Which game do you think I was most looking forward to playing at Eurogamer Expo 2011? Modern Warfare 3? Nope, not interested. Battlefield 3? I dominated the scoreboard, but – nope. Skyrim? It looked lovely, but no; the game I was most excited about getting my hands on was one with no release date and, at time of writing, not even a confirmed gaming platform. I put Joe Danger: The Movie at the top of my ‘to do’list – and I was not disappointed.

Of equal excellence was the opportunity to interview Sean Murray of Hello Games. As he’s the one who usually does the talking at conferences and in interviews, Murray is often seen as something along the lines of CEO (if that’s possible in a company with four employees). When I ask him for a job title for the benefit of the recording however, he modestly replies – in a slightly embarrassed tone of voice – “I guess I’m co-founder. There’s only a few of us, we don’t really have important titles.”

Joe Danger garnered a massively dedicated fanbase very quickly. Were they expecting that? “Not at all! Maybe that sounds bad, like we weren’t proud of our game. We thought it was good, but you don’t know what reception it’s going to get. We’ve played it, a few good friends played it, but they’re not going to tell you if it’s crap! People really did seem to like it; that does continue to surprise me. Eurogamer is awesome for us in terms of the expo. We get people coming round who properly know the game, with really tough questions.”

When I interviewed Grant Duncan before the release of the first game, he seemed keen to get it released on Steam… “Maybe disappointed is the wrong word,” says Murray, on the fact that this didn’t happen “but we missed an opportunity there, we always talk about it. We had to choose one platform at the time, do one thing basically. I’ve always really wanted to see it on other platforms like PC, see it on the 360. I’m a bit of a Sony fanboy, but that doesn’t really come into it. What’s important is that the most people play our game. That may have tainted our decision a little bit; but ultimately, it’s really disappointing to me if somebody comes over to the stand like today to play Joe Danger: The Movie and they look at the controller -” the game is running on two 360s and two PCs, each using a 360 controller “and walk off because it’s not the controller they wanted to see.”

So what formats will we see the new game on? “We’re not in charge of that, we rely on the support of Sony, Microsoft, Steam and whoever else. But it’s been so well received, and so well received at these shows, that hopefully we’ll have more opportunities this time round. Maybe naively we focused on the game first, got it ready, then brought it to shows like this. Everybody asks us what platform it’s on, and we look like idiots! It’s not that we haven’t decided, but we’re hoping that people liking the game will open some doors for us.”

I then ask, for my own personal interest, whether Joe Danger’s resemblance to Bedknobs & Broomsticks-era Bruce Forsyth was intentional. Unfortunately for Murray (and very nearly for me), he was taking a swig of tea when I asked this. “I can’t say that it was intentional,” he says, once he’s stopped laughing “but now that you say it, I can’t see anything else!”

I imagine Joe has an eye for the ladies too.

I make it my mission throughout the rest of the interview to make him spit tea over me, so that I can use the DNA to absorb his powers. Unfortunately, although I make him laugh a few more times, Murray proves to be too polite and restrained for my plan to come to fruition.

Hello Games’ second title is also their second Joe Danger title. Are we seeing the beginning of a long-running franchise? “You’re going to hate me for saying this… no. It’s not that we don’t love the game, but we’ve got to make this decision. The game that we’re doing now, we have to say ‘there won’t be a Joe Danger 3′. Because otherwise we’ll start holding stuff back. Companies I used to work with always used to do that, they’d say ‘Oh, that’ll be for DLC’ or ‘that’ll be for the sequel’. So we’ve all said ‘we won’t do another one’.

We thought people would much rather see us do something new. So we’ve done that, focused on that. Next time, I’d like to see us focus on something much bigger than what we’ve done previously, and not be ‘the Joe Danger studio’.”

“Something I should probably say is that… a good analogy might be that we’ve taken everything and put it on the operating table.” he says, on the issue of players perhaps having missed the PSN exclusive prequel. “We’ve broken the game apart, and the introduction of vehicles isn’t just a reskinning. Skis are all about the scoring aspect for example, while the mine cart isn’t. We’ve broken everything up, had it on the operating table… it’s still in the early stages of development, but we thought we should show people what we’re doing. So we’ve quickly put everything back together again, and shown it.

So what you’re seeing is representative of the final product, but the finished game will be a lot different. If somebody is new to the game, I don’t think that will be a problem. The point is that we’re going to use the fact that we had the original Joe Danger to base this on, and add a lot. So there are moments in the game right now where I want to grab you -”

I back away slightly.

“and say ‘That! That right there, that was what Joe Danger 2 will be like!’. Then there’s other moments where I want to say ‘It won’t be like that, there will be none of that’. People come round and they say ‘oh, this looks finished! When’s it out?’. We don’t know when it’s out, we don’t know a format. I want to tell people, but I don’t admit this usually, that we made all the levels that are in there in about two weeks, before GamesCom. It was a manic ‘put it all back together again!’. So that’s what you’re seeing, you’re not seeing the final game.”

But we’ll still have a level editor to play around with?

“Definitely. That was one of the first things we did, was plan that. The level editor in the first one felt fun to use, but everything that surrounded it was a bit shit. It was a bit clunky to share levels, a bit clunky to fill levels. Actually using it, I always enjoyed. So we really wanted to improve that. There’s lots of things like that, I could tell you so many things. It’s not that we hate the first game. As with anything; you must find this with writing.”

Busted.

“You go back, and you’re like ‘Oh, what an idiot! What was I thinking?’. You have to think like that.”

What’s changed for Hello Games now that their first game is out in the big bad world? “What’s been really crazy is we realise now, we were hitting lots of brick walls with the first game. It came out on PS3 almost out of necessity, every other door had been closed to us. I don’t mean that in a bad way, obviously we’re delighted to be on PlayStation; but we were self published. Nobody would publish the game, basically. Literally, we took it to everyone. We took it to EA, to Capcom, to Sony, to Microsoft… nobody would have it.”

Why not? Was there one particular issue that kept cropping up?

“Lots of different ones. One thing that we hit over and over again, which is something that I’m very wary of, was that people would try to change the game. The difference is that now our game has been successful – it’s one of the top selling games on PSN – now that that’s happened, what I notice is that everything’s a lot easier. In terms of talking to people, in terms of dealing with people. Now we could get our game signed, I’m sure.

At the time, what we kept hitting was what I think is quite indicative of where things are at at the moment. People would look at it, bright and colourful, and think that means it should be on the Wii, and it should be for kids; people think kids are terrible at games. So it should be really easy. We had a lot of that. When I was growing up, bright and colourful games were the hardest games in the world. Every game was bright and colourful. Sonic, Mario – these are difficult games. People would say to us ‘you should make it really easy, like Mario’. These people have never played Mario! ‘Kids need easy games, one button games’. They’ve obviously never seen a kid play through a game!

With this, with the expo, it’s by far the best place to learn that. But anyway, that’s me going off on one. That was a recurring theme for us; people think that now, if you have colours in your game, you should be a casual game. We had loads of people asking us if we’d put it on Facebook.”

He really told me that; I’m not making it up.

“I think the thing is that we were inexperienced, and people could then read that. That’s the biggest difference now, is that we can say ‘this is what we want to do’.”

Having discovered that there are some people from Rocksteady at the Arkham City Eurogamer Expo stand, I wave over somebody I believe to be from the Arkham City development team. It is at this point that I am accosted by a panic-stricken (but very friendly) Warner Bros. Employee. I’m swiftly redirected to the PR rep who, in turn, redirects me to a very busy looking young woman sorting through a box of Batman swag. This is Sarah Wellock, Rocksteady community manager. We’re brought a pair of transparent blocks that look like they could have some vague connection to Mr Freeze, which serve us as seats during the interview.

“As a studio, we always believed in the quality of Arkham Asylum.” she says, when asked about that game’s resounding critical success and potential pressure for the sequel. “The best thing you can get is to have that belief reflected in the review scores. We were obviously thrilled to pieces, but we would never put out a product that we didn’t believe was absolutely top quality.

The most pressure we feel is that we put on ourselves to push ourselves further, push ourselves harder. We didn’t want to make a game that was just Arkham Asylum 2.0; we wanted it to be a completely different experience in the Arkham universe, and that was a different challenge for us.”

How much freedom are they allowed within the Batman license?

