There’s that character in the Truman Show, that director, played by Ed Harris,” says Will Wright. “Imagine if you had somebody like that behind you, trying to make your life more interesting and dramatic. That’s what I’d like to have.”

The veteran developer, mastermind behind such concepts as freeform urban sandbox Sim City and Spore – the latter of which enabled players to micromanage the evolution of a whole species from singe-celled organism to galaxy-conquering warlords – is attempting to describe his latest idea. Comparing it to the sinister puppet master behind the fate of a character imprisoned in a lifelong reality TV show might not be the most auspicious start, but hey, Wright reminds us: “You could turn it off if you want to.”

That’s still not much comfort, but Wright insists that HiveMind is a game – or rather games, as it’s actually a multifaceted experience across several platforms, including mobile and social networking – that seeks to intrude on our daily lives in an entirely benevolent way.

“One of the things I really want to do is have these games expose portions of reality to someone that they’re not aware of, but that are immediately accessible to them,” Wright explains. “If you imagine opportunities and things around you that maybe you don’t know about; there might be people you would meet or events you might go to, or places you would go check out. One of the key questions of this is ‘How do we make reality more interesting?’, rather than using games to distract you from reality.”

He continues: “We want to dig up a lot of information around you where you are, but in other dimensions, not just spatially but also to map from interests, map from time of day, the weather, how much money you want to spend, what’s on your schedule, all these things. If we take all these things into account, we can build a deep situational awareness abut the player. So we understand exactly what state they’re in, their mood, et cetera.”

It’s like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and a Voight Kampff test rolled into one and left to run riot in a gamified real world, with seemingly infinite possibilities. Wright is convinced that the gameplay element of sharing will encourage a serious amount of information surrender from players, as they trade personal data for gameplay.

“We have the ability to build this very deep situational awareness around the individual, and reflect that value. So we want them to feel like, every time they give us a little bit of data, they’re getting something back. So, we’re trying to get them on our side there; we’re gathering the data for their benefit and their entertainment, not just to target advertisers to them.”

“And it’s not always got to come from the user,” he adds, “In fact we can have people that know you, close friends and family, giving us data about you, if they’re part of some game experience you’re collectively doing together.”

Wright’s belief that all this will come good, and that people will throw themselves into his social experiment, seems to be inspired closely by the founding ideals of his general aims as a developer throughout his career.

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In games™ Issue 118, Tore Blystad, game director of Hitman: Absolution IO Interactive, dispels some myths about the chosen direction for the long-awaited followup in killer slaphead Agent 47′s professional career.

“It’s a player choice. What do you want to do?” says Blystad. “You can aim for the perfectionist stuff, but between taking the action route and getting through without touching anything, there’s a pretty healthy variety in that choice spectrum. It’s all part of the balancing. It shouldn’t feel like there’s only one winning strategy – just pulling out your guns and killing everyone is not going to be easier than stealth. In one case it might be easier to shoot someone, yes, but in another case it’ll just be easier to sneak by.”

What’s important, says Blystad, is that – as in previous games in the series – whatever your choice, it’s a compellling one: “The satisfaction you feel as a player should feel the same either way. Some people get offended by the idea of pulling out a gun during a professional playthrough. I think we also want to put the player in the shoes of a highly trained assassin, so of course he should be able to shoot everyone on sight. Agent 47, he could do that easily. The question is: what will the player do? What do you do?”

To find out more exclusive insights into IO’s plans for Hitman: Absolution, pick up games™ Issue 118, available available now. To purchase directly, or for subscription information, please visit the Imagine Shop.

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How is Irrational Games looking back to System Shock and the original BioShock to inform BioShock Infinite’s design?

Something we’re going to be talking about soon about Infinite is how we’ve taken some of the hardcore gamer thoughts on System Shock 2; the difficulty of it, the difficulty in the choices you had to make because they were permanent. We realised that we didn’t deliver to the super-hardcore gamer on BioShock with those choices. I don’t want to say anything prematurely but we’re really looking into that and trying to figure it out. We’re making sure the game delivers to someone who really loves BioShock… but also implementing those specific hard choices for those gamers who really missed that aspect from System Shock 2.

What’s the current state of development?

The last couple of months the thing we’ve been focusing on is spending a lot of time on Elizabeth. Getting her to be incredibly natural in every conceivable situation that happens – and she has a pretty broad range and that requires the programmers to take the time and study people. We told them to go stare at your wife – but don’t tell her that you’re staring at her. It’s the moment-to-moment human movement, and action and if you don’t get it right you get into uncanny valley. The action stuff is easy, right? Jump up here, climb here, do that, climb this… but what happens in the moment-to-moment stuff is important.

BioShock Infinite has a stronger focus on character development. How will the game provoke an emotional reaction in the player?

