| Official Australian PlayStation Magazine, June 1998 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
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| Cover of the Official Australian PS Magazine issue 35. | |||
| Issue No. | 35 | ||
| Page(s) | 27 | ||
| Interviewee(s) | Simon Gardner Andrew Kennedy | ||
| Interview Subject | MediEvil 2 | ||
| Language | English | ||
| URL available? | Yes | ||
An interview with Simon Gardner and Andrew Kennedy from June 2000 published in the Official Australian PlayStation Magazine issue 35.
Transcript
MediEvil History
Whilst visiting Australia, Simon Gardner and Andrew Hennedy of Sony Cambridge - the duo responsible for quirky horror MediEvil2 - shared their experience of developing games and the expertise that comes with it.
Official PlayStation Magazine: Let’s start with your new title... How do you think this game ‘rates’ relative to the first one?
Andrew Kennedy (Producer): I'm very proud of it. I mean, there are areas that you do see that you’d like to be improved a bit more, but you have to draw the line somewhere. The development process we had allowed us to make our Alpha (code) on time, which gave us a lot of time just to polish the game. It was very planned so we didn’t run out of time and miss out on things that we wanted to do.
Simon Gardner (Studio Director): I’d say it’s the best game that I’ve ever worked on and I’ve been in the industry for over seven years now. That includes Dark Stalkers, G-Police, Overboard and G-Police 2 - and it’s very different. The whole package has real quality and the production values are so high. We really did go about it in a very structured way and I think that that shows.
PSM: How long did the project take?
'SG: It ran for about 13 months altogether.
AK: We had a very good team. A lot of the people from the first game came over to work on it. The technical programmer, James Busby, advanced the original engine quite a lot. The team knew exactly what was needed to improve it. Chris Sorrell worked on the camera again, as he wasn’t satisfied with the camera in MediEvil.
PSM: What can you tell budding games developers about what it was like working on this team?
SG: The size of the team peaked at about 35 people.
AK: That’s regarded as a very big team. Not so much by Japanese standards, but certainly for European games. MediEvil games are very complex to develop. I’d say more so than most other games. Every level needs graphical diversity, gameplay diversity. Every level in itself is like a game so we had to have a lot of programmers. We paired up the team as we took in new staff to boost up numbers, then we matched the experienced guys from the first one with graduate programmers.
SG: We even had to invest in some new software as well to manage a team of that size to ensure we could manage all the complexities of the resources and files.
PSM: With a team of 35, what sort of expertise does it comprise of?
AK: There was a core team that started off that worked for about three-and-a-half months. More programmers were added, and then artists that would specifically work on one area like backgrounds or character art. We had about 11 programmers, 15 artists, two musicians and three mappers who built levels and collision data.
SG: Mappers build basic geometry and a lot of work is then based on that from there.
PSM: The MediEvil games are almost a niche genre of their own. What’s the key to adding that ‘special’ element?
SG: It’s partly to do with the creativity of the guy that came up with the original game. It’s his style, his humour and his baby. For us as a studio, it’s a very interesting environment to work in because we do have to look at producing mainstream products. We didn’t originally think that a game like this would have a mass-popularity that was worth exploiting.
AK: Its popularity does cover a broad spectrum. We thought it was basically an ‘English’ game but we’ve found that it does have universal appeal.
PSM: We’re very interested as to what plans Sony Cambridge has for games for the PS2...
SG: I don’t want to say too much about it just yet, but we have really looked at what we want to achieve. We’re in a fortunate position of time so we’ve set the bar very, very high for what we want in our first PlayStation2 product. I do have to say though, that what we have so far does look very spectacular. We have shown it to some European press who were all blown away by it. I can confirm that the first product will be spectacular, it will be slightly different to MediEvil 2, and it’s even more ‘adult’ as far as production values go.
PSM: When you say that the bar has been set very high, are you talking about...
SG: The opposition.
AK: It will be a very big game.
SG: We’ll still be working on PlayStation products as well. We have one more coming out before the end of the year that’s set in the future with a science-fiction base. Again, this one should be spectacular.
AK: It’s the MediEvil engine enhanced.
SG: As far as content goes, it has all of the better puzzle elements of the MediEvil games.