"We’ve tried really hard to create a unique and fun product and I personally just get a kick out of playing with all the warriors...I like to just go into an area and basically play around with all the warriors and their moves to see how I can take out the trolls in the most inventive ways—it keeps me entertained for hours at a time."

Mark Stevenson: Lead Artist (2)

Can you give us an idea of the process of designing for a game like Kameo? What processes are most important to the successful completion of your work?
Kameo has been pretty organic in its design. We go through what I imagine to be a fairly normal game design process: We write design documents, get concept art, produce models and animation, and then get things working. Games though are always heavily dependent on getting things up and running and then a certain amount of the design happens at this stage, there’s only so much you can achieve on paper. Games, being an interactive experience, make it virtually impossible to accurately predict how the final experience will turn out on paper. We frequently evolve designs as we get them running and play with them, this has a knock on effect for the art team as the art also has to evolve as the design does, anything can get redesigned to add, remove, or alter functionality. It’s often a grueling process for everyone involved and it’s not unusual for elements to be dropped so far into development. As I said, it’s frequently a hard process and people have to accept that work they’ve done may be totally dropped if it’s not working out, it’s just a part of the process of making a real quality title that you have to be ruthless sometimes. We implemented a system of the team leads going around regularly and reviewing the work that was going on (particularly as we developed the Warriors) and providing feedback and to-do lists for people, and for me this was one of the more successful processes that we employed on Kameo.

What was your greatest challenge while working on Kameo?
Making it to the end.

What has been your greatest joy?
Making it to the end.

What is your creative relationship with the level developer like?
By level developer I assume you mean level designer. George, the lead designer on the project, designed most of the levels, and my relationship with him is really good (it would have to be as we share an office). When he’s designing stuff he’ll run it by me all the time, often just for technical information of what we can and can’t do and also sometimes to bounce general gameplay ideas off me. The art guys that build the backgrounds are frequently involved as well, as you have to try to prototype the levels and play them and see how they work, so we do sometimes rely on the initiative of the background modelers to make this happen and get the levels to an initial playable state.

If you have to name only one thing that you hope players will appreciate in Kameo, what would it be?
It would have to be the thought, imagination, and all the hard work that has gone into developing all the Warriors. We’ve tried really hard to create a unique and fun product and I personally just get a kick out of playing with all the Warriors (I put a development cheat on to upgrade them all of course, you must try all the upgrades, some of them are so cool). I like to just go into an area and basically play around with all the Warriors and their moves to see how I can take out the Trolls in the most inventive ways—it keeps me entertained for hours at a time.

Kameo has an especially beautiful and voluptuous 3-D environment. What are a few examples of things that have been tweaked in the game to turn it into the rich experience that it is?
What hasn’t been tweaked would be an easier question to answer. As I’ve said, we employed a whole new lighting and shadowing system and every model in the game uses complex shaders to recreate materials. On top of this we reworked the screen effects system so that we have a really cool bloom effect complete with starburst effect, depth of field, and heat haze. We have amazing looking water with a real time caustics effect, day to night transitions, and masses of incidental stuff going on like wildlife to make the player feel they are in a living world. We did the huge battlefield background complete with thousands of baddies—quite a sight to behold even if I say so myself. We added masses of models to backgrounds so that you can always see familiar elements of the surrounding world wherever you are to help immerse the player in a convincing world. Effects, effects, and more effects. There’s not a single piece of artwork in the game that the art team and graphics programmers haven’t waved their magic wands over.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into a career doing what you do?
All the usual advice, really. Get some good qualifications initially—they don’t need to be ones specifically geared towards the games industry. Personally, I just love to see people with pure raw artistic talent and an enthusiasm for their work (a natural enthusiasm for games helps too). You can learn the technical aspects on the job so it’s not crucial to know the processes involved in making a game if you’re just starting out.

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