The other really great thing about working with Cédric is that we are both aligned in terms of the areas where we want to push things. So we don’t want to build tech just for tech’s sake. We will go ahead and buy licensed tech, and will looks anything that we can to help us realize the game vision. There are areas that we know we want to invest in. Things like AI and animation, so we can have more authentic characters. We’re both big believers in simulation in terms of environmental interactions. So, we’ll be investing in simulation tech most likely to get more authentic environments. We both want to invest heavily in tools for designers, especially around the notion of storytelling in games, and how the technology we implement can bring more storytelling elements into the gameplay itself. Those are kind of the big areas that we’re focusing on. The last one is data mining. We’re really interested in mining data around how players play the games, so we can find more inventive ways to customize the experience for each player. That can range from the choices that you make affecting the story, down to some kind of dynamic difficulty scaling.
So, those are the areas that he’ll be charging ahead with. Having those conversations up front has been really helpful, because it’s helped us form the creative concepts and figure out the direction that we’re headed with the game designs.
When do you think you guys will be announcing a slate? How long will we have to wait to see what’s cooking?
It sort of depends on how the industry reacts and how things shape up over the next couple months. We’re hopeful that we’ll be able to make some announcements in the first half of next year. We’ll definitely be giving updates on our website. And posting concept art and stuff like that, just to keep people engaged in what we’re doing.
As we bring more people on board, we’ll probably have some announcements. We have some key hires that we’ll be making in the next couple weeks that hopefully we’ll be able to let people know about. A lot of the timing depends on how things shape up. We’re really committed to making sure that we put our best foot forward. For now, we wanted to announce the formation of the company and get that news out there and make sure people knew that Fearless had been founded, and that Cédric and I are involved in this new venture. But, at the same time, we want to make sure that the concepts are really rock solid. That we have solid tech plans, solid production plans, and the right people to build these games before we commit to any ship dates or anything like that.
Fair enough. Since leaving LucasArts, what have you been up to? I know you’re obviously working on Batwoman. Gameplay-wise, are you catching up with anything? What’s your time away from the cubicle been like?
Yeah. It’s been interesting. I started work on Fearless pretty much the day after I left. The day I was no longer a LucasArts employee, I was a Fearless Studios employee. I have been pretty heavily involved in getting the company up and running.
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Still, I made a lot of time to play games. Red Dead Redemption, I finally just finished, and thought that was excellent. Just started out on Alan Wake at your recommendation, and have been enjoying that. Playing some flash games on Kongregate and just seeing what’s out there.
There’s a few really interesting tower defense games on Kongregate that have captured my attention a little bit. League of Legends, I’ve checked out. Halo: Reach, too. Trying to get in a couple of hours of Medal of Honor today. There’s been some Crackdown 2. I finally was able to get around to Overlord II.
I loved the first Overlord. So I’ve been goofing around with Overlord II and seeing what they’ve done. I got a copy of LEGO Harry Potter and have been playing that, and it’s really fun.
You’ve been doing a lot of catching up!
Yeah, I’ve been all over the map, and play as many different games as I can. I went back and revisited some of Mass Effect 2. I’ve started looking at games that are in the same vein of the types of games that we’re looking at making, so going back and looking at the F.E.A.R. series, for example. Obviously Alan Wake. I have a huge library of superhero games, so I’ve been going back and looking at lot of those and seeing how they handle some of the problems that I know we might run into. So, stuff like Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and a handful of others.
Right. So you’re just basically looking at what’s come before and trying to see where you can carve out your own, I guess, innovations or tweaks.
Yeah. For me, everything begins and ends with the question of “What is that core experience?” How do we want the player to feel as they’re playing the games? So, I’ve been trying to go back and play some of these games and just kind of focus on that. I spent a lot time studying a lot of their mechanics in the past. Now, I just want to play it again to see how does this game make me feel. I try and come at it with fresh eyes.
What’s really great is just having a lot of time to do more research into areas that typically we overlook. I’m reading up on anthropology a lot, on psychology, architecture. Doing a lot of research in other areas that we all know are important to game design, but as game designers and game creators, we don’t actually, in our day to day jobs, spend a lot of time focusing on. So that’s been really rewarding too.
Yeah, it’s funny that you say that because I had a chance to speak to Ken Levine when they did the reveal of BioShock Infinite. And you can see all that stuff in the game. You can see there’s an understanding of, for lack of a better term, like social sciences and human behavior in their games, and I’m assuming that’s something you want to bring out as well.
Yeah. Absolutely. There were a handful of us on The Force Unleashed team early on that had taken extensive psychology classes in college. One guy was actually as psychology major. We were really interested in exploring some of those thing in Force Unleashed I. For a lot of different reasons, where the focus of the game went didn’t allow for some of the data tracking things that we wanted to do. I’m hoping that I can take some of that passion I have for that and redirect it to the new stuff that we’re working on. At the end of the day, we’re hoping to make games that people fondly remember 5, 10, 15 years after they’re done playing them. And, as they’re playing them, we want them to feel big thrills and that there being surprises at every turn. So, we have all these lofty ambitions about where we want the company to be in the future and how many games we want to be building.
We want to create our own IP and those type of things. A lot of the same things that other independent developers want to do. But we’re also very focused on, OK, first and foremost, let’s just really make a fun game that people will have a great time playing, and that they’re constantly surprised.