Kameo: Elements of Power Interview: Writer Chris Allcock

Can you tell us something about your personal history, education, and work history?
As you’d probably expect, I got here through a love of video games—starting on the old rubber-keyed Spectrum and working my way up to more internationally-recognised hardware. As you might not expect, I never set out to become a video game scriptwriter; jobs like that didn’t even exist at the time when I’d decided games were what I wanted to get into.

Writing, on the other hand, was something I’d always played with in my spare time and something I really enjoyed—helped in part by a succession of excellent English teachers. I’d got a portfolio of short stories, magazine articles, that sort of thing…In my mind, though, writing was the hobby and Computer Science was the way to get into the games industry and start paying the bills.

So that was what I did—followed the standard route of UK education before getting thoroughly hacked-off with university and deciding it was time to get out there and give something back. I was working in the technical support department of an Internet Service Provider when a response came back to a letter I’d sent out some months previously and almost forgotten about…This one had a golden R logo in the corner and I couldn’t get to the interview fast enough.

Over the long course of the game’s development, how has your contribution ebbed and flowed?
Thanks to the game’s unique evolution there have always been challenges and opportunities to explore—I’ve always had a full plate! Although the script has been a primary concern of mine I’ve also worked as a designer on the game, and have most recently been helping to ensure we get a stellar quality of script and speech in a multitude of languages across the world.

Have you had to write extra material for the Xbox 360 version of the game? What can you tell us about it?
Well, it wasn’t so much “having” to write extra material—which makes it sound like a burden—as much as being given the opportunity to expand Kameo’s world even further. The Battlefield is a perfect example: as our lead designer was able to introduce these stunning gameplay elements and epic battles, so I from a story perspective was able to explore some of the avenues that had always nagged at me when I’d played games.

A case in point; everyone’s familiar with the concept of the hero who sets out to save the universe, but all too often you find that everyone else in the game world is sitting back and living as normal…while the teen with the sword is single-handedly defeating every single minion of the final boss.

Now, though, we can take a step back and say ‘how is everyone else in the world dealing with this?’ So you’ve got an epic struggle playing out on our Battlefield between good and evil, and characters in that struggle with their own motives and problems who can now be directly affected by the actions of the player. The possibilities with Xbox 360 are limitless.

If you have to name only one thing that you hope players will appreciate in Kameo, what would it be?
Diversity. Spearheading a wave of titles that move above and beyond traditional gamers means you’ve suddenly got to find ways to engage and reach people that we as an industry have been ignoring for far too long.

Kameo can appeal to all sorts of people on different levels at the same time—a rough-and-tumble action fan will gravitate to the Battlefield and all of the amazing things we’ve got going on there. Aspiring adventurers can amuse themselves seeking out every nook and cranny in the game world—and believe me, they’ll be rewarded for doing so—and obsessively stalking the villagers. The hardcore gamers will be setting these incredible scores online but the socialites of the world will be making life-long friends that can help them beat those scores…

I’ve actually cheated and named several things, but I’ve barely scratched the surface…

Is there a character in Kameo that you found particularly fun to write? One that was particularly difficult to get into?
Ortho was particularly fun to write because he’s a miserable, sarcastic old codger—if he weren’t sat in a magical book, he’d be chasing children away from his bins. He gets to be sarcastic and cynical, and that’s always fun. Kameo herself was actually surprisingly tricky to write for—strong female characters who can hold their own without being sassy or losing their femininity are a much more complicated prospect than “man who sells potions.”

Fortunately, there have been some excellent interactions from other industries as of late. Our Hollywood consultant, Alex, and Kameo’s voice actress both did a superlative job bringing the character to life.

What’s it like to hear the words you’ve written recorded by the voice actors? Are you pleased with their performances?
Spooky! As long-time Rare fans will know, voices in our games have previously been long-suffering Rare staff and a number of those veterans stepped up to ‘temp’ the speech while the game was in development. I somehow wrangled my way in front of a microphone, too.

