We had the chance to sit down with Homefront’s lead single player designer, Chris Cross, to talk about his new game, the pressures of creating a compelling narrative experience, and his thoughts about modern game design. Cross is one of the smartest guys in the industry and offers fascinating insights into the processes involved in building a game like Homefront…
360Zine: In what ways have you guys tried to differ from the competition?
Chris Cross: We have several ways – one is making the familiar become alien, so taking something everybody knows and twisting it slightly which is the main reason we’re in the United States and that there’s an occupation here. I think you’ll find some things where they’re immediately recognisable but there’s something wrong with them, so basically the whole visual style of the game seems pretty standard but there’s some slight twists, the other one is the cost of war, like the human cost. We do stuff in this game like? if we were a teen rated game? look I’ve worked on shooters for a long time and most of them have been teen rated. There’s things here that I would have never gotten away with in the past. We’ve got civilians involved, there are scenes that I think are brutal and raw, and maybe I’m wrong and maybe I’m a little old school about it but I think they’re shocking
360Zine: So it’s less of a Black Ops-style action movie?
CC: In some ways it is, but we have to follow that up with – and this goes back to the familiar being alien – we have to make sure the core mechanics are familiar, that everybody knows what to do. If we had changed that up so it was really oddball-strange and really unique, we would have lost a lot of the story points, you’d end up fighting the controller. Even at that point, when I first came on the team it was really about executing everything that’s ‘standard’ really well, so we can get our point across. Basically that stuff can’t be a distraction. If we had a gravity gun, that would get in the way laughs, you know what I mean? You’d be like ‘oh that kid got shot, whatever I gotta gravity gun! Now I’m gonna start throwing cars around!’
360Zine: How important is continuing a strong narrative all the way through the game ?
CC: I think it’s extremely important, and I think we did a pretty good job, I think we could do a better job, but you know coming right of the gate with this one I think we did the best that we could in the circumstances,
360Zine: It’s refreshing to hear honesty like that?
Well there’s a storytelling skillset. I’ve always told people who like story in games that it’s not all about the cinematics, you know, and even our cinematics are in-game. The melding between those two is a hard task and so I think we’ve accomplished that?
360Zine: Do you think we as an industry are still learning ?
CC: I think so, and I think one of the mistakes we make as an industry is trying to make the ‘movie’ too closely, although I think we’re getting closer through happenstance because games are getting shorter. Before we had to support 20 or 40 hours of gameplay. No one can do story like that, people struggle to sit through Lord Of The Rings once, it’s too much information. For me, I tend to think there’s a reason school periods are about an hour. There’s a reason people can only take so much information in, so bite-sized chunks of story bits have to lead you through and there’s a though process that the narrative thread has to be held by the player. So if you choose to lose that and turn levels into two hour epics, then you lose the larger story, right?
360Zine:It’s difficult, isn’t it, to take in some story, some exposition, then all of a sudden have to go into mechanics for one hour, ninety minutes..
CC: Exactly. It’s then ‘red key red door’, and you lose context like what the ‘f*** is this sh**’. For me, the one I always use to teach designers is… I know everybody’s played Half Life so I use that as an example. As a gamer, the main objective for two thirds of the game, maybe three quarters, is ‘escape Black Mesa’, three words ,and that’s what rolls around in the back of your head ‘I gotta keep going I gotta keep going’ and when it turns into ‘kill the baby head’, that’s where it lost a lot of people, because that’s where people lost understanding of what their larger goal was. You go into Mario, and the story in every Mario game is save the princess. Zelda, save the princess. You can make it more complex than that and the journey can be very long, but the end goal is the same. Essentially our goal is save America, save the world. Fight for freedom, right. And I think that we’ve covered that goal. It becomes very hard when you’re stuck in the details in the actual assembling of the smaller pieces to make this experience.
360zine: Can you explain some of the processes that go into starting a project like this?