“We have an absolutely fantastic relationship with DC, we’re very lucky. Paul Crocker, the narrative designer, is always on the phone to them; we get to bounce off ideas. We would never do anything that does the characters a disservice, and they know that, they have faith in us. As a studio working on any great, well known character that’s brilliant, knowing the creators have faith in you.”

Arkham Asylum was a very contained, somewhat claustrophobic experience… “It [Arkham City]‘s a different environment. Arkham Asylum was a cat and mouse chase with Joker; it was meant to be very intense, very claustrophobic in the asylum. Obviously, now we’ve gone from an island, the asylum, to a city; so you’re looking at five times the size of Arkham Asylum. But we love the fact that players can start the game and go where they want to go, explore wherever they want to explore. We’ve got great side missions, and there’s over 400 Riddler trophies now.”

“It’s a difficult question,” says Wellock, when I ask what Arkham City does that Arkham Asylum doesn’t “because I don’t think Arkham Asylum did anything in a negative way, it did exactly what we designed and built it to do – to make this claustrophobic, intense cat and mouse game.

What Arkham City does that is different to Arkham Asylum is that it positions Batman in a much wider scale. You can fly and you can glide; and it gives us freedom as a studio to explore relationships in a very different way across the scale. So it’s not what it does that Arkham Asylum didn’t, but it’s what it does differently that makes it exciting.”

After unsuccessfully trying to get some info on the Wii U version, I bring up the issue of the (now defunct) multiplayer rumours that started going around last year. “Absolutely no multiplayer.” Wellock says firmly. “We do have an interactive online leaderboard, but we felt that the game was comfortable as a singleplayer experience. Batman may have his allies in Catwoman and Robin, but he’s still Batman on his own at the end of the day. We want that reflected in the game experience.”

Laughter is the initial response I get when I suggest that Arkham Asylum was unique in the world of superhero videogames in that it was… well… good. “I think the Rocksteady mantra for all our games even down to Urban Chaos is: it’s about quality, and it’s about narrative. We spent years on Arkham Asylum and years again on Arkham City, and we’re a one game studio. We have nothing else going on while we’re doing these. We worked hard on our relationship with DC to ensure we had the freedom to do this; we’ve got a whole studio full of Batfans. That passion, that knowledge, means we can introduce these characters to a more mainstream audience with a lot of comfortable authority.”

I almost get an answer when I ask about whether they have a firm hold on the Batman license which allows them to make another Batman game…

“We were like, if we can get this to do well, if we were in a position where we could do a sequel, my word that would be amazing. We do have big DLC plans, and we’ve got challenge maps and New Game Plus; so we’re focusing on Arkham City before we even think of another game… and having a holiday! Holiday being the focus.”

Most of you probably have a good idea of what OnLive is. For those of you who don’t; this is cloud gaming. The games you play aren’t stored on discs, nor are they installed on your hard drive. They are hosted by – and streamed to your device from – OnLive.

This is done either via an undemanding (and free) download from the website for PC, Mac and certain tablet devices, or on an HDTV via OnLive’s proprietary ‘microconsole’ (£69.99). As interesting as the basic concept is, it was the intricacies of the service that fascinated me when I explored them at the Eurogamer Expo.

“These are all live games going on right now.” explains James Beaven of Indigo Pearl (who are handling OnLive’s PR in the UK). “In essence, this is almost the world’s biggest shopping window.”

We are in a (relatively) quiet, walled-off area of the expo. OnLive is running on an HDTV via a microconsole. The screen before us is made up of dozens of smaller screens, each one of which shows somebody somewhere playing a game through OnLive in real time. It looks like something a Bond villain might glare at while cackling manically (if the idea of strangers watching you play unnerves you, you can prevent this in the privacy settings). This is the ‘arena’. Beaven picks a screen at random; within just a second or two, the image has filled the entire TV and we see everything that the player sees.

We can bring up the player’s profile, in a similar manner to Xbox Live. As well as viewing his friends we can see when he first joined OnLive, and how many games he owns through the service. Again, if the privacy settings allow, you can talk to the player while you’re spectating by sending a message – or via voice chat with a bluetooth headset.

I am then introduced to the ‘cheers and jeers’ system. This is an informal way of players to approve or disapprove of – generally – one another’s skills while spectating. To illustrate this, Beaven clicks a button to ‘cheer’ the player when he fires a cannon and hits his target. The number next to the ‘thumbs up’ icon in the corner of the screen changes from 0 to 1, and the person we’re watching instantly knows that we’ve ‘cheered’ them. I like to believe that people who camp in multiplayer FPS games will pick up a hefty pile of ‘jeers’.

Spectating opens up several other possibilities when playing with friends. “Say you’re playing co-op. You can actually spectate your mate. Maybe you’re doing a pincer attack; you can see exactly where he is, co-ordinate the attack using your bluetooth headsets. Once you can see you’re both in the perfect position, ‘OK, go, now!’ Or you can create multiple player tags if you want to, use one for constant spectating on one device while you’re playing on another.

It’s also quite useful if you’re stuck on a level. Call up your mate on your headset, tell him you’re stuck. Then he can spectate you while you’re playing; ‘Okay I see you on the viewer; go left, left, shoot him, down there, you’re done’.” Then, I am shown the OnLive Marketplace.

There is no compulsory subscription involved with OnLive. “The only subscription aspect, if you want it, is the PlayPack; currently over a hundred games in there [instant and unlimited access] for £6.99 a month.”

As Beaven scrolls through the games in the PlayPack, I am reminded of something that occurred to me when I caught a glimpse of some older games briefly mentioned as a footnote in the trailer, which is running on a loop on a gigantic screen in the main area of the expo. Though not something mentioned in the OnLive promotional push (so far as I am aware), the service opens up a whole new back catalogue of classic titles to console gamers (such as myself). The original Deus Ex and Alien vs Predator games are available to play, two fantastic titles previously unavailable to those who prefer to sit in front of the TV with a joypad in their hands. Incidentally, the microconsole supports other controllers apart from the included OnLive one – such as a wired Xbox 360 joypad and, yes, mouse and keyboard.

PlayPack subscribers also enjoy a 30% discount on anything not included that they want to buy, and you can play each and every game for half an hour for free; whether you’re a PlayPack subscriber or not. All OnLive users – as well as developers and publishers – enjoy more general benefits. The cloud hosting means that all updates and patches are automatically applied, with no need to wait for installations. It’s easy to see the appeal from the industry’s point of view. As well as the obvious lack of costs involved in manufacturing discs, packaging and manuals, I’m told that the cloud hosting means that piracy will never be an issue.

Interestingly, every game in the marketplace carries its Metacritic score. When I point out that perhaps some within the industry won’t be best pleased about this, Beaven points out that it means the users are “empowered with information”. Bottom line there is that OnLive are helping gamers, which can only be a good thing, Not everybody likes Metacritic, and an average user rating is also displayed; but nonetheless, this level of openness is something Xbox Live and the PlayStation Store would benefit from.

The OnLive controller is comfortable to hold and easy to use.

As well as the scores and the aforementioned half hour trial, trailers for each game are also available to stream instantly; and you can even pay to rent most games for three or five days. It’s hard to think of how ‘try before you buy’ could be stretched any further here. When I ask about the possibility of cross-platform play with other formats, it’s not such good news.

“Unfortunately, that’s not possible. All this takes place within the OnLive cloud. But what it does give you on the flipside is multiplatform play in that somebody on a PC could be playing against somebody on a microconsole, or a Mac against an iPad, and so on.” And now, I get to play myself; the OnLive joypad is handed to me, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is launched.

It’s not long before the game is running. It does, as Beaven says, take less time than it would take to get off the sofa, find and insert the game disc, and wait for it to load in a standard console. Though I didn’t find Space Marine to be the best example, it’s true that OnLive games are graphically comparable to a high-spec PC. This was more immediately obvious when watching people play various other games, such as Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the show floor.

This was the first chance I got to play on an OnLive console, and such was the lack of input lag that I actually forgot there might be any. It was genuinely no different in that respect to playing on my PS3 or 360.

When the expo had quietened down later, I got a chance to sit down with one of the public units. I spent a while playing DiRT 3 and Super Street Fighter IV, two games where any input lag would be obvious and game-breaking. Again, I was impressed by the responsiveness of the controls which was still no different to that of other formats.