Without warning, I’m down in London. These people I’ve never met before walk in, stand behind some glass, and the characters we’ve been forging through the game suddenly spring to life in front of me, bending and waving their voices in ways that really shouldn’t be possible according to medical science. “Sound like a thirty foot Troll,” you say, and it happens. It’s ace.

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

Ahh, finally we reach the important question. Tempting as it is to respond with a typically coy answer, such as “I’d be the secret character from another much-loved franchise that no-one’s found yet,” I’ll say: the Warrior Trainer. He was the character I had the most fun voicing during our temping sessions and he’s got some of the best hidden stuff, too.

Can you give us an idea of the process of writing for a game like Kameo? What processes are most important to the successful completion of your work?

Communication. Kameo has layers upon layers of complexity and challenge for players to delve into and they intermingle so seamlessly that you need to be completely up to speed on what’s happening from a gameplay perspective—and the same applies to the designers!

Even the simplest thing can easily snowball—if a character tells you a secret use for a special move, and that special move is taken out of the game, you’ve suddenly got a raft of issues to be cleared up. What does the character talk about instead? Does it still make sense for that character to even exist? How do you cope if that character has audio attached to their text, and how will the dozen-or-so other languages you’re translating the game into be affected, anyway?

The process for writing really depends on what you’re writing—if it’s something small like the contents of a signpost or a tribal journal, I’ll just get on with it. Anything tied directly into gameplay—a piece of advice about what to do next, for example—tends to get given the once-over by our lead designer before it’s implemented.

A conversation where two characters discuss a vital piece of information can have designers, managers, animators, and our Hollywood consultant offering input and there’s often a lot of back-and-forth before a completed scene finally emerges—it may only be a few seconds of dialogue but if it doesn’t “click” in the heads of people across the planet, it’s got to be redone.

What is your creative relationship with the level developer like?

Probably a lot closer than scriptwriters on many other games, since we’re sat in the same building, and I’m working under him as a designer on other tasks. Ultimately it’s about respect, and you don’t get to be a long-serving senior designer like he is—least of all at a company with a reputation as lauded as Rare’s—without knowing what you’re doing.

That’s one of the things that drives every team here—you can just trust that anyone’s doing the job they’ve been given, and it’s going to turn out great. You may not even understand why they make the decision at the time, but you’ll certainly see their reasons when you look at the quality of the finished product.

What was your greatest challenge while working on Kameo?

Like most action-adventure games we’ve got these little guys, residents of the various tribes that Kameo visits on her quest. In the past characters like this tended to get relegated to being walking signposts but they…escaped, you could say, when we moved to Xbox 360 and started demanding speech and jobs and fun stuff to do at night.

Now there’re literally dozens of villagers, all leading their own little lives (and occasionally accompanying Kameo) but the sheer amount of speech and the ways you can interact with these characters had to be tightly controlled, monitored and debugged…No small order and quite the challenge.

What has been your greatest joy?

I think that one of the things that attracts people to Rare games—aside from the outstanding graphics, brilliant gameplay, and devastatingly attractive scriptwriters—is the sense of humour. Right from the beginning, even when a Rare game has been portraying something serious it’s done it with a twinkle in the eye that says “hey, it’s a game and we’re having as much fun as you.”

Getting a chance to play with that brand of humour has been wonderful and, while Kameo isn’t as openly, brilliantly silly as something like Grabbed by the Ghoulies I would hope people can still find lots to chuckle at. Dig a little and you’ll find characters who poke fun at the usual adventure game clichés, tell Kameo off if she tries to wander into their house and start stealing all of their things, and of course the usual smattering of awful puns.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into a career doing what you do?

Work hard, learn to accept and accommodate criticism of something that you may think is the best you’ve ever written (one of the hardest things anyone will ever have to do). Keep a sense of humour about the whole thing. Oh, and learning to use apostrophes and put letters in the right order always helps.

If you want to be involved with the voice recording process, it’s important to have absolutely no sense of self-consciousness whatsoever because you will, at some point, end up waving your arms about and making silly noises in a little glass box.