The core of our game is the relationship between you and Elizabeth. We make the player feel the connection to the character, to Elizabeth and to the city. The way you do that is you have to make them relatable. That was why BioShock was successful; people tuned into the story of Rapture and found connections to the people in the city. In Rapture they felt something for the citizens and how their lives fell apart. The city was a sort of haunted house, but it was also the story of a fallen king and there was some beauty to that. You have to make people relate to these stories; you have to make characters that people can say, ‘Okay, I can understand where these people are coming from,’ whether that’s Comstock in Infinite, Elizabeth or Andrew Ryan in BioShock. Elizabeth’s story is a very relatable story; it’s the story of someone who just wants to control her own destiny, whose life is being controlled by others. All she wants out of life is to have a say in what she does and what her life is. Booker, on the other hand, is a person who has lost a lot of faith in himself and in people. These two people meet at a point where they need each other.

What are the difficulties in balancing the character driven narrative with the spatial/environmental storytelling?

It’s really about the pacing. We look at each level and there’s a very tight integration of story and gameplay. I think one of the greatest benefits is the fact we don’t have a writer – we don’t need outside writers. I’m sitting there in every meeting in every level review not just as the creative director but as the writer as well. I’m thinking about the gameplay, I’m thinking about the pacing, I’m working with the team who are showing me these amazing things and I’m constantly thinking both as a creative director on the gameplay side and as a writer. That opportunity to be there that allows us to structure the pacing because the writer is heavily integrated into what’s happening on every level.

Is the player more actively involved in the over-arching desolation of Columbia, more so than they were in Rapture?

In BioShock you walk into the world after the story is over and the player is more of an archaeologist putting the pieces together. Infinite’s story is very much alive when you enter in Columbia; Booker and Elizabeth, as they try to accomplish their goal, have a very substantial affect on the larger story of the Vox Populi and the Founders. Actually, when you show up on the scene the Vox Populi aren’t really a force at all; they’re more of a bogeyman that the Founders use as propaganda. Through your actions, the Vox Populi becomes a much more substantial force and you have some responsibility there, which I think is interesting because you’re not just a passive participator in this story but you’re actually doing things that really change the dynamic of the city.

How does Elizabeth’s power affect both the gameplay and the story?

Elizabeth has the power to change what’s going on in that moment. Not just in the narrative but also that power to change combat dynamically. You can actively change the space around you, use new weapons you have, call on allies (for instance calling in the Founders if you’re fighting the Vox Populi) and changing the geometry. There are all these incredible powers that Elizabeth brings into the combat space which give another dimension to what people expect out of BioShock combat.

There must be an extremely complicated process of balancing the political aspects with the fantasy?

What’s so interesting for us is we started this story with a believable social angle. BioShock, for instance, dealt with arguments that are currently hitting America, and to some degree your country, about the role of government. The thing is, we’re not looking to the future for these issues but we’re studying the past. These kinds of arguments come up often. Particularly with BioShock Infinite, there was no Tea Party there was no Occupy Wall Street movement. We created these groups of Founders and the Vox Populi based on history, and it’s fascinating to watch the real world evolve into a situation that reflects Columbia in a lot of ways. We’re students of history and we try to make things that feel very grounded, and in Infinite we’re watching the world come to reflect our game.

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In your presentation of The Secret World today, you said that the game had been in development for nine years. Is that seriously true?

That was not a joke; that is the harsh reality of things. It has been on and off though, because we started working on The Secret World back in 2002 and back then it was called Cabal. It was set in the 1920s but aside from that it was still and MMORPG and it had the exact same backstory. For the most part it’s exactly the same game. Everything was developed on the story side back then and we’ve kept all of that material.

So why did you make the change?

Well the core team went on to make Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and I think during the development of Dreamfall, between 2003 and 2006, we had weekly brainstorming meetings about Cabal and then The Secret World. I think we all felt that the 1920s was a very evocative, romantic setting but that it lacks some of the important elements that would make life easier for us. It would make the game feel a little more fantasy when we wanted it to feel modern, with modern weapons. We wanted to bring more modern monsters into the mix and bring modern technology in. You hack computers in this game, and security cameras. You can’t really do that in the 1920s. So we eventually decided to move it, to keep everything we had but move it forward about 90 years and grow the story from that point on. So what happened after that game we were originally making, let’s build on that.

How long has development taken in its current form?

We’ve been working on it since the day Dreamfall shipped, which was April 2006, so five and a half years. Phew! It’s been fun, and I’m very happy to be shipping in April next year. At a certain point, these games are so big and so huge and time consuming that it’s nice to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. When the game is finished and plays as well as I hoped it would, it feels liberating.