While playing Space Marine in the private session, I am introduced to the concept of ‘brag clips’. The underside of the OnLive controller has play, rewind, fast forward and record buttons. Hitting the record button creates a ‘brag clip’, which is basically your last ten seconds of play recorded and put up for your friends and the OnLive community to see. There’s no way to edit these ten seconds sadly, but the fact that you can record in any game at any time offsets that (for me at least) somewhat.

The microconsole really is tiny, fiiting easily into the palm of one hand.

The basic idea of course is to share something really cool you’ve done in-game, or perhaps to show off something so embarrassingly bad you can’t keep it to yourself. Personally, I can see this getting a lot of use to record amusing glitches. There are various filters to use to search for these clips, which can then be rated. As with seemingly everything nowadays, you can post your clips to Facebook should you so wish.

Arguably the most important issue is that of download speeds. What sort of connection do you need to actually use OnLive? “It depends on the size of your screen. On an HD screen this size -” he indicates the TV which, from memory, I would hazard a guess at being 42” “it’s running at 720p. Most games do 1080p, but 720p is reducing bandwidth. On a screen like this, you need 5-6mb. On a PC screen, 15”, 3-4mb; all the way down to tablets, then it’s 1mb. There are hundreds of compression algorithms checking your line speed, the game you’re playing, all those sorts of things; and it’ll actually compensate for the best possible experience.”

So what happens for people playing on a TV, who are perhaps struggling to meet the required download speed? Is that where lag comes in?

“It’s not lag.” Beaven affirms. “It will compress the graphics. Fundamentally the less bandwidth you’ve got, the more it will compress the graphics. There are so many benefits though, I don’t think anyone’s really going to pay attention to that.”

“The average connection speed is actually better here than it is in the states.” I’m told, when I ask if the UK is ready for the OnLive service. “The last OfCom report was that 92.5% of high speed broadband connections in the UK are 6mb and above.”

But not everybody in the UK has a high speed connection…

“There are going to be people out in the country, too far from the exchange, that it’s really not going to work for.” Beaven concedes, before adding “That’s going to change over time. The infrastructure’s increasing, getting better, getting faster.”

When I bring up the issue of existing gaming formats, it seems that OnLive have no interest in getting confrontational. “What it boils down to is choice. We’ve said very openly we get PS3 and Xbox 360 owners coming on, trying the demo, then going off and buying the game for their PS3 or 360. It really doesn’t matter. What we’re saying is if you want the choice, if you want the flexibility of being able to play wherever you want, then OnLive is a great option. Just come on and try it!”

As for security the bigger OnLive gets, the bigger a target it will become for hackers. Are they prepared for that? “There is a degree of inevitability there, in that the bigger you get the more you attract attention. All I can say is that OnLive is set up to be as secure as possible, without giving too many details away. You don’t advertise your security plans! Just on the simple basis that you can’t pirate software, it is in essence a very secure system.”

The private session ends with something to hammer home the fact that OnLive offers the latest graphical technology without requiring the user to own powerful hardware – technology from Mova, also owned by OnLive CEO Steve Perlman. A completely computer generated, and almost perfectly photorealistic, female human head talks and smiles. It really is ahead of anything in any game currently on the market. “Developers can design for the highest spec; they don’t have to worry about compatibility issues, All the user needs is the video feed.”. The idea is that one day, these could be in-game graphics.

But have there been solid talks about OnLive exclusives? “That I don’t know. All I know is conversations are going on all the time.”

With an extensive and solid streaming infrastructure, are OnLive looking at moving into music and movies? “Not now. There are other services out there that are doing really well; what we see is a great opportunity for streaming games, and that’s what OnLive will be known for.”

In theory, OnLive is little short of incredible. There’s already an extensive games library including some of the biggest titles, and that doesn’t seem set to change; Arkham City, Borderlands 2, and Saints Row the Third featured prominently in the looping trailer. Search social networks and you’ll find legions of people singing the service’s praises; but it’s not difficult to find people complaining either, with the main problem seemingly being an inability to connect to the service. OnLive has been running in the UK for less than a week at time of writing, so personally I’m prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt – for now.

Will download limits, customer demand and broadband speeds suckerpunch OnLive in the UK in the long term? Only time will tell. One thing’s for sure; if it does work, OnLive really could revolutionise the way we buy, play, and enjoy videogames.

Nickelodeon’s Senior Producer Kevin Richardson talks with us about his most valuable lessons from being a producer, winning Volkswagen’s Fun Theory contest, the difference between personal and professional passions and how to make sure you enjoy your industry job without being disappointed by it.

A producer’s best practices

Richardson worked an entire year in Taipei with artists at Wang Films in 1986 for Hanna Barbera's The Pound Puppies and Flintstone Kids productions.

Richardson’s time in the film industry also played a great influence on how he looks at his projects, namely that the passion of the creator definitely leaves a mark on the final product. “You have to care about what you’re producing,” he argues. “If you don’t like the genre, material or content, then it would not very fun to go to work. I’d like to be very passionate about the content and the goals we want to achieve. If there’s nothing exciting in what we’re doing, we need to keep designing. The more fun the team is having, the more passionate the producer is, the better for the player. It’s always clear to the player if the team didn’t really care. That’s not to say we don’t get it wrong sometimes.”

When the going gets tough, Richardson looks back at the initial stage of each project he works on. He makes sure the bar is always set high from the start, removing doubt or uncertainty about the vision of each game. “I’ve learned that you have to make sure to have art, gameplay and other criteria in place before proceeding,” he says. “That you have some tangible measurements of quality that you establish before you begin the production, so that you don’t have to fix things later when everything is too far along.”

One of Richardson’s worst experiences as a producer has clearly shaped this approach and made sure that he never wants to have a similar experience again. “When you have a great game design document, a quality criteria document, an agreed budget and schedule, then the one thing that is out of your control is if the development team is on the verge of bankruptcy,” he says without mentioning at which company or team he was working with. “Twice I’ve had to deal with production where I was not getting the resources, teams were laid off in the middle of my production and I had to keep those productions going by calling up the CEO on the phone every day to keep the team on my project. To the point where they were considering to change their phone number. But I got those games out.”

The Speed Camera Lottery

The Fun Theory awards ceremony was held at a Stockholm Volkswagen dealership, which gave Richardson yet another great excuse to plan a trip to Sweden together with his family.

Richardson recently experienced a different kind of attention for his ideas when his entry won the Volkswagen Fun Theory contest. His winning concept called the Speed Camera Lottery, is currently being developed further in Sweden.

As many developers have tried very often, Richardson’s idea came forth from the desire to combine videogames with real life. He had read that speed cameras have had a proven negative effect on the number of traffic accidents and went to work. “A study shows that more people are having traffic accidents now with speed cameras at intersections than they did before,” he explains. “People think they might get caught, slam their breaks on and get rear ended. I think the Speed Camera Lottery has potential, is because it has an earnest intent to it. Its goal is not to make money, but to make driving safer, and obeying the law more fun.”

The rumour is that three prototypes are being built and are planned to be used in summer in various cities in Sweden. “Sweden has a goal to have zero fatalities from traffic accidents, so they’re very open minded to all kinds of ideas,” says Richardson. “And in Sweden your traffic fine can be up to ten percent of your yearly income, Recently a guy was fined two hundred and fifty thousand Krona I think. So theirs is a lot of enthusiasm about winning that kind of money.”

What excited him the most about the Fun Theory contest, was that it once again got him outside, just like his earlier work on the Ghost Town Mysteries franchise. “The fact that it’s an outdoor game and actually doing good is very exciting to me. It really tapped into my passions.”

Distinguishing personal and professional passions

Richardson is also currently developing a feature film with Bubble Guppies overseas animation director Claus Dzalakowski, who did the concept art for the project.

The recent Fun Theory experience has made Richardson appreciate the value of following his personal passions aside from his professional ones. “The personal thread I’ve had in my recent projects is looking for things that leads to some kind of personal adventure and personal growth.” Something that acknowledges his passion for the outdoors and entertainment was a winning mix.

There are a lot of industry professionals out there that have these passions and have not been able to express them in their work, even though they like their jobs. But how does Richardson handle that? What would his advice be for other? “I talk to my daughters about this all the time,” Richardson admits. “When you go to a job, working for and with other people and you’re hired to specifically build a role and accomplish certain things. The mistake is to believe that that specific job is going to satisfy all your professional and personal yearnings. That’s an unreasonable expectation.”

