Beenox Studios announced today plans to publicly debut The VATZ, a new action/strategy game built using an engine called Goliath. The company plans to officially unveil the product at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), which happens next month in Los Angeles, Calif. Beenox is shopping The VATZ around for a publisher.
While the technology demo Beenox will show at E3 next month runs only on Windows, Beenox founder and president Dee Brown explained to MacCentral that the Goliath technology has been created to support multiple platforms.
“The engine could be used to create Macintosh games,” Brown said. “That really depends on whether or not the publisher of the game wants it for the Macintosh market.”
Beenox Studios is best known to Mac gamers for its efforts with the Coldstone Game Engine, a 2D role-playing adventure game engine published by shareware mavens Ambrosia Software. Coldstone was the underlying technology that powered Pillars of Garendall, an RPG title also published by Ambrosia. Beenox also collaborated with Pangea Software to develop the popular Mac-only kart racing game, Cro-Mag Rally, bundled for a time on iMac and iBook systems.
Details are still sketchy on The VATZ, but Beenox describes the game as featuring “intense 3rd-person game play and multiple twisted storylines.” The underpinning graphics technology, Goliath, sports an advanced physics engine, open-ended logic systems, level of detail rendering, animation interpolation, morphing and blending. The Goliath engine also sports graphics system-specific features and optimizations — such as vertex and pixel shader support for Nvidia’s GeForce3 graphics chip, according to Beenox.
“In the past several months, we put the best we got in developing a 3D engine that would have everything a gamer may expect and more: Goliath was born,” said Brown.
More screenshots are available from The VATZ Web site at the link above. And if you’re going to be at E3 next month, drop by the Beenox booth at location 6035.