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Interview: Dave Brevik and Phil Shenk.
Date: April 7, 2006
Source: CGW on 1up.com

Computer Gaming World Interview

CGW: Thinking about the kind of game that Hellgate will be...it comes up a lot lately, the kinds of games girls are playing versus the kinds of games boys are playing...

Dave Brevik: I think that all along we've tried to make games that -- well, that appeal to myself; there's definitely that -- but also appeal to other people besides just myself. [I try to put] equality in all of the characters. In all the games -- we've only made pretty much role-playing games -- when you're choosing your avatar, we like to try to make it as equal as possible, so it'll open up and make for a broader audience so people can relate to it better. So we've always done those kinds of things. My wife plays games a lot -- we play [World of Warcraft] together; she's been playing games for a long time. I think that there's a lot of women that haven't necessarily been exposed to games. That's the hardest market to tap, moreso than any other thing -- race or religion or anything like that. I think that sex is probably the hardest barrier in videogames, to crossover and make a game that's fun for both women and men.

CGW: The original Diablo games seemed to transcend any kind of barrier there was...

Dave Brevik: Games like Tetris do too, so there are game examples, but then there's a lot of games that appeal more to guys than women, and I think that kind of creates a barrier in the videogame space. We try not to make our games that way; we try to appeal to a broader audience.

CGW: Do you think Hellgate can be that kind of game?

Dave Brevik: We hope so. I think that part of it has to do with the way we make games and the way we think and our philosophies, and it kind of goes with the area, living here in San Francisco where we're open to a bunch of things. So I think that we try to [take] that very liberal feeling that we have here in the office, and put it in the game in a lot of ways...the way that we are is the way that the game comes out.

CGW: What [is going on in the office] this afternoon?

Dave Brevik: We have these play days that are every other Friday. We work on the game for a couple weeks, then spend a day polishing it, and trying to get it ready, so the next afternoon we can have everybody in the company play the game and give feedback -- and we take feedback from everybody. A lot of people have ideas about where to go with the game or have suggestions -- "I couldn't understand this quest or use this skill" or whatever it is. We pay attention to the feedback quite a bit and use that to drive forward the process, so that's what we're doing this afternoon.

CGW: I think a good half the team here was part of Blizzard North beforehand. Did you have a similar practice there?

Dave Brevik: Yeah, we've always... I mean, things we've done for Hellgate we've never done before. Of course, we've never made Hellgate before. This is the largest design document we've ever made. We didn't make design documents [at Blizzard] pretty much. I mean, we did, [but] they were five pages or something like that. As we [went] along, [we'd] be like, "Hey it'd be cool if we did this and this." The ideas [were] simple enough that we [knew] where we we're going with them. But now the games are so complicated that we make, and there's so much content, and they're so difficult to make, that you have to plan out better now more than ever. Because before it was like, "Let's get Bob to go draw us a new monster" or something like that, and it'd take a week or something -- whatever it was. "Oh we need something for this" -- that takes an afternoon. Now it's like, "Oh we need a new NPC" -- okay, well that'll be three weeks. The process is so much more complicated now. The cards can handle so much more. The data's so much more intense. We have to do a little bit more planning than we've ever done, which has been a big transition for us.

CGW: Surely, as the process of making the game goes on, there are times that you're having a really good time, and there are times that you just want to tear your hair out. Where do you think you're at right now with Hellgate?

Dave Brevik: This is a really exciting time. There [have been] a couple changes we've made in the last few months that have been key to making it even better than it was before. I think those kinds of things -- putting in these big milestones, making these decisions, coming up with these ideas that change the gameplay [and] change the way that the game is -- really have impacted it. Right now, I think it's a good time. I think things are finally starting to come together and glue for the project. I knew this was a great idea. I knew where we were going. It's just sometimes it takes a little while to get to that point, and I think it's finally starting to get there. There are days where it's like, "Oh god, I can't believe I gotta do this. I don't want to do anything. I'd much rather be playing WoW," or whatever it is, "than doing this." But I think that's true with any job. People are just that way; that's life.

CGW: You mentioned there were a couple of key changes that happened recently. Is there a good example of one that you can point to?

Dave Brevik: One of the things we've done is we've written the game as a multiplayer game all along, but we haven't really been diligent about keeping it multiplayer ready/capable. We wrote a lot of the game with that in mind, and client/server that all works, and we've done a whole bunch of theoretical tests and all this kind of stuff. But we actually got the real multiplayer hooked up and running after a few months of pain, and you can actually connect and play together. It's crude -- right now it's a command line option and stuff like that -- but the fact is you can do it, and that in and of itself is like, "Ooh that's gonna be neat." So you can tell right away that's kind of special.

Next up is Flagship art director Phil Shenk, who previously worked at Blizzard as well and spends much of his time these days dealing with contracted artwork. Much like the well-publicized outsourcing at Wideload Games, Flagship uses a lot of freelance help with the game's art as a way to keep the company's internal team small. As Shenk describes it, "I do very little actual production work, and it's mostly scheduling and dealing with contractors -- stuff like that."

CGW: I think there are a lot of people who are really interested in understanding how the process of making a game works. From your perspective, can you give us a little walkthrough...for this game in particular, take it back to when you first started working on Hellgate. You left Blizzard, you guys were all sort of working out of...was it Bill's apartment or something?

Phil Shenk: It was Tyler [Thompson]'s house, and luckily his wife was in grad school so she was gone most of the day. The artists were in the basement, and the programmers were in the kitchen, and Ken [Williams] and Bill [Roper] were kind of around the dining room table, and those were good times. There was mariachi music playing next door and it was hot in the middle of the summer, but it was fun. Even at the time, we were saying we were going to look back and say, "These were our garage years and we're going to be able to wear that as a badge of honor and say how proud it was to work back then." But back then, the idea we had basically was we wanted a first-person shooter with RPG elements, basically Diablo from a first-person perspective -- or, that changed into a sort of third-person over the [shoulder] perspective -- but we wanted to bring the camera in and get that close-up feel, but have the random levels and the random items and the character advancement and all that stuff that we did in Diablo.

We started basically with a pretty simple premise. We did make a thick design doc, but we don't hold to that very rigorously. It's sort of like, "Here are some ideas," and we go off and make a game and it evolves organically.

CGW: How would you compare the workflow and the creativity here as opposed to when you were at Blizzard?

Phil Shenk: Well we have a smaller team, which I think -- and this was a stated goal of ours to keep a small team so we can move quick when we decide on a different approach -- makes us a little more creative. It's a little easier to be creative, because there are fewer of us and we don't get as bogged down in organizational details. In working with contractors -- which we do a lot of, art-wise -- in a sense it makes it easier because when we know what we want, we just say, "Make what we want," and they don't have the ego that an inside artist might have where they would say, "I don't want to do that," or "I have this other idea." I think there are plusses and minuses either way, but contractors have the advantage that they don't get paid until it's done, and they're incentivized to get it done quickly.