Among Richardson’s former colleagues and friends are people who have taken up doing comic strips, writing a children’s book or little flash games aside their regular day jobs. “I think the best time to start these projects that you’re super passionate about is right now,” he argues. “If you have a job that is so draining that you can’t do those things, it’s possible that it’s just not the right job, too. I get empowered from my work during the day, but when I get home I’m working on a screenplay or a children’s book with a guy in Tazmania. People I know in the audio side of the games business are doing record albums, personal projects, just for themselves.”

For Richardson himself, it is important to honour the things you’re passionate about. “That’s what will make you feel fully alive,” he adds. “Otherwise you get resentful about your job during the day because it’s not giving you everything you thought it should. Well, your job will never give you everything. Any more than your significant other should fulfill every emotional part of you. You have to hang out with your friends, go to museums, play sports, watch movies, take classes, and do other things. Don’t live life like wash-rinse-repeat, the instructions on the back of the shampoo bottle.”

Beyond the game gig

Richardson: “I tried for years to break into the newspaper comic strip business. However I must have drawn hundreds of comics, submitted them to newspapers and all the major syndicates, all rejected. Its a format that is very difficult.”

Richardson: “I tried for years to break into the newspaper comic strip business. However I must have drawn hundreds of comics, submitted them to newspapers and all the major syndicates, all rejected. Its a format that is very difficult. Try to draw a comic strip and immediately you have respect for the people who do them and what an art it is. Part of my therapy in raising daughters was drawing comic strips about them. Here’s one I found which is about a typical parent dilemma: How do you get them to stop playing video games and do their homework?”

The issue he and I discussed reflects on many other game professionals that enter this industry because of their passion for the medium, but too many tend to forgot that their work will also involve many aspects that are not as personally fulfilling as they would’ve expected. For Richardson, it goes beyond that and is something that has been engrained into our culture. “The mistake is that you’re going to school, work, get through your degree program and job into the job market,” he explains. “That’s kind of as far as you ever thought things should go. Nobody ever said to keep doing things on the side, to follow your passions, enrich your life and that your job is just one expression of your passion and gifts. You do that because you need to make money.”

The comparison to getting married was easily drawn. “The movie always end with people getting married,” he says. “They never talk about how difficult it is during a marriage and that you have to work at. Your spouse should not be the sole source of your happiness, just as your job shouldn’t be either.” Similarly, most people who get into this business are super creative people, but are often given the illusion that everything they will end up doing professionally is directly connected to their personal passions. “But you’re never going to get all your creative ideas out in any business,” Richardson argues. “You’re going to get out the ideas that are applicable to the specific game or company that you’re at.”

Honour your passions

One of Richardson’s many storyboards (there are tons) from the upcoming second Ghost Town Mysteries casual game, a franchise Richardson created together with Indian media companyHangama. This second installment in the franchise is coming out at the end of 2011 with Richardson as one of the artists on the project.

While the games industry is receiving a massive influx of passionate young people, lots of experienced professionals who get out of games seem to not be noticed as much. “If you think that everyone you’re working with loves to make games, it’s not true,” Richardson admits. “ If 95% of the world doesn’t like their job, that means that a fairly large percentage at each game company actually would rather not be making games. So you might be one of those passionate people who really loves making games, but a lot of people aren’t around you. I always thinks it’s a cause for celebration when someone finds their calling and goes for it. Many people are making games because that’s the job they fell into. In the film business I’ve seen animators become dancers, insurance salesman, writers, fine artists and so on. One of the big game engineers from the Learning Company now does database systems for Fells Fargo. He never ever wants to go back to games, but he was one of the best game engineers at that company. I think that you have to keep evolving and honour what you’re really passionate about, even if the answer means a complete 360 on where you are. If not now, in what life will you make that change?”

Seeing this happen around him, Richardson looks back at both his careers as enriching, but not the sole purpose of his enjoyment of life. “You could be a 3d animator and now you’re working for Pixar where you may realize that they’ve become really super corporate, since now they’re owned by Disney,” he explains. “But you tell yourself you don’t want to be a little fish in a big pond. I know guys like this who are now making comic books or personal films. They have a calling and they honour it.”

The big thing at CalArts when Richardson graduated was for graduates to go and work at Disney studios. “I could never see myself working there,” he admits. “I just couldn’t see myself be part of this huge corporate system, though at the same time I was jealous, too. Not because I wanted to work at Disney specifically, but because I wanted to avoid the loneliness that was ahead, where I’d have to carve out my own future and career path. Working for Disney would have prevented me from having to figure out my career on my own. But that’s the path I chose, and I am glad I did.”

Despite this comment we note that Kevin is credited for working on Disney’s Brave Little Toaster. “It was a great team, and I ‘ve never had so much fun,” he recalls. “And it made me realize I want to be in charge! So that experience just led me back to where I am today, still looking to push the envelope and stretch myself in the entertainment business as a creative person and producer.”

May’s Mysteries: The Secret of Dragonville will be hitting shop shelves very, very soon (12th August in fact). We tracked down developer V5 Play Studio to ask some questions; but not before solving puzzles for complete strangers we met along the way, and looking for a fork hidden in a paddling pool full of spoons.

CG: Why release your first game on DS? The rivalry between Nintendo’s handhelds and mobile gaming is heating up. What are the advantages of releasing May’s Mysteries on DS rather than, say, itunes? Or 3DS, for that matter?

V5: When we decided what kind of game and platform we would develop for, we noticed a gap in the DS market for puzzle adventure games. By “gap” I mean a small number of quality games combining puzzle and adventure genres. Besides, DS has 150 million users, so it wasn’t too difficult to choose that console. The path to market on DS is more difficult than the equivalent on iTunes. But once a DS product reaches the shelves, I think it’s more likely the efforts will pay off than on iTunes. Of course, we didn’t neglect the mobile and online market. At the moment, we’re porting the game to PC/iPhone/iPad and getting ready to try out in the iTunes lottery. As for 3DS, sales have yet to meet expectations. So I believe we will wait until the console reaches a critical mass of users before we start development on that platform.

CG: What games influenced The Secret of Dragonville? There seems to be a taste of Professor Layton in there.

V5: The puzzle adventure genre, even though it seems it has taken off in recent years, is really an evolution and a twist on the genres that have been here for over two decades. From very puzzle-oriented edutainment titles such as Castle of Dr. Brain (and the whole array of successful products that followed that title), to classic point & click adventures and even visual novels, the core puzzle-solving and adventure gameplay has always been there. Professor Layton is one of the games from that genre, which is probably the best of all technically. While studying different projects from that genre, we tried to understand which features most appeal to fans and to focus our development on implementing such features as best we could.

CG: Could you give us a story synopsis?

V5: Gameplay is located in a semi-real world, with the story and atmosphere which should appeal to both young and older audiences alike. It’s a story of a clever girl, with a knack for solving puzzles, whose brother was lost in an odd town. While searching for her brother, she meets many eccentric characters (some of them will help her, some will be phoney friends, and others will be obvious enemies), and before the end of game she will reveal a few huge secrets and mysteries. The introduction to the story is not long, it throws a player right into action, and the whole concept is reminiscent of a movie. I hope players will like the concept.

CG: As the story doesn’t directly affect gameplay, you had a lot of freedom in what you could write and how you could write it. How and why did you come up with the script that you did?

V5: Each puzzle or task in the game is actually related to the story. For example, on the way to a hidden location in town, a fountain full of piranhas will stand in your way. There will be two wooden boards by the fountain. In order to get across the fountain, you will have to solve the puzzle by placing boards to create a temporary bridge so you can cross the water. Of course, we had more freedom in selecting the story and the environment where our game is placed. Like I mentioned before, we tried to create a story which both young and older players would like.

CG: From what we’ve seen so far, a lot of effort seems to have gone into the graphics in terms of style and animation. How important is the visual element of the game?

V5: The game’s graphics is an element we’re very proud of. That’s the element of a game which makes the first impression on a player and it’s very important that a game’s graphics attracts players at once. Of course, without good gameplay, not even the most beautiful graphics can help the game make a good impression. So we were trying to achieve the best possible quality in every element of the game.

CG: Rather than being a story punctuated by puzzles, you’ve also included a ‘hidden object’ element and rhythm-based games. Do you see this mix of genres as a gamble, or a calculated risk?

