Dellekamp Siefert, a senior game designer with Electronic Arts/Dreamworks Interactive talked to us at the EA press date in more technical terms about Clive Barker’s Undying and what he wants out of game.
Question: Since you were on the project before Clive came on, how did it affect your work when this guy came in and started changing everything?
Dellekamp Siefert: What was nice about it was that Clive was very understanding of where we were coming from. So, his attitude was very much: how can I help you guys, how can we push this further, and how can I really bolster this product, not how can I re-write it to be my vision. Certainly, I had my concerns, but Clive quickly alleviated those. He was like, how can I help you and how can you teach me this process as well? For him, learning gaming was as much of a challenge and a new experience as it was for us to work with him. So we he came in he was really just looking to get an overview of it with fresh eyes and then say, hey, these are the places I see that we can address, bolster, improve and really expand upon to make it a better game.
Question: Had you seen Clive’s paintings before?
Del: Yeah, I had. It was really fun because Brian Horton had the contacts to get to Clive and came to us one day and said how do you feel about getting Clive involved. We thought it would be a cool and
Character design art
© Electronic Art/Smilin` Jack Ruby |
interesting experience. Let’s research this further. Next thing we knew, we sent off a packet of images to him. He called the next day I love it, let’s meet, let’s talk. So, we were carting up a computer to his house and we get in there having no idea what we were doing trying to figure out what kind of personality we were dealing with. So he comes in and we show him a quick demo of the game. For the next two hours, Clive just talks. He was like this amazing mind-dump of information that came flowing out of him. He is a very vivid personality. He’s so funny, because he just goes off. We were in awe. You just kind of go along with the roller coaster ride. From the get-go, it was a really positive experience. He wasn’t just looking to do his project, he was inspired by our project. From there, we ended up having a lot of drawing sessions with him where the artists would take pictures that were already done, concepts that were already done and Clive would say, what if we pushed the grotesque up on this one, make it more creepy. The scarrow is a good example of his work. Clive just said, what I’m seeing is a pattern in the styles of the creatures. [Smilin’ Jack Note: This is one of the creatures Clive re-designed himself]
Question: Were there any designs that were just so whacked you couldn’t use
A grisly beheading
© Electronic Arts |
them?
Del: I think he was working within the constraints of him working with us, so there wasn’t anything where he really got out there. I think some of the things he tried to address...sometimes he tried to get into deeper psychological or deeper answers for the creatures than we could ever convey on screen and through a computer game. A computer game is a fairly interaction with the things you come up against, so I think the only times that you would go, hey Clive, this stuff’s great, but we can’t use it, was when we were getting into places we couldn’t express. In general, he was very much thinking about these things in the context of the game and in the context of the world we were already creating. I can’t remember anything off the top of my head that was like, whoa, Clive, what’s going on, buddy? Some of his work is more mature than we were willing to go for a computer game because we wanted to keep it relatively mass market. There are certain themes he explores in his books that we’re weren’t going to embrace.
Question: Like sexuality?
Del: Sexuality, of course, you don’t see any of that in the games because you’re trying to keep it mass market. The big problem with games is that this society still views it as a child’s medium and that’s not true in Europe and not true in Japan. Here, you know, you have Joe Lieberman saying, how can you show this to a kid?
The Manor in Undying
© Electronic Arts |
Well, it says "Mature" on the box, you’re not supervising your kids. There’s this continual aspect where you can’t have mature themes in games because of the kids and it’s not very fair because everything we’re doing is like, you wouldn’t let your child see a horror movie, so why would you let him play a horror game. We’ve been unapologetic about doing something horror.
Question: Where do you draw the line with the violence in the game?
Del: Violence is kind of like...we’re a mixed bag. Everyone likes to complain about it, Joe Lieberman likes to go after it, but at the same time, you can have tons of violence in your games and get through, but you even start to step into sexuality and red flags and sirens go off. It basically ends up being, do you want to be one of the poster children for the next crusade that’s going to come down the line. In some ways, that’s good advertising, but in other ways, you don’t want to be the one they raise and say, this is an example of why our society is going downhill. One of the best arguments I just heard lately was about SSX, a snowboarding game. A guy said, I play SSX all day long and it doesn’t make me a better snowboarder so why the hell do you think playing this game will make me a better killer. It’s true to a degree. Truly, there’s no comparison between moving a mouse like this (indicates game action mouse 
Oneiros - one of the worlds they created
© Electronic Arts |
usage) and shooting a gun.
Question: Where did you come up with some of the weapons and creature concepts?
Del: Those are just a bunch of ideas I’ve been sitting on for awhile to tell you the truth. As soon as you embrace the idea that you’re a game designer, you just start sitting on ideas. I have a whole bunch of stories I want to tell. So, something like the lightning spear gun is something I came up with four years ago when I was doing another game concept and never got around to using it. A lot of times you start out with a skill set or a concept of skill set test. I’m very much from the Quake school of game coding which is about direct skill. You put your crosshairs on it, you shoot it, there’s nothing really that does the work for you. You have to have the skills, you have to be actually doing it. From there, you start dividing that into a structure, what kind of experience do you want the player to have. We want you to have magic in this game, we want you to feel that you really are magical and not just that this is a magical world. Your goal is that you want to create a fully developed world that the player wants to visit.
Question: There’s a journal in the game. Why did that get put in?
Del: What is horror versus an adventure game? Horror has to have a lot
Clive and the designers in a brainstorming session
© Electronic Arts |
more story, a lot more background in it, because you have to have...horror happens before the moment so you can build it up in your head. It’s all these storytelling moments that the journal builds up. If you look at all the classic writers, from Poe to Lovecraft, Clive’s work, it’s all that foreshadowing and building up to things that communicates. I think that we still have a lot to learn about that in games, on how to build that up because I think you have two divergent things. I think you run into a problem in a first-person shooter where people expect action every 15 to 20 seconds when you’re trying to convey a much more fleshed out horror story. I think we did a good job. The challenge is, are the first-person shooter players going to embrace slowing down the game a bit, reading these journals, and trying to understand things.
Question: Is there stuff you worked on from this game that you’re sitting on for the next one?
Del: Yeah, for sure. I would love to do another Undying because a lot of things we’ve learned in the process of making this game just means that we can come back and do a richer game next time and to get Clive more deeply involved would be a big benefit. For me, this is the first time this team has worked together and so there was a lot of getting to know each other and finding out what we could do. I’d say that there was a lot in this game that we’re proud of, but a lot that we just said, hey, we don’t have time to do this or let’s save this for another time. There’s definitely a lot more that we can do. One of my main goals was to create a world that you would want to come back to.
And that was it for Dellekamp Siefert, though we spoke a little more about beta testing the game and I found out that that’s a way to break into this biz. You start as a tester and move into design. Coolsville.
To read my interview with the game’s producer, Brady Bell – click here
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