You can see the time investment when you play it; the attention to detail in the environments…

It’s insane, just on the art side. Going through London, all that attention to detail, every texture being unique, every single sign meaning something, every piece of graffiti is double checked and incorporated into the lore. That’s the advantage of spending so much time on the game, to really be able to build and construct this elaborate world. But it also means that you have to maintain that level across the whole game. The attention to detail that you see in Kingsmouth, it’s there in Egypt and Transylvania as well. We’ve done the meticulous research, sending people to locations, hiring experts to explain how certain structures are designed, what their roads are like, what the street signs are like. It’s a lot of work.

Being from the UK, take it from us, London is incredibly authentic.

It feels like… It’s not a real part of London, but it has the ambience of London. I think that cities in games are just portrayed horribly wrong. It’s too easy to do the prettified version of Times Square, for example, but you don’t want that. You want to find the soul of the city. That’s really important to me. All that detail is part of giving this game a soul and I think good games have souls. Good games can be flawed and those that do have a soul have some value to them, and that’s what we’re trying to create here – a world with a soul, characters with soul… gameplay with a soul. Something that is fresh and different and maybe not super polished but with a substance of soul that’s really important to us.

There’s a huge dedication to storytelling in The Secret World, which remarkable given the size of the game. How much of a strain has it put on the writing team?

It is a lot of work but the advantage on the writing side is that we’ve had a long time. The lead writer and I have been working on this game since 2002 and we have kept most of our work from back then. Back in 2002, then during pre-production in 2006-07, we had meetings that lasted entire days at cafes. We’d say ‘ok, fuck it’ and just sit down somewhere and talk about one element and research it extensively. A lot of the characters, especially on Solomon Island, are characters we’ve been working on for five years and have developed real personalities through continuous rework, voice acting done over long periods of time. The deputy on the roof, in the demo you played, his strange sense of humour came from having the actor in the studio and realising that the character was very dry and boring then deciding to give him more soul, make him more quirky. So we rewrote the character on the spot and it worked perfectly with that actor, so we retrofitted his new characteristics into his history and backstory. It’s a very organic process that has been very beneficial. We don’t always have time to do it so sometimes we get lucky and other times we just have two hours to write a character and record his dialogue. But that in itself is a good exercise, we’re very used to working in intense situations and some of our best stuff comes from those moments where you say ‘holy shit, we have to do something now so let’s go nuts and do something no-one has done before’.

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Worms is sixteen years old now, practically a videogames veteran. How do you look at the IP these days?

John Dennis

Well I think we’re really fortunate to be in a position where we own our own IP, and I think for a company of our size to have an IP as successful as Worms, you can’t help but feel a bit lucky. A lot of the changes the industry has gone through in recent times, like the move toward digital as well as platforms like iPad and iPhone, we’re very lucky that ours is an IP that usefully extends across all of those.

So I always feel like a very lucky person working for a very lucky company. And that’s not to say that we haven’t made good decisions, we definitely have, but the way the industry has changed has helped us too. We’re fortunate in that we’ve weathered those changes and made the right decisions along the way.

With Worms on XBLA in 2007, I think that was a turning point for the company. We were working with THQ at the time and they just weren’t interested in Live Arcade. It was too small for them, and I think that indicates that a lot of publishers thought that digital outlet was maybe just going to be old arcade games, ports of Galaga and Gauntlet. And we’ve seen since that publishers like THQ have suffered the most from that switch to digital. I don’t know why, I don’t want to speculate on their fortunes but it did take a few people by surprise.

The industry’s changing quicker and more profoundly than at any other time. I’ve been here 14 years and it’s changed more in the last two years than the previous 12. The dearth of success at retail, the move to digital and now even those changes within digital; the way people want to pay for their experience. They want to pay for the whole thing, or with micro-transactions, they want a freemium model. There’s a lot to stay on top of and it’s all very challenging but I think we’re well placed at the moment.

What was the question?

“Worms, question mark. We guess”. One of the interesting things about Worms Crazy Golf is that it harks back to the boom period of Worms where they would appear in lots of spin-offs like Worms Pinball or Worms Blast, and everyone would joke ‘When’s Worms Kart coming out?’ There was a sense that the brand was being devalued, but then the franchise was reined in a little with purer traditional Worms titles. So what would you say it is about Worms Crazy Golf that retains the core Worms values in ways those previous spin-offs didn’t?

John Dennis

I think a lot of people fear that it’s just a golf game with a Worms skin thrown over the top but it really isn’t that. It’s a Worms game that happens to have some of the trappings of a golf game. It’s much more like Worms in that it’s about judging shot power and trajectory, coupled with that social fun that you have when you know things are going wrong and you try to cope, much to the amusement of the other players. So whatever you do with the brand, as long as it sticks to the values, has a sense of humour, cute visuals, customisation, great social multiplayer, I think that’s the key really so that when people see the Worms logo they know what to expect and they’ll be prepared to take a punt on something that looks like a golf game, knowing that it’s going to come with all the good things that make a Worms game a Worms game.

