Maintaining the Vigil

Yeah - we learned a million things, but we took it one step at a time. We had a cool idea, but we had to build technology, the team... The biggest thing I learned personally is that the interesting thing about game development, if you have a lot of experience making games - if you're making a game you've never made before, a lot of that experience is useless. It's useful in a way, but you can be the best FPS developer on the face of the Earth - but if somebody comes to you and asks you to make an RPG, you've got to learn everything all over again.

You don't intrinsically know what makes an RPG great - and that's definitely hard to do when everything else is variable, when you're also trying to build the team and the technology. We just had a situation where we had to figure out a lot of different variables that were primordial and we had to grow into something useful. Doing them all at the same time was definitely fun...

I think, because of the situation we were in, I'm sure you can go into something with a little more planning and structure than we had, but we had so few people. It just felt like a boat that you're constantly plugging holes in, and dealing with stuff as it arose.

It was like: "This week, our main focus is that we need to hire a certain number of artists," while the next week it was that the engine needed some tools we hadn't thought of... the focus kept changing - it wasn't like we had this huge map laid out before us and we knew when the hurdles would come, it was more about which fire we were putting out that week.

But eventually we did get a lot better at it, and we had the right people in the right position. Things got smoother, and now we've announced a sequel - we have the team in place, and the experience of the first game, so it'll be nice to spend more time on the development and less on the fire-fighting.

Yes, and add to the fact that we started that other project before we finished the first game... But we're at the point now where we know how to make Darksiders, we're making the sequel, which is cool - so a lot of that mental energy (in addition to making Darksiders 2 as cool as ever) has shifted to finishing the MMO.

We do have a leg up in that regard, because we did actually work on MMOs before Darksiders - unlike action-adventure console games, which we came into with almost zero knowledge...

But it's still such a huge undertaking - there's just a lot of moving parts, we've still got to build up a lot of the team. Trying to do that while at the same time trying to make a double-kick-ass sequel that exceeds the first in every way - that's a lot of work.

The quality of the people is huge. My whole philosophy with production methods is that the best one is the last one that worked for you. If there was some magical philosophy that just worked, someone would have trade-marked it and everybody would do it.

But the fact that almost every single studio has a different development process is indicative of the fact that there's no true solution. It's a combination of the people you have, how they work together and how you best utilise them - that's the best development philosophy for any particular development studio.

I think for us as a studio, we are more heavily invested in our internal people. We've done some outsourcing and there are some things that work really well - but there are a lot of things that we like to iterate on, and it's not easy with somebody that's not in the studio and privy to the daily back-and-forth.

I've worked contract for most of my career, so it's something I'm pretty familiar with - but I know that when you're internal and involved with the people on a day-to-day basis, you just take a different approach to what you're working on.

It's not like we'd rule it out - I think it's pretty valuable for certain things, certain types of games, or just asset creation when you have a tonne of stuff to do. But for us, so far, the best experience that's working is to build a strong internal team and that's probably what we'll keep trying to do.

We were pretty lucky, just because our publisher had this weird, insane faith in us that I don't necessarily think any other publisher would have had. They signed us when there were about six or eight of us, and pretty much every other publisher just said: "You guys are lame..." But our take was that if we just did really cool stuff, people would see that - they'd want to jump on the bandwagon and support us, and THQ did.

So we luckily avoided a lot of that stuff. THQ went through a lot of pain and restructuring - they took a lot of bullets so we could continue to make our game, and that's a good indication of their faith in us, and their drive to make great-quality products.

Hopefully it's a reflection on us - we are very iterative on everything we do, and that's not just related to the actual games that we make. It's also the processes, trying to be more efficient, do stuff quicker, using less money - it's something we're constantly working on.