CC: There’s like… I call it the teeter totter of design, there’s this balance between how the game is expressed on screen and how you originally write it, and you have to be working together. Ideas have to flow back and forth. Here we started with a beat doc, like what are all the beats we want to hit and then it’s all about trying to connect these dots. Honestly this is probably one of the more successful titles I’ve ever worked on to do that in a longer narrative form. It’s difficult, it can be very hard and without proper give and take it can go sideways real fast.
360zine: I think it’s important that people on my side, in the press, to inform the people of how you guys actually put these things together ?
CC: I have a really good friend who used to be Editor In Chief at a major press place, and we used to go and play games and he’d be like ‘ok what’s going on here’ and from a developer’s perspective I can saw ‘I’ll tell you what happened there, they ran out of time’ or ‘the original conception of that mechanic didn’t fit in, you know what I mean, this is how they broke it down and this is how I would go back and do it’ but once again, that’s like armchair quarterbacking . When you make those decisions like ‘no man, we have to have a flamethrower here cos this is where we light stuff on fire to serve the story’ ‘but dude, the fire looks like shit, what are we gonna do?’ and then you have to go back and forth.
I look at game development like a giant science experiment. We write down a theory of what we’re going to make, then we go into the experiment of pre production, and then as you go in you see some of the arms aren’t working together so you have to switch it up and think on your feet, and that plan becomes a rolling mutation until you get to the end and it’s like ‘it’s pretty close’. I’ve been doing this a long time so I think I can hit 75 percent on fantastic day, but you know it’s part of what makes it fun, it makes it frustrating for people to predict how the budget’s gonna go, but that’s the fun part of trying to integrate the narrative into the gameplay and getting the gameplay to support the narrative.
360Zine: Do you think sometimes developers forget that their customerse don’t have their level of insight and understanding?
CC: Absolutely, one of the guidelines I throw down for developers is ‘anytime you feel clever, that you’re feeling you’ve done something really cheeky, your little design is really appealing to you as a designer, double check’, because our job is to actually make the player feel clever, so if you’re feeling clever you might be taking away from what makes them feel like that. So the example I give them is like teaching a kid why the sky is blue. You can say it’s refraction and water vapour in the air and blah blah blah? too much detail, gonna go straight over their head. But if you do stuff like put a prism next to his bed so when he wakes up he says ‘what’s this cool thing’ and you begin on this process? that’s what a game designer’s job is, actually to be invisible, but always be guiding, providing the helping hand.
360Zine: Do you think game narrative can be overly reliant on twists and huge story turns?
CC: Yeah at some point. Well, if the twists are to work, first of all you need to get the character investment, right, and that’s a hard thing to gauge sometimes. Like, do we have them invested enough so that when we flip it around they’ll care? We went for a pretty straightforward narrative in Homefront and I think that’s important because, when you’re introducing new ideas or new thought processes or a different world, it’s vital to keep everybody on track, right. I used to think, when I was younger, I kept the mantra ‘let’s make a player cry’ and to do that you have to have a twist, you have to take something and trash it, but that’s a hard thing to do because you have to guarantee the audience is invested in whatever you’re going to twist, and that’s a difficult task and typically takes long periods of time and investment.
Videogames are felt, in a very tactile way, through the controller, it becomes very difficult between us telling you a story, and you making a story happen, you know what I mean? There’s a balance between those two things. So if I give you free agency, you want to experience it in your own way, that means that traditional narrative techniques may not work as you might feel it’s pushed upon you. So one of the things we did in this game that helps is that you always have allies with you, and they’re set up with certain character responses. So basically the theory is this? in first person shooters you can’t see yourself, so you have nobody to identify with, and we’ve gone with an empty vessel approach, so the idea is to give you a mirror of what you should feel like based on the allies around you. You have three allies around you so you’re going to identify with one or another based on your own personality. When you can see that, you start thinking ‘right, they’re having a human reaction, so how do I feel about this?’ If you’re wondering around by yourself that’s harder to do
Tags: Homefront
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