I rarely make posts devoted solely to content published elsewhere as part of my job, but I did want to mention an interview that ran today on Gamasutra that I conducted with Dead Space’s producer Chuck Beaver. It was one of the more enjoyable interviews I’ve done recently, because Chuck was able to speak easily and entertainingly about the considerably thought he and his team put into the game’s design decisions. It’s always fun to be able to speak with somebody who can deliver a relevant response even when I get off the rails a bit with my questions.

From what I’ve seen and played, Dead Space seems to be one of those games that won’t be hailed as revolutionary inside and out, but will try its hand with a few intriguing progressive design elements and, perhaps more importantly, coalesces around a fairly defined and coherent design sensibility.

For example, the HUD interface, which takes the form of a projected hologram manipulated by the third-person protagonist, isn’t functionally innovative, but from a design perspective seems to take the best part of an in-world UI (the realism) and the best part of a traditional separate-screen menu (its cleanliness and straightforwardness). It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s very slick, and adds to the realization of the sci-fi game world.

Here are some excerpts:

You were saying when you make decisions about “no cutscenes” or the integrated UI, one of the hardest parts [of development] can be convincing [the team] to do it in the first place.

CB: Yeah. People are really almost religious about their belief in what we should and shouldn’t do. It’s a big binary switch, like, “Are we going to have cutscenes, or are we not going to have cutscenes?” because it’s a big, big deal in design. When we decided in the beginning that we were going to take [the switch], we’re like, “Alright, let’s go for it. Let’s go for it!”

Everyone took a big breath, and they went, “OK! We’re gonna do it!” because it impacts everything. With line of sight, you have to design that into the level, so that it becomes part of the fabric of what the experience is. It’s much different if you’re like, “Ah, now I’ve got control of the camera, and I’ve got control of this, and I don’t have to worry about anything.” So that’s a big one.

And then when we started taking the HUD away, and we were going to start making that on the character? People have very specific ideas about what you should be doing with that. Like, as far as camera? If we’re taking the camera control, like authored camera, people have very specific ideas about what you should or should not, in a horror film, be doing with camera language, right?

There’s a very specific language in the horror genre; we didn’t let that happen, because we wanted to stay real. So when you take off into this design decisions and stuff, it’s really—it’s really, not new territory, but it’s not like you’re just aping everything.

One of my favorite things at GDC is watching people try to set that stuff down. Clint Hocking at Ubisoft had a talk this year about immersion, and it wasn’t so much about the concept of immersion, it was more about codifying what we mean when we say that. Instead of having all of these unwritten things that everyone kind of understands on principle, let’s say, “This is what I mean when I say this.” And it’s a process that’s only very much at the beginning.

CB: And no one’s even started. We did the same thing on our game, like having a discussion about puzzles, and how do you get the language around that; where you’re talking about how a puzzle needs to be “intuitive”, so the end state needs to communicate to you. The line-of-sight needs to communicate; how much of the puzzle space is the cognitive parsing of what’s happening, like, “What do I do?” and then how much is the execution of the cognitive answer, right?

In Ratchet & Clank, you walk in, you go, “I know what to do!” and then you spend all your time doing it. In Myst, the game, you have no idea what to do, forever. And then once you figure it out, it’s done, right? So those are the two extreme examples. So what’s that language? How do you discuss those phases of the puzzle, and what you’re trying to be?

What is the actual “puzzle” that is just a random set of trial and error, that you’re like, “If I try this, did it work? If I try this, did it work?” Is that a puzzle? Versus, like, Portal, which is brilliantly intuitive. You’re thinking of the space, and going, “Oh! I have to do A, and then B, and then C,” and you intuit what you need to do to get to the end-state, which is in the space.

Where is that kind of language? Who is doing it? Is that being taught in a college somewhere? Is there a book you can read? And so having that language—like, if it was film, they would have a language for that; everyone would talk in this lingo that is all about puzzle lingo. It doesn’t even feel like that is standardized yet, across the industry. You happen across people who’ve done it, and have experience, and talent, and talk about it, and then you have people that don’t.

Read the rest. (The game is out for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 in late October.)

Tags: chuck beaver, console gaming, dead space, electronic arts, gamasutra, interviews, pc gaming

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 8:10 pm and is filed under game design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.