That care for the brand that you obviously have, does that come from the responsibility that comes with self-publishing, is it something you’ve always wanted to do but wasn’t always possible…?

John Dennis

We’ve always owned the IP but the difficulty we had in the Nineties was that publishers weren’t particularly open to the idea of a 2D, turn-based strategy game. As the industry moved toward 3D third-person adventure games like Tomb Raider it became increasingly hard to convince publishers to sign a 2D strategy game. You could tell them that previous editions had sold in the millions, that it’s a very good game, but it’s hard to communicate that to business people who maybe aren’t gamers. So, for some period when we were essentially work-for-hire and had to pitch concepts to publishers, you’re bound by what you can sell. I’ve got a stack of concepts on my hard drive that have gone no further than that pitching stage. You’re bound by the sensibilities of someone else, whereas now we’re in a position where we’re financially independent and not relying on someone else to get our products out to consumers. So we’re very lucky that we now have executive control over the IP.

Now that you are self-publishing do you see the world more from a publisher’s perspective than you did before?

John Dennis

I don’t think when we worked with THQ or Codemasters that we ever felt like we were pumping them something that was unsuitable for the brand, but they would sometimes have a different perspective and say ‘the game should have this or that in it’. And you think ‘Oh, you don’t know the game as well as us’. You’d have a debate about it but at the end of the day they’re your customer, whereas now our customer is our customer, the person who plays the game.

That’s something that came across in your Worms Ultimate Mayhem presentation; that many of the improvements made came directly from player feedback. Which recalls the changes you made between episodes on Alien Breed Evolution, where you listened very carefully to what people had to say and responded accordingly.

John Dennis

With Alien Breed we couldn’t make all of the changes that were requested. We couldn’t make the campaign a multiplayer experience, for example, it was too big a change to make. But some of the other things, being able to visit a shop and power up your character, they were things we could act on and we agree that it’s always very useful to hear what people think. Flaming aside, it’s nice to hear what people think of your game. As I say, we’re in a lucky position where we have those lines of communication. We spend a lot of time talking to our customers on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. The way the platforms have changed too, making a game used to be a bit fire and forget. You’d go gold, send it off to a publisher and then you were all done and dusted then on to the next game. But now you release your product and listen to what people say and continue to provide new content through DLC and title updates.

On iPhone, there are many free updates. The feedback loop is so quick now and it’s much easier to respond to it. So we’ve changed our strategy to support that. In the future you’ll probably see fewer titles, but they’ll be better supported. Only this week we released even more DLC for Worms 2: Armageddon, which is now two years old. People seem very positive that there’s still content coming for a game they’ve owned for two years; it’s almost an excuse to go back and revisit the game for some.

A couple of years ago we spoke to Martyn Brown [co-founder of Team17, now an independent consultant at Insight For Hire] just after Team17’s move to digital-only, and one of the things he wanted to do then was nurture small developers and help bring their independent games to market. It’s come out of the woodwork since that you were working with the Pickford brothers on Magnetic Billiards before they went their own way with it, for example. But that ambition seems to have gone away as the digital market has matured. Do you think it’s harder to make new IP a success in digital now compared to a couple of years ago?

John Dennis

I think it’s fair to say there’s a barrier to entry more to XBLA than there is to PSN or Steam. They’re more carefully guarded about what they allow on the platform, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s no disrespect to Microsoft or indeed Sony or Valve. I think as that marketplace has grown, so too has the desire to get content on there and the competition is very hard.

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When you first started developing games did you always envision yourself going down this big blockbuster design route?

Absolutely, yeah. Honestly, I’m not going to lie – I had Romero envy. I have a lot of respect for John and I think he got a lot of undue amount of shit… to this day he does. He’s actually moved on and is doing very well in the social space cos John dared to do what no one else dared do at that point and that’s actually show he was having fun with his job and try and bring gaming out of the basement. Some of the efforts may have been a little bit misguided but I was like ‘wow, that guy is kinda cool with his long hair and his Ferrari. I wanna be like that dude’! And that was one of the things – instead of a kid wanting to grow up and be a football player or an astronaut or a fireman suddenly game design popped up on the radar and, you know, you take a lot of flak for it but I’m having the time of my life.

So how do you react to gamers who turn their nose down at Gears?

For every King’s Speech you can have a Transformers 3. I love videogames that love the art of it but I also like being able to sleep at night and know that I can pay my bills and eat, you know. I don’t want to be a starving artist… [laughs]

With all the problems that surrounded Gears 2’s multiplayer, how did you approach it this time around in terms of balancing time between it and the campaign?