V5: The most important feature of our gameplay is solving the puzzles. There are 277 puzzles sorted into 14 types like Write Answer, Check Answer, Colour Area, Connect the Dots, Crossing, Draw Lines, Hidden Picture, Matches, Pouring, Placement, Sliding, etc.

Of course, each developer tries to freshen up the gameplay and attract as many players as possible in that way. We tried to do so by adding hidden object and rhythm games. Those two genres were chosen because they fit well in the style and atmosphere of our game, but also because they are very popular among DS players.

Regardless of that, you noticed that there was a certain risk in such a decision. We tried to reduce the risk by producing the highest possible quality gameplay, and I actually think we eliminated it completely.

You see, the game allows player to go to the Inventory at any moment and play a few puzzles/tasks that suit them best. In that way, they gain points that let them skip a task in the main part of the game. So, for example, if a player doesn’t like hidden objects, all they need to do is go to the Inventory and play a few puzzle games that let them skip a hidden object game. It’s the same with rhythm games.

CG: The subtitle suggests that this is set to be the first of a series. What plans do you have for the future of May’s Mysteries?

V5: We’re already working on preparations for the sequel. We hope to achieve success with the first part of the series, which would allow us to implement all those ideas we couldn’t do in the first version due to lack of time and resources.

Audio designer and composer Jonathan van den Wijngaarden has had his share of broken illusions and fairy tales with no happy endings. After working at two of the Netherlands’ most promising studios that failed by aiming too high, he remains optimistic and takes the lessons learned into his own endeavors as a freelance audio designer and composer.  We sit down with Van den Wijngaarden about his work on Adam’s Venture part 1 and 2, freelancing and the importance of good sound in games.

The Golden Age of adventures

The second installment of Adam's Venture has you entangled in a ruthless dig on the Temple Mount that's stirring up the entire region.

One of the most well-known games Van den Wijngaarden worked on is Adams Venture (part one and two). “It’s inspired by Lucas Arts adventure games mixed with the Indiana Jones movies.” Van de Wijngaarden tells. “The music, although inspired on the classics as well, has a style I created especially for this title.”

“My music for Adams Venture 1 led to a great amount of positive reactions on my work, even though it was kind of a rush job for me. But people told me they could really see the LucasArts influences in the game. For me the music for Adam’s Venture is one big tribute to LucasArts and their Golden Age of adventures. These games put a huge mark on the musical choices I make today as a professional and sparked my love for the genre as a whole.” Van den Wijngaarden hopes that one day he’ll be able to create a third installment for Adam’s Venture together with Vertigo. The studio was founded with [some of] the guys from Coded [Illusions]. The IP belongs to Vertigo. Richard, [the creative director at Vertigo], and I know each other very well, I’m pretty liberal when it comes to music creation and styles. Ideas go back and forth all the time, and they [Vertigo] are very keen on making sure I remain involved in the puzzles they’re making. I also handle a lot of the audio-implementation work.”

Although Van den Wijngaarden acknowledges that he would consider working with Vertigo full-time if and when the studio starts working on multiple titles, he is currently still happy working freelance. “I currently have my own studio at home. With over 5 years of experience working with the Unreal Engine 3, doors get opened for me. I really hope we can create a third installment for Adam’s Venture to close off the trilogy. Right now it’s pretty much comes down to waiting and seeing how Episode 2 is received.”

Freelancing for small and large projects

In 2008 Jonathan was asked to act as chair for the BGin Audio Special Interest Group.

Besides working on the Adams Venture games, which were relatively large projects, Van den Wijngaarden also worked on smaller projects. For him, the differences between these two types of project are clear as crystal. “There’s a difference in quantity of material I have to deliver. With large and middle-large projects, like Adams Venture, you quickly notice that it’s a more iterative project. The Need for Speed Hot Persuit webgame for EA  [I worked on] was a relatively small project that doesn’t require an extreme amount of work, which I liked. I’m a huge fan of the original Hot Pursuit and it’s music. It is a franchise I always wanted to work on, even though the game in this case was rather small. At least I can take that one off my wish-list! I really had a much clearer overview for this project, which is refreshing. You gain a lot of control over the project, which makes the process communicating and getting comments from the client a lot easier”.

With his own home office to freelance away in, Van den Wijngaarden still cannot deny the hardships a freelancer has to go through. “It’s always quite a fight to be a freelancer in the videogame industry. Obviously this has everything to do with the current economy, but it’s also tough because a lot of things are changing. There’s a shift taking place towards a more professional industry, [where] it’s no longer just about making fun games. There’s a larger consciousness of risks and the fact that you need to take these into account, contrary to the past times where you got a pile of money to build something big to wait and see whether you’ll be successful or not. Currently evolution usually comes in tiny steps.”

This consciousness is something that he notices in his work as a freelancer as well. “People don’t have the tendency anymore to experiment much and they prefer to work within systems and structures they are familiar with. There is slower development in this process than there used to be. There used to be an avalanche of change, and now there are just some snowballs being thrown every once in a while. It’s a different way of growing. This doesn’t necessarily make it a negative thing, it just makes it different.”

The importance of sound

Recently Jonathan was awarded with a Dutch Game Award for Best Audio Design on Fairytale Fights.

During his time as an audio designer at studio Playlogic, Van den Wijngaarden experienced the challenge of having to stress the importance of sound, which was sometimes overlooked in the production process. “You can’t blame the people per se for this; it is usually a matter of time pressure. When working on this kind of production cycle, you know that you will have to make some sacrifices. You can’t constantly be on top of everything. I had to miss a lot of meetings to reach the deadlines. But still, I was able to stress the importance of great audio: audio isn’t important, as is often referred to, but essential to a great experience.”

Fortunately, as Van den Wijngaarden explains, the moment this landed with the team, they had to think about how the game was supposed to sound as well, not just about what it can do and what it looks like. “That aspect was overlooked in the beginning. It is wise to always have an audio designer involved as early in the project as possible, preferably when you’re still in concept phase.

“It is funny that people often use sounds to explain a gameplay mechanic with whooshes and crashes, but forget about this aspect altogether when drawing their initial plans! We ended up with a lot of consultation with lead-designers and artists, which led to collective creative decisions, instead of individuals telling others what to do. Personally I had a lot of freedom. My only limits lay in the scope of the game”.

Van den Wijngaarden recently finished his work on Adam’s Venture 2 and the Sims Medieval Facebook game for EA. The soundtrack to Adam’s Venture 2 is set to be released digitally on Jonathan’s Bandcamp website.  Jonathan also contributed to the upcoming One Big Album project by The Game Music Initiative.

Special thanks to Javier Sancho for his help on processing this interview

Having played through Bastion and come out the other end with a praiseful grin on our collective face, Critical Gamer accosted writer and level designer, Greg Kasavin, for a chat about Supergiant Games and their latest release.

Critical Gamer: Bastion is your first game, which means there’s a lot riding on it. Was it difficult balancing elements proven to be popular with the market with elements which would make Bastion and your studio stand out?

Greg Kasavin: It’s certainly the case that we as a studio have a lot riding on the success of Bastion. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. We left our jobs working for big publishers in order to be able to make games our way, and sink or swim based on the results of our own decisions. We all knew the stakes, being part of a small start-up company, and I think that pressure motivated us in a positive way — it kept us quick on our feet and hungry to make the most of our circumstances. In creating Bastion, all of us on the team pushed ourselves to do our absolute best work and make this game the best it could be. At the same time, the work was so rewarding and exciting that the effort felt very rewarding on the whole, even during the toughest times we faced.

Each member of the team was able to leave his or her mark on the game, even as we worked to make it feel like a cohesive whole, so in that sense we did not concern ourselves with trying to stand out from other games on the market just for the sake of it. Instead we focused on creating a complete-feeling experience that expressed our team’s collective feelings about gaming, and we believed the result of that effort would be something with its own clear identity.

CG: As a small team, do roles tend to overlap a lot or do members generally stick to their allotted tasks?

Greg: Our team is rather specialized overall, and there’s little overlap between the roles. For example, Darren Korb does all our audio including our music and sound effects and voice recording, while Jen Zee does all our artwork. Gavin Simon and Andrew Wang, our two engineers, split their responsibilities pretty cleanly with Gavin focusing on gameplay and tools and Andrew focusing on systems and core technology. Amir Rao and I collaborate on level design, but our roles differ a lot besides that — Amir does systems design and tuning and is also studio director, while I do all the writing and fiction. Last but not least we have Logan Cunningham our voice actor, whose performance is so essential to the experience of the game. Our culture is such that everyone tends to give feedback on everyone else’s work, and we’re all rather critical of and introspective about our own work, but having specialists in each domain I think leads to a strong sense of ownership and mutual respect.

