George Andreas: Senior Designer (2)

If you have to name only one thing that you hope players will appreciate in Kameo, what would it be?
The diversity of the 10 warriors and how they affect the overall feel of the gameplay.

It must have been an enormous challenge to program the warzones in Kameo where thousands of Elves and Trolls battle away at each other, but what a cool idea!  How did you approach the development on it and what can you tell us about how this is done?
This may come as a shock to most people, but, to be honest, programming and developing the 10 warriors and their individual abilities took far longer than the entire battlefield to develop. Mainly because when we eventually got around to tackling the battlefield, we already had a very good working knowledge of the trolls and the fighting system.

With the battlefield, we knew what we wanted to do, but realising it is always another matter. I spent some time on my own for a while, going through what I thought we could do and how that wouldn’t take away from the rest of the game, how it would fit into the bigger picture. I got one of our concept artists to draw up some pictures to try and capture the mood and feeling of the level. I didn’t want us to create a completely new game system and mechanic that would suddenly make the rest of the game redundant.
I then presented the ideas to some of the senior people on the team. Normally what happens is that people don’t fully see what you see. But they know you’re enthusiastic about it and I suppose have faith in your vision and your ability. And then we go from there. The program manager, lead programmer and lead artist then do their best to support your ideas and move heaven and earth to help get the rest of the team on board and get things into production.    

We were initially aiming for a hundred or so characters on screen. But a couple of our senior programmers discovered a way to get a few more characters on screen. A few thousand more, to be precise! Once we saw how many characters we could get away with on such a big background, we knew we were on to something pretty special.

It didn’t take long for the team to see the results and we just kept developing the idea and the battles until we were all happy enough with the results.

What primary complications does including a Live-enabled element to the game pose to developers?
Too many to list! If you plan to use Live in some capacity, then you build and design this into the game from the outset. It’s still a headache, but something you’re better prepared for. But with Kameo, we were never going to support any Live features. So for us it was a big change to the way the game worked in code and the way we had to approach the rest of the game. 

How many people did you have on your team of developers and programmers?
For the most part around 15 – 20 people. But this figure’s gone up now to around 30, as we near completion.

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