We spent a lot more time on the multiplayer absolutely, but the campaign is still the thing that takes up the most time and effort because you’re building what is essentially hundreds and thousand of miles of unique content as opposed to a multiplayer map which is only a few square blocks that one level designer can build in a day. And then, of course, it takes a few days to mesh it but you can bust out multiplayer maps all you want. I mean iteration is huge in terms of getting the weapons balanced and doing the beta, as well as the multiplayer suite – you look at horde mode, beast, team deathmatch, capture the leader and thankfully all these modes are using the same maps but there was a lot of testing involved; the test matrix was huge. But by and large the campaign is what takes the most effort and we’re trying to encourage players to replay that. Play it by yourself first, then play it with a friend, then play arcade mode and then enable the laugh track and just keep going through it.

Do you still think you’re finding your feet with the gaming community when it comes to campaign because for so long Epic has been know as a multiplayer studio?

Well, yeah, definitely. You say Gears 2 to a lot of people and immediately the knee-jerk reaction is ‘broken online!’ because it was and we steadily improved it until it got decent. Not great, but it got decent and playable but, again, not perfect. It was then we realised dedicated servers became necessary but not nice. The beta allowed us to suss a lot of the connection issues and balance, and we’re in a world of used games and rentals so if you don’t make a game with a deep multiplayer component, you’re dead in the water right now. Otherwise you’re Skyrim, you’re 300 hours, you’re going to be fine so basically the games that do well are the ones that do deep single and multiplayer or they’re massively single-player.

How do you stop people trying to find holes in the multiplayer?

We have guys on our team that we ask, deliberately, to be the biggest douches. There’s an entire meta-game of being a douchebag online. Lag switchers and griefers, never mind the names people call each other, right? You can’t just assume people are going to play nice in your game. You’ve always got to find the possible glitches and get rid of them so they don’t ruin somebody else’s experience. One of the things we have now is a ‘navmesh’ which basically says here’s all the areas you can get to in the map, and if you find a way to glitch outside of it, you’re going to be in for a rude awakening.

Do you ever think this would stop people playing Gears altogether?

If you’re the type of player who wants to grief through a game, I’m more than happy to lose your money.

Gears has now managed to become a game that many associate with the Xbox, much in the same way as they do Halo…

It’s incredibly flattering because for people to say Gears is considered amongst the likes of Halo or COD it’s like ‘oh, okay, we’re only the third game’. Halo, and especially Call Of Duty, are so many games ahead of us, so to after the third game hopefully be in that kind of category is immensely satisfying and rewarding and if the sales fairies have it hopefully down the line we’ll see another one.

The third already has some very impressive pre-order numbers, even, currently, outdoing Modern Warfare 3 on 360 and PS3 combined.

The thing is, pre-orders are seen as this crazy metric right now where people are like ‘we have to have a certain amount of pre-orders’ but, dude, when’s the last game you haven’t been able to find in stores?! I haven’t had to pre-order a game since Ocarina of Time because I was still burnt from the whole gold cartridge thing where I was like ‘I got to pre-order!’ Now, okay so may Gamestop might not have it, but Best Buy will and if not Walmart or Target. I may have to make two stops but I’ll get it, or Amazon day one, but for some reason pre-order is the big deal which is fine. I think we’re over 2 million worldwide, though, which is a great problem to have.

So why is it Gears 3 has had this impact far beyond the first two?

I don’t know. I’ve had other journalists tell me that for some reason this game feels like it’s hitting this perfect storm of hype and things like that. Maybe it’s because there’s no Halo this year outside of Halo Anniversary – which, by the way, I think looks great – and we have a partner that needs a hit this year and we’re very happy to hit that slot, just like we were with Gears 1.

You’re obviously going to be monitoring multiplayer very closely going forward, but in terms of new content, will it just be new maps?

Absolutely not. When we announced the Season Pass there was a lot of negative perception – a lot of people thought we were doing the EA online pass which we’re not doing. Basically it’s like the All Fronts map pack but upfront, but it’s definitely not just new maps. You’ll see new features come unlocked in Horde mode, new characters come online as well as we’re working on a whole new what I like to call mini-campaign and, if I recall correctly, Marcus ain’t in it. So new characters and some old faces that have passed in the series now returning.

So it differs from Gears 2’s offerings?

I’m not a big fan of the campaign DLC we’ve released in the past. Not because of the content in there, but because of getting excited about it. Whenever you cut content from a movie or a game you’re like ‘ah, I see why that scene was deleted’ and I was happy we did delete that scene from Gears 2 because my gut was like we’re already spending way too much time underground and psychologically that’s just exhausting – the reason why we’re scared of being buried alive. So I’m proud of the stealth segment and some of the dialogue but, with that said, it felt like it was on the cutting room floor which gamers don’t get excited about. If you’re going to do DLC make it cool and unique, just like Borderlands did so that’s what we’ve gone with. It’s stuff we can take risks with like ‘what if?’ stories or ‘Red Dead Zombies’. Expect some fun stuff from us.

