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!” (more…)

Most of the recent conversation I had with Crytek’s Crysis producer Bernd Diemer wasn’t actually about the Warhead PC—we actually discussed in considerable depth the lessons the studio learned after developing Crysis, and how those lessons were considered to make Crysis Warhead a better game.

Today over at Gamasutra we published a feature based on that interview, which ends up kind of like a postmortem of the original game as as applied to its followup. For example:

“From a pacing standpoint, we switched almost entirely to alien combat at a certain point in the game, and from then onwards the expectations were set. The players knew, ‘From now on, it’s aliens.’ Forum posters talked about the first part of the game, and the second part of the game. The public perception was really driven by these design choices — there was ‘pre-alien Crysis‘ and ‘post-alien Crysis.’

“In Warhead, we tried to stay away from that. As a team, and as a company, we’re now a lot more familiar with the IP we created. Crysis‘ nanosuit actually came into development rather late, while we were building the game. As a game designer on Crysis before I moved into the producer rule, I had to convince level designers into changing levels to be more suitable to the nanosuit gameplay. If somebody had spent three months working on a level, it can be tough to accept a different mindset for that level. Now, as a team, we are much more comfortable with how levels have to be built. The nanosuit makes sense.”

It’s a pretty good read, if I do say so myself (and I can say so myself without feeling bad about it, since the whole thing is in Diemer’s words). If, like I was, you were a fan of Crysis but were also aware of its flaws, it’s encouraging to see that the Crytek team recognized those flaws as well. Diemer is straightforward and demonstrates a strong grasp of design, and I’m looking forward to playing the result of that.

A couple of months ago, I conducted a pretty lengthy interview with adventure gaming legend Ron Gilbert (The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Maniac Mansion, etc.), and for various complicated reasons it was only just published yesterday on Gamasutra. We discuss Gilbert’s recent projects, including his own title DeathSpank and its Diablo influence (yes), how he feels about the game industry these days, and the merits of the Hollywood production system.

It was nice to see Gilbert a whole lot more cheerful about the industry than he was the last time I interviewed him, then alongside my colleague Jake Rodkin–although something that didn’t change was my vaguely embarrassing tendency to start asking four-paragraph questions toward the end.

As before, he was a good sport about it.

The question about Spore’s true audience is something that remains unanswered by pretty much everybody–potentially even including the development team to some extent, as far as I can tell.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to it. Probably like a lot of gamers, I’ve gone through something of an Spore excitement sine curve. I recently checked some of the game out over at Will Wright’s Emeryville studio, however, and I’m now climbing back up to the apex of that curve, mainly due to an extended conversation with Soren Johnson, lead designer of Civilization IV and now on Wright’s team. Like most people, he wasn’t able to nail down who the game’s target is–more encouragingly, he indicated Wright is rarely as concerned about that than he is about simply making whatever game he wants to make, which is uncommon in the games industry and fairly ridiculous within EA, but hey, he made The Sims.

He did make me excited, though. One of Johnson’s roles on the team is to serve as something of an advocate for core gamers, to ensure Spore is an experience they can not only tolerate but enjoy. It’s a fitting role; while Spore consists of numerous gameplay phases, it is most dominantly a strategy game, and Johnson comes from one of the industry’s premier strategy developers. He even successfully lobbied the team to put in three levels of difficulty, to ensure those who want some level of challenge can get it. The thought of a game that cycles through individually-playable homages to Pac-Man, Diablo, Civilization, Populous, and more is one that the nostalgic gamer in me cannot refuse.

The full transcript of my chat with Johnson, conducted with my coworker Brandon Sheffield, will be up on Gamasutra at some point in the future, but for now you can check out the rest of my thoughts on Spore (also now up at our blog GameSetWatch), including different demographic angles and the impressive social features the team has planned.

*Correctly, “For whom is Spore?” The More You Know.