Ask our interviewees about the level of critical acclaim heaped on their Xbox project Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and they admit to surprise. Taking a low-key property and turning it into videogaming gold could become the company's calling card if its latest project The Darkness, based on a relatively unknown comic book series, lives up to expectations when it's finally released in spring 2007. As they take a break from an increasingly heavy workload, we sit down with game designers Mikael Saker and Tommy Tordsson, lead level designer Jerk Gustafsson and art director Jens Matthies...
What was the draw of The Darkness? Why base this project on a cult comic?
Jens Matthies: There were a lot of factors that went into that decision. After Riddick we had numerous offers to do different things, including a next-gen game. Then we got this one offer for The Darkness. So we read the comic and found a lot of elements we really liked. It was the kind of project we wanted to do from a technological standpoint, so it was a good match.
With Riddick being such a critical success, did you feel pressure to deliver with this next project?
Mikael Saker: Of course! (Laughs.) For one, you're here. We've noticed a lot more press coverage around this project than Riddick, so there's definitely a lot more pressure.
JM: Every game we've done has been better than the last one, and we've improved each time, learning to be more ambitious as well. It would be both a professional and personal failure if it didn't do as well as Riddick. So that's what we're aiming for; to make it better.
MS: We're just hoping that our creative peak is still ahead of us!
Do you find while developing The Darkness you can employ unused ideas from the Riddick project as you're still using your own custom Starbreeze graphics engine?
MS: We had a prototype up and running pretty early on the Riddick engine, and so this gave us a starting point. As both games use a first-person perspective, we could use animations from Riddick to test out the engine and get things going, steadily progressing towards what you are seeing now. It looks and plays a lot differently from Riddick, but there are common elements that we have been able to use so development can progress more quickly.
JM: But there are some things you really can't take from Riddick, even though we and other people really liked them - like the melee attacks.
JM: In Riddick we had this guy in prison and it didn't seem realistic that he was carrying guns. But being a hitman for the Mafia, you're going to have access to weaponry, that's just the way it is. So if you have access to guns all the time, you don't just walk up and punch people in the face.
MS: We also have some storytelling ideas that we developed during the Riddick production that we pushed further. Because in Riddick we wanted to limit the number of cinematic cutscenes and bring as much as possible into the actual gameplay. In The Darkness we've gone even further. There are cinematic cut scenes, but all of them bar one are in the first-person. It's in the style of Half-Life, but far more dramatic.
Were any of you fans of the comic before you started the project?
Jerk Gustaffsson: I don't think anyone had read it!
JM: Only a few of us were, because The Darkness isn't really available in Sweden.
MS: I know when we started the project we had to order huge racks of the comic from America, because we went into town and had a hard time tracking copies down.
It's a relatively unknown cult comic. Did you find that allowed you to be more creative during development?
JM: The experience has been awesome working with Top Cow (The Darkness comic publisher). Those guys were super supportive of us when we had to make a change or enhance something. For example, in the comic The Darkness's powers aren't as defined - they're whatever that particular issue or that individual story needs. In the game, we needed to set out and say this is what The Darkness is and this is what it can do, building the game mechanics around that. So we needed to make those decisions. Top Cow has been supportive of that.
MS: You'll recognise some elements from the comic, others you'll notice we've changed for the story. There are a few that we've dropped.
So you managed to define the scope of Jackie's powers by deciding what wouldn't work in the videogame?
MS: I think one thing that wasn't really dealt with in the comics was the struggle between Jackie and The Darkness.
JM: What we latch onto in the story is the basic arcs of all the characters, finding the dramatic situation between them....
MS: So we have three main conflicts within the game - we have Jackie and Paulie, the Mob Boss that Jackie wants to dethrone; we have Jackie and The Darkness and how they relate to each other; then Jackie and his girlfriend Jenny. It's a pretty complex story in a way. It's all tied together in an intricate web.
JG: We've also had Paul Jenkins (ex-The Darkness comic writer) on board.
What exactly is Paul Jenkins's role? Is he merely laying down the groundwork for the story, or is his brief far broader than that?
JM: When the project started, we hashed out a few things we wanted to do and when he came on-board, we sat in this very room for a straight week of meetings, fleshing out the whole foundation of the story, going from A to B to C.
MS: Identifying key moments in the story.
JG: And it allowed us to understand this amazing universe a lot more.
MS: We then took a look at the base material and decided on what we could and couldn't do with locations - so it was a creative process that went back and forth. In the process, we've written material that we've shown Paul and vice versa. It's hard to say who has written what!
With the Xbox 360 already brimming with a raft of first-person shooters, how do you make The Darkness stand out from the crowd?
JG: The only issue we have is that we want to make the game the best we possibly can!
MS: But of course you look at the competition - like Gears of War. They got ten out of ten in a lot of reviews and it's scary.
JM: 'Intimidating' is the word.
MS: But I haven't looked at the game closely because what we're doing is so different, with a completely different focus.
Jackie starts off as a Mafia hitman. How do you make someone playing the game sympathetic to his rather unsympathetic character?
JM: Well, we felt sympathetic when reading the comics, so it's possible for that to happen. Have you seen the TV show Dexter? It's about a serial killer sociopath and there's no problem there - you can sympathise with that guy. It plainly states this guy doesn't feel much so, when you develop a character, cast him and engineer all these things he'll go through, it creates someone who you want to play as. But we might fail!
MS: It's a strong thing that you play as this character, and that in itself makes you bond with him. I don't think I've ever played a game where I didn't have that bond with a character.
JM: Outcast - an old 1999 Atari PC action adventure. I didn't like their main character at all!
MS: Maybe it's all to do with the moment that you pick up the game box and look at the picture on the cover, then subconsciously decide if you really want to play the game or not. With Outcast, the main character looks like a wuss. I still don't want to be him. Maybe you make the decision based on that.
JM: It's not really about the look - but the major difference is that this is a first-person game and you are that person. When you're playing Riddick you are Riddick, and when you're playing The Darkness you are Jackie.
TT: Even though The Darkness is quite a dark character - a hitman. Although he suffers from the normal trials and issues that we all do.
MS: Yes, like 'Who do I want kill?'
TT: On the base level there are always issues.
MS: The feelings are always primal, that everyone can relate to. If Jackie loses something precious to him he gets angry. We all do, I think.
JM: What's my direction? 'You're angry!'
What do you think the Xbox 360 could add to the gaming experience this time round?
MS: You mean technically? There's a huge amount of things that we can now do - one of the obvious things is the stencil-shadow technique (the use of sharp edges). Since Riddick was a lot about moving in the shadows, this technique created really sharp shadows, allowing you to move around light sources. But it's hard to make it look natural because of all the hard edges. In The Darkness we've added light mapping, a traditional technique that allows dynamic use of lighting.
JG: It allows us to build larger-scale worlds, larger-scale environments.
MS: There's also the motion-captured dialogue, where we capture all the facial movements of the actors.
JM: The most important thing I think we did was taking the next-gen leap from Riddick, from the production side of things. We've done a lot of things, but the core is the same, allowing us to do much more and get more detail and extra information in the game. For me, this opportunity wasn't about creating a game that's better in the technological sense, but in terms of gameplay and storytelling. We're at a point now where a lot of companies can make really pretty-looking games, so it's not really about just the looks anymore.
With developing a mature horror title, do you look at other videogame series like Silent Hill or Resident Evil to research how to conceive it?
JM: We didn't have to try very hard!
MS: There aren't many horror elements in the game and those there are aren't particularly strong. We're all movie and gameplay buffs, so it's easy to go into game sections and say this part should be like Silent Hill!