Where would you like to take the series next, then? Would it be focusing on another character entirely

Possibly. I’m in love with so many of our characters. With Cole Train it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense right now because when you play Gears 3 he actually does have that for a while so his story has largely been told. I’d like to get back to Griffin just because hiring my childhood hero and putting him in the game was immensely satisfying.

How did the whole Ice-T involvement come about?

It was weird. I’m friends with Jace Hall and he has his show and he knew Ice-T so he called me one time. So, Jace in the game was actually inspired by him, as far as the name – that’s the way I creatively work, by plucking things from real-life. Like Cole is named after Phil Cole, one of our designers so things like that. So they called me from the show, put me on the spot, and I was like ‘yeah, we can find a character for Ice-T to play’ so that’s how Griffin came about. If you play him in multiplayer he’s shouting out crap all the time like ‘Take that motherf**ker’ but you have the awesome Ice-T voice. I’d like to maybe play as Griffin after he goes off and find out what happened to him. I don’t know if we’ll get around to it anytime soon. I feel a bit like Quentin Tarrintino introducing my hero to this whole new generation. Iced is still in Law & Order and he’s rocking it, but there’s a bunch of gamers who didn’t really know who this guy was. When we cast Drake as Jace in Gears 3 a lot of the journalists were like ‘who’s that again?’ And he’s huge, he’s a phenomenon right now is Drake. But then I looked at all the journalists and I thought ‘Hmm, all you guys are about 35’ so when we cast Ice-T they were like ‘Ah, sweet, it’s Ice-T. Motherf**ing sweet bitch!’

Related posts:

1. Epic’s Tim Sweeney on the Samaritan tech demo, next-gen consoles and the future of videogames
2. E3 2011: Why Halo Anniversary deserves recognition
3. Gears Of War 3 review

“We get asked a lot about Battlefield,” Glen Schofield, general manager of Sledgehammer Games, tells games™. “The truth is that it’s a great team. We know that they’re going to do something really excellent, but what we’re really comparing ourselves to is MW2. We have to look at that one; we have to be better than that. We’re competing against ourselves.”

“You can’t think about Battlefield in that way because we only get the same snippets you guys do. So we don’t really know. We just have to make the best game we possibly can. We know it gets blown out by Riccitiello a lot but we just have to do what’s right for us and right for the fans.”

Read the rest of our exclusive interview with Sledgehammer Games in Issue 113 of games™, available now. For subscription information is also available at the Imagine Shop.

Related posts:

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 review

Some developers live in the pockets of platform holders. Even the likes of Naughty Dog and Rare are swayed to include nefarious features like Sixaxis balancing or become subsumed into servicing a particular controller technology. However, Q-Games is the exception that proves the rule. Even though the developer has a hotline to both Nintendo and Sony – it even contributed the iconic ‘ribbon’ effect to the PS3’s XrossMediaBar – Q-Games has retained the freedom to develop the games it chooses, and at a pace it dictates for itself.

To unravel this paradox, it’s necessary to reach back into history. Q-Games’ pedigree starts back with founder Dylan Cuthbert’s work on the Game Boy with X, before moving to the SNES with Star Fox, running through the prestigious bit Generations series on the GBA with Digidrive and continuing on with Star Fox Command DS, before being rounded off with what are often touted as the best DSiWare games: Reflector, Starship Patrol and 3D Space Tank. From here, Q-Games’ march continues onto the PlayStation 3, first with creation of some core system elements and then with the particularly celebrated PixelJunk titles.

Through these projects you can trace the development of Q-Games’ DNA. It’s a gaming grammar that combines the simplicity and familiarity of retro experiences with an original twist or implementation. Celebrating the developer’s bedroom coding roots, while at the same time creating something entirely contemporary.

We caught up with Dylan Cuthbert, President of Q-games, to get to the bottom of what makes the company such an unusual entity in the videogame world. It was immediately clear that Cuthbert is no corporate stooge, as founder of the now 40 strong company he is as directly involved as ever with game development. He outlined how things got started at Q-Games, which followed a string of titles ranging from Starglider (16-bit), X (Game Boy), Star Fox (SNES) and Blasto (PlayStation).

“I started the company about ten years ago,” he says. “Initially, we did technology research for Sony, but towards the end of that time I felt a real urge to get back into games and ended up talking to Nintendo.” This easy movement from one platform to another set the roving remit for Q-Games and later saw it deliver to very different audiences on both Nintendo and Sony platforms.

