Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Interview

Gamasutra has returned from the long holiday weekend, and they’ve brought with them an interview that they recently conducted with Big Huge Games art director Tim Coman about the affect that other games have had on Reckoning’s art direction, the changes that the team has made since 38 Studios’ acquisition, how they’re ensuring a consistent feel with the upcoming Copernicus, and more.

When you’re talking from a process perspective, how did you start with this “design it from the ground up” mentality, and where did you start?

TC: I don’t know how familiar you are with the back story of the project. It was originally a different project. When 38 [Studios] came on board, we basically started the IP over. So, we went back and sort of built everything from scratch. The first thing we usually do is, we sit down and have a lot of conversations about it. We looked back to all the [material] R.A has written… I mean, we keep saying, “Oh, he’s got 10,000 years of history that he wrote for this game!” He really did write that. There is this huge tome of knowledge on this stuff.

And the cool part about it is we could dive back through all that and start to find things that we’re like, “Oh, this is really cool! We really like this. Here are the races of the games. This is what makes them, them.” So we went back and we tried to craft each of the weapons, craft the weapons that they would use, the armors, the clothing, the cities, the environments that they’re in, basically feeding back to that one basic idea.

That’s kind of what my job is, to take all the individual pieces of those and try to craft it like, “Okay, a little bit less this. A little more this. This is maybe a little bit too standard, like I’ve seen this before. Why don’t we try to innovate a bit more on this, this, and this? It’s a great process.

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So, from a process perspective, working with 38, in terms of ensuring consistency between the MMO project, Copernicus, and this, how does that work?

TC: Thom Ang is the art director for Copernicus. He and I basically talk every week, so we’re constantly going back like, “Here’s our version of X.” I can’t go into any details on the MMO obviously — we’re not announcing that stuff right now — but we basically work together on things, things that are core to the IP.

There’s also Steve Danuser. I don’t know if you met him. He’s in charge of the overall IP, and so whenever there are questions about something like, “Would this creature or would this race do X?” or “Would this type of structure make sense in this world?” those are the kind of people that we have those conversations with.

Again, what I keep saying is everything is considered. We don’t kind of casually do stuff and just throw it in the game. Everything has a back story. So, for instance, in the first opening area, as soon as you get out… I don’t want to spoil too much, but there are ruins that you’ll come across, and those ruins actually have a back story that aren’t presented in the games.

There’s lore, there are books you can find about it, and there are people in the town who will talk about it, but it’s not something that’s directly covered. So, there’s that much story to pull from for everything in the game, so there’s nothing in the game that’s just arbitrary.