Aliens Colonial Marines Keeps Restarting
Graeme Timmins started designing mod levels for first-person shooters like Quake, but he didn't think about a career in game development until a Seattle company wanted to recruit him straight out of high school.Now as lead level designer for Gearbox Software, Timmins is parlaying his passion for shooters into titles like Aliens: Colonial Marines. “Alien 3” for Super Nintendo and “Aliens: Colonial Marines” for Xbox 360 are two of my all-time favourite video games. And James Cameron’s “Aliens” is one of the greatest action movies ever made. When it comes to first-person shooter games, it’ll be hard to top “Aliens: Colonial Marines.”.
It was one of the most highlyanticipated games of the year. When the Gearbox Software announced they wererebooting the Aliens film franchise into a first-person shooter, fans ofboth the studio’s previous games and the Ridley Scott/James Cameron films were eagerto see the game’s. When Aliens: ColonialMarines was released this past February, it received harsh criticism forboth the gameplay and for looking significantly different than promotionaldemos presented earlier.If the game proves anything,it’s that critic opinion isn’t always indicative of sales. Aliens: ColonialMarines debuted at number one in the U.K. And sold more than 1.31 millioncopies worldwide between February and May. Graeme Timmins, a lead at Gearbox, worked on the game during its last year of development.Coming to Aliens: Colonial Marines after working on other titles like Brothersin Arms: Earned in Blood, Borderlands, and Borderlands 2,Timmins chatted with Get In about the challenges of creating a game from analready heralded film franchise and what it takes to work at Gearbox. Get In Media: You’ve stated in previous interviews that FoxEntertainment supplied you guys with lots of concept art and other referencecontent from the Aliens films.
How does having those kind of things inplace affect the design of the game?Graeme Timmins:, we like to be inspired by anything wecan get our hands on, and to have Fox be gracious enough to give us some of theoriginal environment concept art, it’s like amazing to a level designer to seethat because we can understand how to build the environment. As a leveldesigner, you’re putting together many pieces of art to form a space. They’reall separate pieces.
To get art from the original, you get anidea of, “ OK, this column should be here and next should be made of upthree wall pieces and then I put a column again.” It just gives you reallygreat insight on how to build that environment that you saw in the film. Whenyou’re watching it, you don’t necessarily understand how each piece is puttogether, but when you have that piece of concept art given to you, you have amuch clearer vision of how to replicate that because you have the blueprint forit yourself. GIM: Did the fact that Aliens is a licensed productpresent any challenges to your design team?GT: There are certain expectations for what the look andfeel of a game is when it’s based on an existing franchise that you have to aimto achieve. You have expectations of scale for the environment that, as a, you have to achieve given the types of art that were in thefilm, but also, you have to make the space feel good for a game. Moviefranchises and games are experienced differently. One is an active role and theother is a passive role.
When you’re in an active world, you want to be able toexplore it, but sometimes a movie set isn’t that fun to explore. Leveldesigners are kind of constantly pressed up against making a space that’senjoyable to play but also achieve the visual look and feel from the film. GIM: How can you ensure that something is enjoyable toplay?GT: A lot of it goes by gut. A lot of the guys that makegames play games obviously. We’re big gamers at Gearbox. We use our gut firstto imagine what we want to achieve and we document that as a starting point andthen we build it and it goes through tons of iteration. We try one thing, ifwe don’t like it, we’ll throw it out.
We’ll redo sections of levels frequentlyand we’ll keep iterating on the level until we feel that it’s in a good stateto show it. Gearbox has a focus department where we have individuals come andplaytest our work. Then we get tons of great data from that department on whatplayers like, what they didn’t like, what kinds of things they’d like to seechanged, and then we incorporate that into our iteration to try to make thebest possible piece of level design.
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GIM: How do you decide how big a level is going to be?GT: It really depends on the game. Each game that youplay, that you work on, has a kind of flow or pace to it and you don’tnecessarily know that flow right when you begin. It comes to back to that wholeidea of iteration because as you’re starting with a game you don’t have all thepieces up front. As a, you’re working with things as they comeonline, so you might build half a level without any AI artificialintelligence development going on. You have to imagine how enemies are goingto use the space. When you actually get that enemy, it might completely changehow you think about your space.
It might completely change how the pacing ofthat level is, so in turn it changes how big you envision the level being.In general, on majorprojects, we have goals for how long we want the player to play thesingle-player game or be engaged in whatever form of content. You go in saying,“ OK, I’m imagining this level being 20 to 40 minutes long if I get thesethings.” As you go, you’ll find out if you got all the pieces that youwanted.
Did you get all the art? Are you going to get all the enemies that yourequested? Are you going to get all the animation? Depending on how thingscome together, you’ll start to feel that pace.