“We made Digidrive, which became part of the bit Generations series and around the same time Nintendo asked us to make a version of Star Fox on the Nintendo DS that was new at the time. That sounded like a lot of fun as I made the original SNES Star Fox and the unreleased Star Fox 2. I really wanted to revisit these ideas, as did [Shigeru] Miyamoto, and so we went ahead and Star Fox Command was released in 2006.”

Cuthbert then switches gear to talk about Sony, refreshingly free from the baggage of platform commitments that other developers often carry. “The PlayStation 3 was then released and we got involved creating technology for that. We made the ribbon background and music visualisation.”

This PlayStation 3 work inspired Cuthbert to consider what a Q-Games title would look like on a Sony platform. “We really enjoyed the power it gave us and being just a small company, we wanted to use that power in a unique and interesting way, rather than going the FPS or full-on 3D games route. I looked at the 1080p output on the PS3 that at the time was a new thing, took some pictures of old 8-bit ZX Spectrum games and tiled them on the screen just to test its fidelity. It looked really awesome; you could see all the pixels with none of the PAL colour crawling issues. Everything was nice and sharp, and you could fit so many old 8-bit screens on one PlayStation screen. So it got me thinking that maybe 2D is an interesting way to go, so let’s think up some concepts for the system.”

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1. games™ Issue 111

To start out, could you give us a brief outline of how you see Silver Dollar – your history, overarching goals, long-term ambitions, mission statement, and so on.
Silver Dollar Games was incorporated in September 2009, but the beginnings go back to 2006 when my brother David first discovered XNA, the programming language behind all Xbox Live Indie Games. David’s programming language was limited to a couple courses in high school, but XNA is intuitive enough that even the most amateur programmers can give it a shot. Microsoft’s Dream Build Play contest started in 2007. My brother and I spent the better part of that year building our first competition game, Blazing Birds. We had our day jobs, as most indie game developers do, but like any great hobbyist we spent the better part of our free time on Blazing Birds.

Blazing Birds was a co-winner that year. As part of the prize, we were offered a chance to put Blazing Birds on Xbox Live Arcade, which my brother did completely on his own. Blazing Birds never reached its full potential simply because my brother’s programming skills and knowledge were so limited. He tried as hard as he could, but he’s just not as skilled as other indie developers like James Silva and Jonathan Blow. Blazing Birds didn’t do too well on the market for many reasons. Did I mention Blazing Birds is about Robot Badminton? Yeah, people aren’t really into that kind of thing.

We ended up a finalist in the next two Dream Build Play contests (in 2008 and 2009) with our games Blow and Mirror. Both games were inferior to the other entries in terms of graphics and design, but made up for it with concept.

In 2009, our goals shifted from the Dream Build Play contests to simply making Indie Games for fun. Our plan at the time was just to make games and see what happens. Also, there’s a large learning curve when it comes to the indie scene. What sells, what draws attention, what people want and most importantly how the Xbox App Hub functions. The App Hub is a beast of its own. The community is sharp, excited, jaded, young and experienced.

Our mission statement is: just have fun making games. When you see how serious some of the indie community can be… we realised that having fun is something I think the indie game community is lacking. The whole point is to entertain others. I don’t think you can do that if you’re not having fun yourself.

How would you say that vision of yourselves differs from the public perception of the company?
We are very amateur and our skills are extremely limited, but with all these barriers we still seem to be able to make whatever we want. I think our vision of ourselves differ from the public perception in two ways. The first misperception is that many people think we’re a studio with a full staff of people. I’ve heard things on forums and website like, ‘I think Silver Dollar Games have two divisions; one that makes dating games, and another that makes shooting games,’ or ‘They must have an army of interns.’

The second misperception some people have is that we really don’t have an agenda or goal when we make games. We make whatever our hearts desire. We don’t say, ‘Let’s make a game that might sell, and we’ll follow it up with an art game.’ Most of the time, if an idea makes us laugh or we think it’s a cool idea, that’s all it takes to go ahead and start working on it.

You’ve made a selection of interesting, well-received and original games, but as you’ve said, you’re best known for the ‘dating’ games. To what extent are these games used to fund the more time-consuming, ambitious and, for want of a better word, ‘proper’ games?
The interesting thing about Xbox Indie Games is that you never know what the customer is going to be into from week to week. When I Made A Game With Zombies came out, it was a hot seller. Sure enough, a slew of zombie games came out shortly after, but just having zombies wasn’t enough, as many of those games didn’t sell too well. The same thing happened when Indie Games started using the Xbox Avatars. A few games featuring Avatars sold great, like Avatar Drop and Avatar Showdown, but there are dozens of equally great Avatar games that didn’t sell much. It’s a guessing game really.

