chronic Logic’s bridge building games, please give us a brief history of the series, and perhaps tell us a bit about the inspiration/concept that started it all.

Josiah Pisciotta:

Our bridge building games started when we were developing a vehicle combat game called MindRiot. Alex Austin was developing a physics engine for it when he got the idea to try and use the physics to do a bridge building game, much like the projects in physics class where you build a structure out of toothpicks and see how much weight it can support. Our first bridge building game was called Bridge Builder, but the name was trademarked, which we didn’t find out tell after the demo was release. Instead of finishing the game, Alex developed Pontifex, a much more advanced bridge building game. After Pontifex we developed Bridge Construction Set (Pontifex II), which we feel was a vast improvement over Pontifex. Bridge It is based on Bridge Construction Set.

GCM:	Setting out to make Bridge It, what of the foundation laid out in the first two titles did you most want to improve upon?
Josiah Pisciotta:	The concept of Bridge It was to take the foundation laid out in Bridge Construction Set and vastly improve the graphics, as well as update the user interface. The idea was to keep the game play basically the same.

GCM:

As for all new features and gameplay elements, what can we expect from Bridge It?

Josiah Pisciotta:

First off graphically Bridge It is in a whole different world then our other bridge building games. The user interface is much more friendly. Bridge It includes a scoring system which rates your bridge based on cost and strength. This will allow people to compete for high scores. Bridge It also has levels where your bridges are tested by earthquakes, and new vehicles. Most of all its quite a experience visually.

GCM:

Please tell us about the physics engine behind Bridge It? What does it take into account and how closely do you feel it reflects the “real thing”?

Josiah Pisciotta:

The physics behave realistically on a very simple level, so things that would work on real bridges will tend to work in Bridge It. The physics take care of all the simulating which allows the user the freedom to try anything they like and see if it works. This allows anyone to play the game with or without engineering knowledge. As for the real thing, I would not drive across any bridges designed in Bridge It. :)

GCM:

How many levels in total will Bridge It feature and what do you feel will add replay value?

Josiah Pisciotta:

Bridge It includes 30 levels and 3 tutorial levels. The scoring system will add replay value, because you can build a bridge and then think wait I could make this cheaper or stronger, or maybe there is totally different way I could build this bridge. Much like BCS the number of possible bridges that can be built in a level is huge. Even after playing through all the levels a number of times I will suddenly get a new idea about how to do a level.

GCM:	Considering the community that has developed around Bridge Contraction Set, how integral do you feel this community is to the final product and what is being done in Bridge It to further nurture this community.
Josiah Pisciotta:	I feel that the community will be very happy with Bridge It, but with Bridge It more then any of our other games we hope to help the community grow. With the beautiful graphics and simple user interface we hope to create new bridge building fans that have never played a bridge building game before.

GCM:

APlease tell us about the Bridge It graphics engine, its “bells and whistles”, and how well it will run on both high-end NVIDIA and ATI cards.

Josiah Pisciotta:

Bridge It shows off the very latest in cinematic gaming. Using the Auran Jet 3D engine running on Nvidia’s latest GeForceFX hardware it offers a host of real time effects that surpass many pre-rendered scenes. It includes extremely high level of detail on all objects within a scene with per-pixel lighting and realistic shadows and reflections that change with the time of day. It will run on any NVIDIA card that is Geforce 4 or better. To really see Bridge It in all its glory you should run it on a GeForceFX. Bridge It was specifically designed for NVIDIA graphics cards and unfortunately will not work on ATI cards.

GCM:

Finally, as a smaller developer, how hard is it to alert the public of your products and how much success have you found so far?

Josiah Pisciotta:

As a small developer it can be very difficult to get your products out there, specially to the “mainstream” audience. We have a great fan base, and the whole independent game industry’s growth has helped to spread the word about Chronic Logic and our games. As far as success, we have been able to complete four games (Pontifex, Triptych, Word Peace, and BCS), and are about to release our fifth (Bridge It). We are also developing three other original games at this time. In that aspect we have been very successful. Financial however it’s still very much a struggle.

GCM:	Thanks for your time. Would you care to leave our readers with any last thoughts or impressions?
Josiah Pisciotta:	If you have not tried Bridge Construction Set, or Bridge It you should, many people think a game about building bridges is only for engineers, but we are no engineers and we made the game. It’s an original, dynamic and fun game that almost anyone can enjoy. Give it a try :)

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