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…)

Last month, I wrote up my initial reactions to Spore, based on some hands-on at Will Wright’s Emeryville studio and following a long interview with Soren Johnson, Spore designer and former Firaxis designer on Civilization III and IV.  That full interview has finally been posted.  It was conducted with my coworker Brandon Sheffield in hot tag-team style.

The interview starts out very much about Spore (obviously), but towards the end it actually starts to angle more towards a discussion about strategy games in general—why they’ve become successful, why they’ve faced challenges, and what their future may hold.  Johnson obviously has a lot of perspective on the matter, and it’s particularly interesting since he was the designer on Spore charged with ensuring the game will be of interest to hardcore gamers, not just the more casual crowd that has typified Wright’s audience with The Sims.

He also speaks a lot about the Civilization series, and the pressures to satisfy an increasingly hardcore and competent audience by the fourth game in the series, at the potential expense of the broader audience that made the series big in the first place.

And did you know the original Civ was conceived as an RTS?  Sid Meier changed his mind.  I didn’t know that!  Maybe you did.