CG: Do you have any desire to work on retail titles, and why?

Greg: Many of us used to work on retail games. Amir, Gavin, and I met while working on the Command & Conquer franchise for Electronic Arts, and Andrew worked at Infinity Ward on Modern Warfare and its sequel. So we’ve been there before. I’d be foolish to say it’s something I’d never want to do again under any circumstances, because once in a while there’s a truly amazing retail game that’s like nothing else out there. But we deliberately left making retail games in favor of making downloadable games because we saw more exciting opportunities here. We can work faster to make our own games, make the kinds of creative choices that would never be permissable at a large studio, and ultimately provide a better value to players out there — folks have remarked that Bastion has the quality and scope of a full retail title, but it’s available for just a fraction of the cost.

CG: Tell us about those wonderful graphics.

Greg: Our hand-painted 2D art style is the work of our art director Jen Zee, who joined the project at a point when we had a feel for the kind of tone we wanted even though the look of the game was still undefined. Jen was able to take those details and create a visual style that struck just the balance we realized we were looking for. We wanted the game to be visually striking, to have that transportive quality where you felt like you were in a different world while you were playing. And we wanted that world to have a lot of beauty in it, almost like you were exploring a storybook, some of it familiar and some exotic. But we also wanted an emotional weight to all of it, where you quickly realized that this world has suffered and lost so much. I think Jen’s work really captured all this nuance and complexity, in addition to just looking great. One thing we knew from the very beginning was that we wanted to make a 2D game, as we really miss the crisp and responsive feel of classic 2D games and think most of today’s 3D games still struggle to achieve that.

CG: That old-school isometric 3D would work great combined with a 3D display. Could we see Bastion, or perhaps some kind of spin-off, on the 3DS?

Greg: The only versions of Bastion that we’ve announced are the just-released Xbox 360 version and the PC version slated for later this year. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess as to what we do next! Our plans aren’t set in stone as yet and we don’t know what the future holds, especially since a lot will depend on how Bastion does for us. As a small team, we believe it’s in our and our players’ best interest for us to focus development on one version of the game at a time, so that we can make the best possible game each time. We’d love to be on every platform under the sun but want to make sure we put care and attention into any version of the game we put out there for people. So yeah, while I agree there’s some cool potential in seeing the world of our game on a 3D-capable platform like the 3DS, I can’t make any promises about something like that. We’re focused right now on supporting the 360 version of the game while wrapping development on PC.

CG: Where did the idea for a real-time narrator come from?

Greg: Like many of the specific ideas in Bastion, the real-time narration was something that came about during the course of around nine months of prototyping work. It was something Amir wanted to try, seeing as he was already working with Darren our audio director who was roommates with Logan, their mutual friend and an actor in New York. One day they recorded a few lines, and when Amir plugged them into the game, it really added a lot to the experience. The narration turned out to be a great way of delivering the story we wanted to tell because it solved some of the seemingly contradictory problems we were struggling with at the outset of the project: On one hand we wanted a game that could leave some sort of lasting impact through its use of narrative, but on the other, we did not want to interrupt the play experience for the sake of the story. Using narration we realized we could have the story unfold at the player’s own pace, and find opportunities to make it feel personal by reflecting on the player’s actions and choices.

CG: How many pages/hours of dialogue are there in Bastion?

Greg: We recorded something close to 3,000 lines of narration. I’m not exactly sure what the total running time of that content is but the game takes most players at least eight hours to play through and the narration is fairly steady throughout . We didn’t aim for any particular threshold, we just applied the narration everywhere we felt it enhanced the game, and we used it to tell an overarching story in addition to deepening the player’s experience in some of the optional areas. In fact we cut a lot of stuff along the way, and we were constantly rewriting, tuning, and re-recording in order to get the feel of it just right.

CG: Are there any specific games that inspired Bastion?

Greg: Really there are too many inspirational games to mention here and I’m hesitant to name specifics because it’s misleading to suggest that any one, or two, or five games were direct influences. Everyone on the team has been playing games pretty much their entire lives, so we each have a variety of past influences that have gone into this game, depending on whether you’re talking about specific aspects of the gameplay, or the look, or the narrative, or any aspect.

Our process wasn’t to look at specific games and assimilate their features, but rather to look at the central idea we had and incrementally add to it until we felt like the game was complete and fully delivered on the experience we had in mind. In so doing, we would always first try doing things we couldn’t think of from any other games, and when that inevitably failed half the time or so, we’d think of references from other games and look at what they did well. Some people see Bastion as sort of a throwback to the classic 16-bit era, which is an era of gaming I personally love a lot. But even though some of my favorite games from that era include stuff like Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV and VI, I don’t think there’s a lot of over similarity between Bastion and those games. Also we were spiritually inspired by some of the past successes from independent developers, everything from Braid to Castle Crashers to Plants vs. Zombies. While the cofounders of the studio and I were working at EA, we were seeing these high-quality, beautifully executed games created by small teams, and we started to imagine what it might be like to strike out on our own and follow in their footsteps.

CG: How does it feel to have your first game finally ready for download on XBLA?

Greg: It feels amazing! I’ve wanted to make games since I was a little kid playing Ultima games on the family Apple II computer. Bastion isn’t the first game I’ve had a chance to work on but it’s by far the most personal, not just for me but for all of us on the team. We were happy with how it turned out, all the more so now that we’ve heard from a lot of players who’ve played through it for themselves.

Petroglyph President and Co-Founder Michael Legg has seen many sides of this industry in his career as a lead programmer and occasional designer. He’s most famous for his work at Westwood Studios, where he gathered 17 years of valuable experience and stories . After that, Legg decided to co-found his own studio; Petroglyph. With the majority of the studio hard at work on the upcoming MMORTS End of Nations, it was a pleasant surprise to be able to sit down and talk to Legg about changing the design of PvP, Petroglyph’s work on their own newest projects, staying innovative, learning from others and the studio’s internal love for League of Legends.

Changing the horror of PvP

Mike Leggs’ experience at Westwood Studios still influences his work today and drives him to strive further than ever. “We have a huge real-time strategy background and so doing End of Nations with Trion Worlds is a dream come true project. It was one thing where they gave us the opportunity to say, ‘Hey, take your RTS pedigree and push it forward and let’s take it online’. Let’s go to server based gaming where everything persists and there are thousands and thousands of people playing simultaneously and you can play co-operatively with your friends, rather than just PvP where, you know, it’s like you’d log in and you’d play PvP and you’d just get trounced”.

Instead of putting the player through the same-old PvP experiences, they decided to take a more MMORPG inspired direction. “We’ll let people play co-operatively and team up with their friends to work together as a group, like you would in an MMORPG, because it’s so much more accessible. This is because nobody loses, you play together with your friends, you team up, you go fight the dragon, and it’s like, ‘God! There are no losers’.”

Petroglyph’s own games

Legg: "We released four separate board games during the summer of 2010 and celebrated here in this photo with the production assistants."

The bulk of the studio is working on End of Nations and a small team is left to work on Petroglyph’s own new title, Rise of Immortals. Within that small team, a couple of developers started to utter their intrigue with the game League of Legends. “The company was having so much fun playing League, they were like, ‘man, we’ve got to make one of these ourselves because they’re so much fun and they’re so cool’,” Legg admits. “That was a huge inspiration to us. We own all of our technology and we’ve developed it since 2003, since we started Petroglyph, so it seemed like a great fit for what our technology could do. The guys went off with a very small handful of people and created a playable prototype. Just some very simple turrets, they got some creeps to run around and fight each other, they had a red team and a blue team, and you could swoop in with a very simple hero and run and fight”.

The resulting prototype quickly charmed Legg as well. “When they showed it to us we were like, ‘this is awesome you guys! This is really fantastic’. We decided this was a really great opportunity, because this type of game is very controllable, from an asset point of view, because it’s not a full-scale MMORPG where the world has to be massive. Plus our whole company loves this game. We have the tech to do it and so we started a very small team with just a handful of people. They started it up last summer and have just been working away to where we are now.”

Legg: "Spring and Fall are always great for a company BBQ out in the garage."

