Kameo: Elements of Power Interview: Lead Artist Mark Stevenson

Can you tell us something about your personal history, education, and work history?
After school, I went into higher education and did a general art and design course followed by a graphic design course which initially covered graphic design, advertising, and illustration. I had to specialize on this course so I chose illustration for the final year. I’d always been mad into games and was quite annoyed and frustrated when my final year project that I wanted to do of designing and illustrating covers for videogames was frowned heavily upon by the lecturers, forcing me to alter this project for book covers (whoopee). It’s good to see that attitudes in higher education have changed a lot since then with courses dedicated specifically to games starting to appear around the world.

Anyway, as I’ve already said, I was always mad into games starting with the arcade (bizarrely [see later] the original Donkey Kong arcade machine being one of my first addictions), I progressed onto the Atari 2600 (much to the disappointment of my French teacher as I chose to have the Atari for Christmas rather than my Mum and Dad pay for me to go on some crappy school trip to France—you’ve got to get your priorities straight, haven’t you?) I then went through the usual home computer scene that is synonymous with us Brits, I was a Commodore man (C64 followed by an Amiga, great days for the sheer volume of creativity and exciting and unique ideas). On to Rare, I’ve worked here pretty much since leaving college (12 years now), it’s the only job in the industry I’ve had. When I started I was fortunate enough that my first game I worked on was Donkey Kong Country (I did one background, most of the props and most of the promotional artwork). After this I did Donkey Kong Country 2 (several backgrounds, most of the props again, modeled and animated a couple of the characters, and again most of the promotional artwork). Next was Donkey Kong Country 3, I got the chance to be lead artist on this one and modeled and animated most of the main characters, did a lot of the props again and several of the backgrounds and most of the promotional artwork. So the last project I did before Kameo™: Elements of Power™, I’m sure you can guess by now, was Donkey Kong 64 again in the role of lead artist. Then onto where we now: Kameo: Elements of Power.

Over the long course of the game’s development, how has your contribution ebbed and flowed?
Straight from DK64 we started working on planning and designing Kameo. As lead artist I devoted a lot of time to getting the core graphics systems of the game up and running with the programmers, then we went on to prototyping the game into its initial form as seen on the GameCube at E3 many years ago (check out the movies if you haven’t already, there’s some really cool stuff that helped sow the seeds for what Kameo was to become). Towards the end of the development time we spent on Gamecube, my involvement as lead artist ceased and I just continued as an individual contributor mainly on modeling characters and doing effects. But then when the Microsoft buyout of Rare happened and we moved the game to Xbox I took the reins again as lead artist and started to become more involved in the actual game play design also. Through our work on Xbox and then Xbox 360 my contribution has gradually become less and less about creating actual content and more of a managerial role, overseeing the art side of the project and sticking my nose into the design side of the project as much as I can (and am allowed to).

When you heard that Kameo would come out on the Xbox 360 platform, how did your approach to the artwork change?
It’s been kind of like going back to the beginning of my career; the techniques we employ now are very similar to how we produced graphics for Donkey Kong Country via prerendering. Only we can produce better results now in real time than we could achieve with the limitations of prerendering solutions back then. It’s great from an art point of view as we’re rapidly getting into a situation where the only limitation is your imagination. For Kameo we totally revised the lighting and shadowing solution. Everything uses shaders as in prerendering to create realistic looking materials with bump mapping (or normal mapping) and specular shine and we have this really amazing effect we’re using called parallax mapping that make the surfaces look even more three dimensional than even I can believe.

If you could be any of the Elemental Warriors or other characters in Kameo, which one would you be, and why?

Tough call. I’d probably pick Thermite. Why, for me he just has one of the coolest moves in the game in the form of an upgrade called Backblast. Maybe I’m just naturally sadistic but the move gives me enormous satisfaction in the way that you can just…Nah, I’m not telling, you’ll just have to check it out for yourself when you play the game.

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.