Striving for 100% perfection
Villains are usually seen as the most dramatic part of a story, would you say there was any pressure on you to design ‘cool’ bosses? Is this always a pressure as a designer?When I receive a design brief, I always analyze the character and think about how to make it more impressive and interesting for the player. It’s not so much a ‘pressured scenario’ as opposed to a ‘challenging scenario’, but naturally you do still worry that others, including players, might not find them as interesting as me when designing them. There’s a fine line but of course this is always approved beforehand.
How many concepts do you go through to get to the right one when developing the characters?
We can use our own ideas to create an image, but if we want the person or player to like what they see, then we need to take some time to think about what it is we want to design. Generally speaking, there are three types of bosses that appear in games, the cute-type, abominable-type and fantasy-type. These are factors to think about when designing and, at the same time, we need to consider the story of the boss’ life, where does he/she come from, what’s the background, the reason the boss is an enemy and how/why they became the way they are.
Which is your favourite character and why?
It’s hard to say because as a designer, there’s always something I’m not 100% happy with. As a result of this, I haven’t sat down and actually thought that there is one particular design I would say is my favourite. I like them all but would love to spend more time on each of them too. My main aim when designing is to fill the criteria of the character and the game, not just what I like, but more importantly what the players would like.
TLBB provides a number of different boss characters and doesn’t stick to one type of genre i.e. a gangster video game or a cowboy western shot-em-up where you know what to expect a lot of the time. Did this open the doors to even greater creativity? Or did you have to follow certain guidelines? If so, what were the difficulties, as a designer, of sticking to the right format?
From the start of a brief, we need to consider a character’s story and according to the background and expectation of this, then we design the appropriate characters. I also have to consider whether or not the character can be smoothly implemented in the final model of the game. Sometimes, due to some limitations in the engine of a game, it’s difficult to get an absolute perfect result of what you want.
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