Besides going from players to creators, Petroglyph is planning to completely self-publish the game. “We feel like we’re making a really great game,” Legg argues. “It’s free to play and it’s downloadable. We feel that if we do a quality job and provide a quality experience, and react to people’s feedback, and let them know were listening, we can pull people in. We want to say ‘we’re self publishing this, so we can listen and we can react. We don’t have to go through another party to co-ordinate what we’re doing’. It’s going to be a huge challenge. And it’s something that we love, so we are looking at potential cross promotion plans right now with other companies. We’re looking at publishing partners that can have a big marketing span.”

With Rise of the Immortals in closed beta, Petroglyph is trying to get the word out that they are creating something that they are particularly passionate about. The small team of developers, including lead designer Amanda Flock, have been showing demos and promoting the game intensively. “The game is not going to come out day one and be like, ‘Boom! Million’s of people! Oh man what are we going to do’,” Legg admits. “The gameplay though, has proven to be really compelling and it’s so infinitely replay-able over and over and over again that we feel that we can react. We can completely watch what everybody’s saying, what everybody likes, what everybody doesn’t like. We can be right there reacting, ‘Oh we’ve got to tweak this, and people are saying this thing is way too overpowered, look at the analytics’.”

Innovating co-op

Legg: "End of Nations was unveiled in Spring of 2010. Trion sent us these t-shirts as a thanks for the hard work on the project!"

For creating Rise of the Immortals, Petroglyph uses the countless lessons and experience they’ve gained from other projects, like End of Nations . “We’re constantly creating new technology on both projects but they are shared between all the projects that we do,” Legg explains. “We’re always thinking about a multi-use solution, to use in both projects. The bulk of my time is stuff developed for End of Nations; its size and demands are way higher.”

Besides learning from their own projects, Petroglyph learns from other people’s projects too. According to Legg, playing other people’s games keeps him and his team on the edge. “We learned a lot from League of Legends and other free to play micro-transaction games,” he admits. “We found out people love vanity items, for example. We’ve already kind of gained that knowledge just watching the online space and the free to play space. The End of Nations project is where a ton of the innovation is happening. That really is where our huge innovations are happening with Real Time Strategy. We’re just taking RTS and Roleplaying and we are just totally taking it to the next level”.

Legg: "Each year we dress up for Halloween and have some pretty crazy costumes... like this tank!"

Staying innovative and creative is a must when developing End of Nations , Mike Legg explains. “Each side is dynamically, hugely different, and there are awesome units for each faction. So with End of Nations we’re like, ‘Gosh Dang we’ve got to bring it!’. We have to have a way in which people can come in and team up with friends, play in a group and work cooperatively and have that co-op experience, where you’re not just getting trashed in multi-play.”

This notion was instantly carried over into Rise of Immortals Legg confirms. “I think it just became a company paradigm. It became the idea of ‘Let’s make cooperative play really, really important so that people can team up together and not have to play against the other humans if they don’t want to.’ So we brought that up in Rise of Immortals, where there’s a PVE mode where you can team up with your friends and you can play through almost a kind of dungeon crawl style of game play. It lets you get familiar with the immortals that you’re playing. It lets you learn how to play them and get better at them. You’re not immediately in a game where ‘Oh crap! This is going to go against me in the leader boards and this is going to affect my ranking’, and all that stuff. So we felt having that kind of cooperative play would be good.”

Legg and his team are currently working on End of Nations.

Imagine LittleBigPlanet was a gorefest featuring all kinds of traps that cause the screen to be filled with blood. Bloody Trapland isn’t far off, but also brings a whole lot more to the table. This fast paced multiplayer platformer made by a couple of students from the Blekinge Institute of Technology recently caught my attention during the Nordic Game Conference a couple of months ago. I sat down with Alexander Åkerman to talk a bit more about the game.

Simple student game gone crazy

“With Bloody Trapland, we wanted to create a simple, yet fun platformer that anyone could just pick up and play with their friends,” Åkerman says. “We felt that the market was missing a simple game that let all the players enjoy the fun together, no matter what gaming experience they have. We have always wanted to create a really addictive platformer.”

Made in XNA with the team’s dream to see it released on XBLA some day, Bloody Trapland lets you enjoy a race through levels filled with traps with up to 4 players. You can compete in different game modes, including the standard Race mode. First player to reach the end of the level, after being repeatedly killed and instantly respawned, wins the match. In Deathmatch, the players are set against one other in battle. Whoever kills the others most within a limit time wins.

Little Big indie game

Don’t let the pixelated graphics deceive you. Bloody Trapland features some very smooth mechanics, such as allowing players to kill each other by jumping on each other’s heads Super Mario style, while using them as a springboard at the same time. The game also has 60 maps split into six different worlds for you to play in, including different difficulty settings.

“Our first thought was that we wanted it to have a retro feel, so we designed it to feel and play just like an old classic 16-bit game,” Åkerman explains. “We started our work with a quick prototype with some basic gameplay functions. After that, we’ve been fine-tuning the controls to feel just right, and added a ton of features like more traps, multiplayer support, more characters, etc.” Åkerman and his team have been working on the game the entire summer.

The responses they got from attending the Nordic Game Conference gave Åkerman and his team quite the boost of motivation. “We had the opportunity to attend Nordic Game thanks to our school, Blekinge Institute of Technology. We took the chance to show our game and get some feedback from the people who tested it. We learned a lot and received feedback from all sorts of people! We hope we have the opportunity to attend Nordic Game next year again!”

Bloody Trapland has also been applied to enter the Game Concept Challenge, a game design contest held in Karlshamn, Sweden. “We are really excited about this contest,” Åkerman tells me. “We have strong faith in our game! But first and foremost our goal is to get the game released on both Xbox 360 and Steam, and if all goes well we will release it at the end of summer.”

Brown and actor Jack Black at the first of over 20 recording sessions for Brütal Legend's main character Eddie Riggs: "He was hilarious and wonderful - a very generous, loving and smart actor."

Award-winning casting director and creative direction consultant Khris Brown is considering a major shift in her career that might just be coming up with a new project she’s working on, but sadly can’t say anything about just yet. What we do know is that with two decades of experience in the game industry and with her own company KBA Voice Production, she thinks it’s time to get even more involved in the creative side of things. We sat down with her to talk about the choices that led her work at LucasArts, how she ended up working with the Lucasfilm group of companies for almost 20 years, her passion for storytelling in games, her work on the Star Wars movies and the value of working with people you know you can trust.

From College activist tot Product Support

The screen capture shows Brown's own first game cameo in The Secret of Monkey Island II: "I'd befriended Ron, Tim & Dave almost immediately after starting at LucasArts in 1990, and at the time I was the manager of Product Support (which included providing hints to players). Chester was an in-joke nickname."

Having grown up with an environmentalist mother and worked in environmental activism from an early age, Brown decided to major in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz when it came time for college. “InNorthern California, where I was raised, there’s a long history of environmental and political activism,” Brown explains. On a fateful day, Brown read a profile of Bonnie Reiss, a Hollywood lawyer who had set up a non-profit organization called the Earth Communications Office inLos Angeles. She promptly decided to apply for an internship position. “I had reached a point where I became disillusioned with protests and blame-based contention as being the right way to get people to change their habits,” she explains. “Bonnie’s theory was to get celebrities and people who had a popular culture influence to talk about environmental subjects. She also was tired of the conflict model and wanted to affect more positive change by leveragingAmerica’s love of celebrity. Instead of fighting to be heard, she started an organization that recruited Tom Cruise, Al Gore, Jane Fonda and others to speak up for environmental conservation.”

Brown would end up working on the resulting “A Call to Action” conference, dealing with all the celebrities, getting them involved and rewriting their presentation scripts. “Our office space was donated by Ron Howard of Imagine Entertainment, which was under the umbrella of Universal Pictures at that time,” Brown recalls. “We shared space with the casting department, and when I was free, I would learn about their process,” she says. “It was only a four-month internship, and when I returned home fromLos Angeles, I had two weeks before school resumed for the Fall term. I thought I would do a temporary job.” That temp job happened to be at the product support department at LucasArts.

David Fox, a lead designer at LucasArts at that time, noticed Brown’s good work. Though Fox knew Brown was supposed to go back to school after the two week assignment, he asked her to stay a while longer. In the two years that passed, Brown would become responsible for managing product support, and LucasArts would begin developing their famous line of adventure games that would also employ voice acting. “We started this concept of what we were calling ‘Talkies’ at the time, and the adventure game market was largely Sierra and us,” Brown explains. “We had a friendly competition.”