You’ll start to feel that grooveand it’s very easy to find, “Oh man, this level is feeling great” andthen it ends. We can probably extend this moment and get more value out of it,or a level can feel like it’s dragging. It’s like, “ OK, I’m starting to dorepetitive actions too frequently and I’m kind of getting worn out,” so you’llchop some of that content away to try to find that right amount of time.
It’svery different for every project. GIM: How closely did you work with Aliens gamewriter Mikey Neumann on the game?GT: Pretty closely. He wrote other projects here atGearbox.
He wrote the Brothers in Arms franchise. He wrote Borderlands.I had worked with Mikey before. He’s a writer, so he’s able to look at a storycompletely different than I do. He thinks about characters and emotion and arcwhereas I look at environments and layout and lights.
We had to worktogether, kind of saying, “These are the kind of environments I care aboutas a and these are the kinds of things we’d like to see happenthere,” and he’d come with, “These are the characters I have in mymind and these are the stories that I want to tell with them.” We’d haveto, along with the creative director John Mulkey, the three of us, figure outhow we could tell an interesting story that Mikey’s proud of and that alsomakes sure we have excitement about what environments we’re building. Thescript went through several iterations, just like any other game, untileveryone was happy with what we had. It’s, again, a lot of iteration and justworking together with people that have a different perspective but all workingtowards the same goal. GIM: What is a good portfolio for a level designer looklike? When you’re hiring, what elements are you looking for in portfolios?GT: I like to see strong design in the sense of the space,have strong silhouette, I can follow the environment with my eyes well.
Interms of what the actual portfolio is, in terms of presentation, it’s importantto have lots of screenshots that are large, easy to get at, that highlight thestrongest parts of your work. It’s important that, for me, when I’m reviewingpeople who are applying to come here to Gearbox, I want to quickly see whatthey’re good at, making sure to take a critical eye of their own work, findingthe best stuff that they’re proud of, and giving some great shots that I canget to immediately from their website or, if they’re in a packet of datathey’re sending like a zip file, get that stuff easily readable quickly. That’sreally important for me. When I get a portfolio that comes by that all thescreenshots are small on the website or it’s a busy website and there’s a lotof stuff going on, that is kind of a turnoff. I just want to see what you’regood at clearly and that goes for just about anybody.In terms of what we’relooking for, in terms of what those screenshots are, what’s your best work?Again, we like to see people that are capable of doing a little bit ofeverything, whether that’s scripting and taking screenshots of your script,whether that’s text, or if it’s digitally based on a base like on Kismetvisual scripting system. Those are helpful because that gives us an idea ofhow clean your scripting is.
If you’re more visually oriented, you want to seethose great pieces of environment put together and highlight what you’ve done.If you’ve done the lighting yourself, if you’ve done the particle systems, callout the work that you’ve done in each shot. Highlight all those great pieces ofyour work and then include short descriptions of what you did in each ofthose screenshots that were yours and what your thought process was behind it. GIM: Aside from a great portfolio, what qualities are youlooking for in the hiring process?GT: Great communication skills. When I was at CentralMichigan University, my minor was in journalism and I’m so thankful that Ifollowed through on that because I learned a lot of communication skills. Ingame development, you will be working with a group of people everyday.
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No levelis done in a vacuumCommunication skills are abig deal to me and a lot of people throughout the industry. A greatpersonality. A positive personality. Your work is going to be worked on byother people. There’s a tendency in any creative field to think that yourwork is your work. You have to execute what you see and it’s hard to let otherpeople take it and it’s hard to take criticism. Having a positive attitudethat’s open to constructive criticism and then acting on that in a positive wayis so critical to what we do.
Those two things, having a positive attitude andfantastic communication skills will take you very, very, very far.Aliens: ColonialMarines is currently available on XBOX, Playstation 3, and Microsoft Windows.Timmins says that future game developers who want to get a taste of Unreal, thegame engine licensed by Gearbox, can do so by downloading a free UnrealDevelopers Kit.
Was looking forward to playing a quick bit of Aliens: Colonial Marines before work and the.exe is missing. Thanks Gearbox. Thanks a lot.
Dicks.EDIT It's fixed but not in time for me to play before starting work, I do advise everyone to have a look at the comments in the steam forums.Some of the comments on the thread are pretty funny:)'well thats great, thats just f#$%ing great man 'Looks for exe file doesnt find it. ' now what f@#k we are supposed to do'Looks at steam ' we're in some real deep ♥♥♥♥ now man'Fails to launch game again, buries face in keyboard 'thats it man, game over man game over!' Steam's useful advice 'maybe we could build a fire, sing a couple of songs'hey gearbox.have you ever been mistaken for a developer?' 'Well, somebody's gonna have to go out there.
Take a portable Playstation, go out there and patch in manually.' 'Oh yeah, sure, with no executable running around? You can count me out!' '-then it's right on us'what the hell.7 minutes, -10 hours'that's not possible, that's right on my hard drive'It's reading right man, look'Then Steam isn't listing it right'.