God of War Interview
We interview Jo Wright about the level design in God of War
Tags: God Of War Categories: Features, PS2 Features
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Feb 18th, 2005
Recently we had the opportunity to talk to Jo Wright, Senior Designer at Sony Computer Entertainment Santa Monica, where they are currently putting the finishing touches on God of War.
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DEN: Hi Jo, tell me a little bit about your background, about what you do at Sony.
Jo Wright: I’ve been working in the games industry as a designer for 11 years, before that I worked part-time as a tester while I was at university. I’m originally from the UK, but I made the move to the US 6 years ago, when I came to work for Sony. My main job here at Sony Computer Entertainment America’s Santa Monica Studio is level design and level scripting, although everyone on the team works on the overall game design too.
DEN: What’s the difference between designing a level and scripting a level?
JW: Designing a level is the planning stage, which starts on paper. We come up with the idea for the setting, figure out what objectives and experiences the player should be having in this level, then plan the layout and enemy placement on paper. Next we build a rough version of it that the player can run around, and hand it off to the artists. Then it goes back and forth between the artists and designers as we flesh the level out, and thats where the scripting part comes in.
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Scripting a level is when we populate it with enemies, create all the interactive objects and program the game logic. The game logic part is something that programmers used to do, but having the designers do this allows the designers more freedom to experiment, try out wacky ideas, and ultimately whittle down our ideas to find the most fun. We are very lucky to have a great set of tools here, which allows us to create custom versions of all our gameplay mechanics, for each level. That has allowed us to have a lot of variety throughout the game.
DEN: How is this title (from a level standpoint) different from the last game you worked on?
JW: It’s very different indeed. The previous game I worked on was a monster fighting game, where each level was an arena filled with destructible buildings, power-ups and objects to pick up and use as weapons. It wasn’t so story based, and your interaction with the environment was pretty much “collect it” or “smash it”.
[NOTE: That title would be War of the Monsters.]
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DEN: We’re promised to have some diversity in the levels, such as varying paths, as the game progresses. Can you talk about those?
JW: God of War is really very story-driven so that limited the scale of our branching paths a bit. We had already planned out the sequence of events in the story, and we wanted to make sure that neither the story or the gameplay got compromised. I think we ended up with the best of both worlds, while your choice of level tends to be more linear and dictated by the turn of events in the story, the levels themselves are more open so you can play through in the way you want.
DEN: How are they (the branching path levels) to work on as opposed to “straight forward” linear style levels?
JW: They’re much harder to script, because you have to allow for many different possibilities, and keep everything coherent no matter which order the player chooses to do things. It’s a fun challenge though, it forces you to think things through, and consider many different play-styles, and try to accommodate them all equally well.
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DEN: Where do you get your inspiration from – what causes you to design or modify a level the way you do?
JW: For level designs, I am often inspired by architecture. I can be walking through an office building, when I will look up, and see some balconies next to an atrium full of rafters, and wish that I could climb up there and jump over to some obscure corner and find something hidden. Every day we pass through cool real-life environments, but we are socially restricted in the ways we can interact with them. Games allow us to recreate these places and explore them how we want. That’s usually my starting point for a level design.
DEN: How are you able to get the diversity in levels that you do? Is there a specific toolset?
JW: We have an awesome toolset that puts a lot of power into the hands of the designers. That means the programmers can spend more time concentrating on making the technology the best it can be, and the designers can spend a lot of time experimenting with the game mechanics, and making the game really fun.
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DEN: Which level are you the most proud of in God of War?
JW: There are elements within many levels I am proud of, but I think my biggest achievement was scripting the “Rings of Pandora” level. I don’t want to give away too much about it, since I think its one of the coolest levels in the game, but the level is one giant puzzle, and its also one quite non-linear. For me it was a constant challenge to get it working right, since it does so many things – it’s a puzzle, so everything is connected to everything else. It’s also too big to fit into one level, so we had to break it into two levels, and make the transition between the two seamless, and also keep all the puzzle parts communicating with each other across the two levels. Added to that, it’s a gateway to multiple other levels, so we had to juggle lots of loading and unloading. It was a development headache, but I think the end result is worth it, and I’m really proud that I got it to work, it’s such a cool concept that’s fun to play in.
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DEN: What’s the best part of working on this project?
JW: Probably the team I am working with. Everybody is really talented and motivated to make a really fun game with the best gameplay, art and technology. When everyone cares about the game that inevitably leads to lots of arguments, but its all part of the process of finding the best way to do things, and get the best end result.
DEN: Thank you Jo for your time. We look forward to the game.
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Tags: God Of War
Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Feb 18th, 2005 and is filed under Features, PS2 Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