Brown’s voice casting career would begin shortly after LucasArts started a voice department in 1992. “There was a woman there who had a degree in radio broadcasting and they needed someone who had experience in casting and working with actors,” she explains. “They posted the position and I applied for it. This was before we did Sam and Max Hit the Road.”

But Brown will always look back fondly at her early beginnings managing LucasArts’ product support team. “I loved the customers and I loved my product support team,” she says. A lot of her former colleagues would also move on to take up new positions and challenges inside the game industry. “One of them now is the head of a department at Adobe Software, another is making her own games. You always have to move onwards and upwards.”

Doing voice casting for LucasArts, Brown would later be responsible for the casting of multiple other games such as The Dig, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, and many more.

Brown stayed with LucasArts until Grim Fandango was released in 1998 and then left to start her own company, KBA Voice Production. Brown left LucasArts because Lucasfilm was to become her first client. “I had the casting experience and knew how to work with talent to bring out the best performance despite any of their idiosyncracies,” she says. “I was asked to go work on the Episode 1 Star Wars movie to help with all of the actors doing ADR. George (Lucas) did all of the directing, and my job was to provide support and assistance.”

Brown was asked to return in the same role for the Star Wars: Episode 2 movie, with the added task of recording sounds from various animals in Australiain conjunction with the sound designers. “I’ve always been steadily working and never really taken the time to market myself,” she admits. “It’s extremely fortunate and I’m grateful, but I should probably do more promotion – or maybe not!,” she says with a laugh. Brown traveled to Londonto work with all the actors on Star Wars: Episode 1 and continued to do so on Episodes 2 and 3. “We would commute back and forth, and when I came back, I became the sound archivist, working really closely with Ben Burtt, the original sound designer of all the Star Wars movies, to manage all the Star Wars related sound assets.”

The evolution of storytelling

The Full Throttle team on wrap day in 1994: "I'm on the left in front of Tim. I hunted for the right voice for Ben Throttle for weeks until I finally discovered Roy Conrad, a local actor who had sent us an audio tape. He beat out all the celebs and big names, and I later used him in the animated film Titan A.E. 1994."

With her career spanning over 20 years of experience in casting and creative direction, Brown is currently expanding her focus to embrace new opportunities in story and character consultation. One book she mentioned was Ralph Coster’s “The Theory of Fun.” “In many ways, his points are right on,” she says. “But we’re in an interesting place right now, where narrative fiction is bumping up against open-world needs.”

Brown once received a message from a German player who found out she had worked on Rebel Assault. “Which I thought was a very straightforward game and had less of an emotional component then something like Grim Fandango.” But the young man told her that every day he was at high school, he would walk past the group of popular athletes and repeat a line from Rebel Assault in his mind. “There was some line he would repeat every single time to make it through this feeling of being endangered and being threatened,” she recalls. “That’s what got him through. It made him want to learn to work with computers and now he’s working with on creating an open internet and all these things I feel are essential to our digital future.”

Her interest in story had stayed with Brown since she started working at LucasArts. “There’s always a huge storytelling and wish fulfillment thing, so it’s not only pattern recognition that makes a game,” she states. After having spent almost 20 years on keeping characters consistent and keeping stories powerful, Brown has had ample time to position herself towards games in such a way as to make sure they combine the best elements of design & story.

Helping to maintain a level of emotional engagement in games is one of Brown’s biggest motivations in her current work. “I enjoy nurturing this idea of a memorable user experience,” she adds. ”Not in opposition to the notion of games simply being puzzles, but in combining those two viewpoints in an elegant way.”

Pushing for quality

Brown: Tim and I re-creating the pose of Eddie and Ophelia from the first "Brutal Legend" trailer. We were giddy at the huge banner for the game on the front on the E3 convention center and started being silly.

Brown considers herself to have been very fortunate in her position. “Most of the titles that I work on are with people I enjoy working with and can trust,” she admits. “For example, I do all of the voice casting & direction for Double Fine games, which is Tim Schafer’s company. He is a LucasArts veteran in the same way that I am. We work together really well.” In her work with Schafer, Brown also continued pushing the importance of story, character and character consistency. “I’ve been very fortunate because he listens to me, which is really nice. I don’t think I’ve had to battle so much. I think that there have been some projects that I won’t name where it has been more difficult and those projects have not been as well received.”

“Some games have built-in limitations, such as licensee demands for certain cast members or storylines. In that instance, you do the best you can to make a quality product, but it’s definitely more challenging when they’re coming from a non-game-based background.”

Although Brown has high quality standards towards her work, her freelancing position did not put her in a managerial role. And so, she has also had her share of looking on how her advice would not be heeded and what consequences it would have. “It’s too bad, I hate to see anything not be well received,” she says. “It’s kind of that thing where I think what would’ve happened if only I could’ve been in a stronger role to and pushed a bit harder. People hire me as an advisor and usually take my advice, which is a great compliment. My job is to bring someone’s vision to light, and often that’s about constructive collaboration. I want to see my clients get what they want in the best way possible, which sometimes means they have to think things through a bit more. Thankfully, I have great longstanding relationships with people who I trust and we can really hash out what’s best. Even with differing opinions, we can talk, and that’s incredibly fulfilling. I’ve learned a lot from a huge group of very smart people.”

Legacy of the LucasArts people

For Brown, the relationships and levels of trust that she has in her working environment are very important. According to her, those relationships have only become more important with the development of new technologies and trends that have been sweeping the industry the past couple of years. “We’re making these huge 30 million dollar games and then we have something like the lower-cost Facebook games that are reaching so many more people,” she explains. “I think that everybody is kind of looking and wondering how they can reach the highest number of people with the highest quality.”

If there’s one group of people Brown knows she can always work with, it’s her fellow veterans from her time at LucasArts, who by now have all moved on to their own different projects in the game industry. “It’s not just what we did in the past,” She argues. “It’s kind of the notion of this core group of people. We’ve all worked together for so long and we’ve been through so much together, we’re like a family.”

Recent industry developments have also challenged Brown in rethinking her personal direction. “There’s a lot of honest, good kind of soul searching thought out there,” she says. “I feel like right now there’s very much a kind of openness towards exploration and I think it’s an incredibly exciting time. People are tending to come for me for voice, but also tend to say, well we don’t even know exactly who our characters are. People are coming to me for creative direction as well as voice-over direction. It’s really nice for me to expand to the whole creative picture.”

Chocolate or Cake? Pick one

Brown in Australia while recording raw SFX for Star Wars: Episode II: "I travelled from the North of Australia, the World Heritage Daintree rainforest, to record crocodiles, fruit bats and rare songbirds to the Phillip Island in the South of Australia to record the annual migration of a population of over a million antarctic penguins (heard as the Geonosians in the film)."

After having Lucasfilm as her first client, Brown would later get so many assignments through KBA Voice Production that she would have to hand off her work maintaining the Star Wars sound archive to someone else. “It was too much,” she admits. “I would be directing in the studio for 8 hours a day, get back to my hotel room and then I would be editing and uploading sounds at 10 o’clock at night. I had to slow down a little.”

But the entire experience was a dream come true for Brown. “I grew up loving Star Wars,” she says. “I’m the generation that saw it in the theater when they were seven and it meant so much. Then they were making a cartoon a couple of years later and I had friends who were working on it. The previous casting supervisor left and my friends in the sound department told me I should come and take her place. They needed someone who was good and they could rely on.” But soon  after Brown joined Lucasfilm Animation to work on the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon series, another unexpected offer showed up on her doorstep.

“I was there for about six weeks and Tim Schafer started working on Brütal Legend,” she recalls. ”He really wanted me to do the casting & direction and I asked him if he wanted me to recommend a different director because I was already on a project. He said ‘Are you kidding?!’.” Brown suddenly had a difficult decision to make. “It’s impossible to choose,” she admits. “It’s crazy. Do you want the greatest chocolate candy in the whole wide world or do you want the world’s greatest chocolate cake? There’s never a day that I don’t wake up feeling really grateful or go to bed feeling really grateful. I know that may sound trite, but it’s an incredible life. I’ve been so fortunate. I’m really excited for what’s next.”

Khris Brown most recently worked on Double Fine’s XBLA title Entrenched, which is currently undergoing a quick name change.