The Making Of Kameo:

In the first part of this interview, we met Chris and learned about the softer side of writing. Here, Chris discusses the more technical details of how he writes, how he relates to his coworkers, and how the switch to the Xbox 360® platform impacted his work.

Can you give us an idea of the process of writing for a game like Kameo? What processes are most important to the successful completion of your work?

Communication. Kameo has layers upon layers of complexity and challenge for players to delve into and they intermingle so seamlessly that you need to be completely up to speed on what’s happening from a gameplay perspective—and the same applies to the designers!

Even the simplest thing can easily snowball—if a character tells you a secret use for a special move, and that special move is taken out of the game, you’ve suddenly got a raft of issues to be cleared up. What does the character talk about instead? Does it still make sense for that character to even exist? How do you cope if that character has audio attached to their text, and how will the dozen-or-so other languages you’re translating the game into be affected, anyway?

The process for writing really depends on what you’re writing—if it’s something small like the contents of a signpost or a tribal journal, I’ll just get on with it. Anything tied directly into gameplay—a piece of advice about what to do next, for example—tends to get given the once-over by our lead designer before it’s implemented.

A conversation where two characters discuss a vital piece of information can have designers, managers, animators, and our Hollywood consultant offering input and there’s often a lot of back-and-forth before a completed scene finally emerges—it may only be a few seconds of dialogue but if it doesn’t “click” in the heads of people across the planet, it’s got to be redone. 

What is your creative relationship with the level developer like?

Probably a lot closer than scriptwriters on many other games, since we’re sat in the same building, and I’m working under him as a designer on other tasks. Ultimately it’s about respect, and you don’t get to be a long-serving senior designer like he is—least of all at a company with a reputation as lauded as Rare’s—without knowing what you’re doing.

That’s one of the things that drives every team here—you can just trust that anyone’s doing the job they’ve been given, and it’s going to turn out great. You may not even understand why they make the decision at the time, but you’ll certainly see their reasons when you look at the quality of the finished product. 

What was your greatest challenge while working on Kameo?

Like most action-adventure games we’ve got these little guys, residents of the various tribes that Kameo visits on her quest. In the past characters like this tended to get relegated to being walking signposts but they...escaped, you could say, when we moved to Xbox 360 and started demanding speech and jobs and fun stuff to do at night.

Now there’re literally dozens of villagers, all leading their own little lives (and occasionally accompanying Kameo) but the sheer amount of speech and the ways you can interact with these characters had to be tightly controlled, monitored and debugged...No small order and quite the challenge.

What has been your greatest joy?

I think that one of the things that attracts people to Rare games—aside from the outstanding graphics, brilliant gameplay, and devastatingly attractive scriptwriters—is the sense of humour. Right from the beginning, even when a Rare game has been portraying something serious it’s done it with a twinkle in the eye that says “hey, it’s a game and we’re having as much fun as you.”

Getting a chance to play with that brand of humour has been wonderful and, while Kameo isn’t as openly, brilliantly silly as something like Grabbed by the Ghoulies I would hope people can still find lots to chuckle at. Dig a little and you’ll find characters who poke fun at the usual adventure game clichés, tell Kameo off if she tries to wander into their house and start stealing all of their things, and of course the usual smattering of awful puns.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into a career doing what you do?

Work hard, learn to accept and accommodate criticism of something that you may think is the best you’ve ever written (one of the hardest things anyone will ever have to do). Keep a sense of humour about the whole thing. Oh, and learning to use apostrophes and put letters in the right order always helps.

If you want to be involved with the voice recording process, it’s important to have absolutely no sense of self-consciousness whatsoever because you will, at some point, end up waving your arms about and making silly noises in a little glass box.

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