BUILDING A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE GAME--WITHOUT THE MOVIE
by Dan Reiley, Jr.
 
Nearly 80 game industry workers gathered to hear the IGDA's guest speaker, Stormfront Studios founder Don Daglow, give a presentation on Building A Hollywood Movie Game—Without the Movie on September 12th, 2004. Hosted at the Sony Metreon, the event was a wealth of information and war stories relating to Stormfront Studios' recently released Demon Stone game on the PS2 (Xbox and PC versions to follow in November). Before Don's presentation, a pitch was made by Heather from the Metreon for attendees and all IGDA members to visit www.walkofgame.com to cast votes for the Metreon's Walk of Game Nominees, which include some of gaming's most iconic figures, both real (i.e. Nolan Bushnell) and digital (i.e. Link from Legend of Zelda). The voting will take place October 1st through October 31st. Rudy Geronimo, the IGDA San Francisco chapter's Operations and Community Manager also made an impassioned request for the attendees to continue to support the IGDA and to encourage their peers to do the same, including coming out to IGDA events. Also Rudy let the gathering know that if their team wants to present at a future IGDA meeting, then they need to contact him.
 
Taking the spotlight, Don Daglow immediately launched into an overview of the evening's topics. Kicking things off, Don related that Stormfront was not content to just crank out titles based on the same engine that powered The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, but rather that Stormfront needed to build on the process while creating something new that felt like its own game. Also, due to prior involvement with many licensed titles, Don lectured that licensed games come with a lot of requirements, i.e. for a licensed baseball game you are required to create the environment and rules of baseball before you ever get into actual design of gameplay. Don was thankful that Atari, the publisher for Demon Stone was such a joy to work with and were committed to publishing a high quality game. Unlike most horror stories of developer-publisher hostile relations, Atari seemed to understand the kind of game Don and the rest of Stormfront wanted to strive to create.
 
Indeed, Don told how Atari had certain requirements that would be met in order for Stormfront to be able to take on the project: a) The final product must be of cinematic quality all-around, b) Stormfront must use New York Times bestselling author R.A. Salvatore to pen the story for the game, and finally c) Stormfront must be proud of what they do next---Atari did not want them to clone LoTR: The Two Towers. Don agreed to these terms and the game got underway with pre-production and design, although some snags began to develop almost immediately. Also working R.A. Salvatore's widely-recognized character, Drizzt Do'Urden into the story was a design/writing challenge as well. Eventually the decision was made to make the female rogue of the game a half-drow, giving Drizzt a "hook" to make an appearance in the game.
 
Stormfront knew that to make a cinematic quality game as required by Atari, meant considerable spending in the audio department---meaning that a symphony orchestra must be procured, they would have to have an original score for the symphony to play, as well as great Hollywood name actors to deliver the game's dialogue with emotional impact. Don knew he would be in for a fight with Atari, so he gave the following advice for any meeting with a publisher: treat it as if it were a boxing match. Go into the meeting after 'warming up'---attend the meeting sweating and be ready to come out swinging. Unfortunately, Don was cheated of the fight that he sought, as Atari acquiesced to every demand that he made for the game, since Atari confessed that they had already been thinking along the same lines.
 
On the tech side, there were really no snags that were related during the presentation, but Don had some good advice for all teams to consider: The ultimate purpose of tech is to unlock the creative potential of the rest of the team by designing good tools for them to create the rest of the game. Don also advises that Stormfront's policy is to rotate the people working on tools so that no one is stuck in "Tool Creation Mode" and gets burned out with that process. Rotating tools people back into other areas allows them to train others on the tools that they've created for maximum benefit to the whole team. Also Don noted that having tech guys who embrace the role of "enabling the greatness" in the rest of the team by creating tools for them is highly desirable.
 
Rounding out the presentation, Don treated the group to a demo of Demon Stone, followed by an ample Q&A session with questions ranging from typical budgets for Stormfront's recent games, the "switch-on-the-fly" system in Demon Stone, and camera control in action games, among others. Afterwards, Don and the attendees met for drinks at the monthly Game Buzz event, which was sponsored by Fernet-Branca and Bafferts Gin, and held at LJ's Martini Club and Grille in the Metreon.