Many developers think, ‘Just put a girl on the cover and your game’s going to sell.’ I wouldn’t say that’s 100 per cent true. There are few cases where the whole ‘sex sells’ seemed to work, but I wouldn’t say we use dating games – or any of our games – to really help fund our other games. I wish we could use dating games to generate money so we can focus on other things. But sadly, it’s a risky market, and I don’t think a developer can rely on any particular hook to sell their games.

Generally speaking, how long do your games take to make? Is there much in the way of parity between time/money investment and return?
Each of our Dream Build Play contest games took about six months to make. Games like Johnny’s Minefield and Drop Zone took a week or so to make, as they were more of a learning tool than a game really. I think it’s very important to get a feel for the XBLIG market, and see how the whole process works before you spend significant time on a project. Once we felt we were ready, we started to make games like Boom Chick Chick and Raid, which each took a month or so to make.

I feel, due to the unpredictable and risky nature of XBLIG market, the best time-to-money investment you can make is about two to three months working on a game. If you spend any more or less time on a game, don’t expect to make your money back. There are many projects that took developers a year to make that didn’t sell at all. That being said, games like Fortress Craft and Avatar Legends took a while to make and they are selling great. But, for the most part, I wouldn’t take your life’s work and throw it into one XBLIG, unless you really like to gamble.

A lot of your games seem exceedingly tongue-in-cheek – are the more ridiculous titles developed ironically or merely enjoyed that way?
A lot of our titles are purposely developed ironically, like Crisis Nuclear Holocaust and Mind Warp. We know going in that some games are just stupid fun or, in some cases, just plain stupid. I think the fact that we’re allowed to do that is what makes Xbox Indie Games so awesome.

Many of your games also feature live action performances. Where do you source the performers? And what do they think of the games if/when they play them?
First I should start by saying we use live action performances because it’s something no one else is doing; it’s a good way to separate some games from the rest of the pack. We put ads on Greg’s List, or use friends and family; Cassie from Cassie’s Corner is our sister. And the announcer in Help Fight Breast Cancer is a friend of ours. Only a few of the actors ever care to look at the final product, and the ones that did thought it was neat. But truthfully, I don’t think the actors could care less about it. I don’t think there’s any perceived star power when you’re the star of an Indie Game, so it’s just not that cool.

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1. Silver Dollar Games wants your ideas

So, we’ve just watched you play the opening level to the new Tomb Raider, and it’s surprising to see such a radical overhaul for a long-running series. It seems like something that will appeal to even those who wouldn’t normally play a Tomb Raider game.

That’s great. Obviously I meet a lot of Tomb Raider fans, and it’s great that they accept it, but there’s a whole new audience that we’re trying to introduce the series to. There are people who’ve never played Tomb Raider, who’ve let the series pass them by. So for people to look at this and go ‘this piques my interest, I want to play it,” that’s perfect.

Crystal Dynamics has been the custodian of the Tomb Raider series for about seven years now. We imagine that every time you come to create a new entry you ask yourselves how far to push it, how much to change, and this is by far the most dramatic so far. So in what particular way did the stars align to allow such a big change this time?

We inherited Tomb Raider from Core Design when we did Legend, and we continued on in our vision; it wasn’t a reboot, it wasn’t a re-imagining. As a studio we always had the trilogy of Legend, Anniversary and Underworld in mind, and when we finished Underworld we always had it in the back of our minds that, although we’d inherited this character, we really wanted to show a side to her that we’ve never shown before. Show her personality, show her origins and the foundations for how she becomes who she is. But the more we looked at it the more we realised it wasn’t so much about setting the foundations for this girl but setting the foundations to make her culturally relevant today.

For us as a studio, it was a great opportunity to say, ‘Let’s show people that we’re not this one trick pony that just builds this one version; let’s try and do something really cool, completely different.’ I think Guardian Of Light was a step, something partway between where we are now and where we were then. We took the character into an isometric space, did something different and pushed the engine. As a studio we wanted to step out on our own and say, ‘Hey, we’re capable and this is truly our vision. Nobody else’s.’

There’s still some platforming and combat in this Tomb Raider but there are also elements more reminiscent of old-school survival-horror. What label would you personally put on the game in terms of what genre it is? Is it even a platform game any more?

It’s not really a platform game, but then I know the rest of the game and it kind of is and it isn’t. In terms of a genre, I’d say ‘survival action’. I think action adventure is great, adventure is phenomenal, but survival definitely plays more of a dominant role throughout the entire game. It’s the foundation for everything, not just the island and the situations Lara finds herself in but also the character evolution. There’s something raw that everyone can associate with the survival notion, that it’s not just physical but psychological. So I think survival action is the genre we’d most like to be associated with, although I did just make it up.

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