I had a chance to speak to Mike Bithell at Rezzed in March earlier this year. We had a nice chat about his upcoming stealth based strategy game Volume.
“So, I’ve had a quick pop up to see Volume…”
“Did you get to play it as well?”
“Yeah, I’ve had a bit of a play of it…and one of the things that you’ve mentioned in the past is that Metal Gear Solid is an inspiration to you”
“Of course, yeah, absolutely.”
“Certainly when playing it, it hearkened back to the original couple of games for me. Was there anything in particular that you focused on in order to bring the edge into Volume that may have been missing in the newer Metal Gear games?”
“I do love modern stealth games. I never want to make it sound like ‘Stealth games are awful nowadays’ but one thing I think we had which maybe we don’t get as much now is that kind of pure, core stealth experience. Kind of a puzzling, thinking game which isn’t quite as present. For me that’s something which really excites me, it’s that old school focus on gadgets and indirect ways of completing levels. So that’s what we’ve tried to do.
It’s a really puzzling, really mechanics led approach that is just all about being the cleverest guy in the room and not attacking. Which really frees us up, because as soon as you have the ability to do a back of the head kill, that’s all you do because you know that solution and you go through the level doing that over and over.”
“I mean, from what I’ve seen so far, you haven’t really got a focus on harming people, you have more of a focus on using the tools that you have at your disposal just to get through the level”
“Yeah, you can’t harm at all. There is a group of gadgets that you can use to stun guards but they literally stun them for a matter of seconds. It’s not a period of time that is permanent. It’s not knocking them out, killing them, or removing them from the field of play permanently. It’s very much a case of stun them to get out of a difficult situation, or just to clear a space to get through.
It’s not about killing, it’s about crowd control”
“I noticed playing today that I got a feeling of the “death is a slap on the wrist” style gameplay wise but death is quite impactful in the way that it’s delivered. It reminded me of the permadeath aspects of certain titles in recent years.
Do you think that over the past few years there’s been more of a focus on player attachment to characters? Certainly there’s an attachment considering the memorable voice talent that you’re working with…”
“I don’t think every player cares about it, and I’m sure there are people who will just mute the voice-over but for me it’s an amazing framing device. I care about the game more when I know the characters in it. It’s also a game where we establish a virtual environment.
At no point is Rob actually hurt or killed. Y’know, we have certain quips where he says ‘Oh, I won’t do that again’ or a short reaction. So we play and have fun with it, but you’re meant to know when you’ve failed and why you’ve failed and that’s the big thing. When you die we need to explain to you what happened and let you know why. It’s important because here’s no loading times so you’re back in the action very quickly.
So for me the character stuff frames all of that, it gives you context and a reason to keep playing. I want you to wonder where the story is going when you’ve got these characters and their relationship develops over the course of the game whether they’re heroes or villains. I also want you to be wondering where it’s going next. That will get you through the more challenging bits by making you think “I want to get to the next bit to know what happens” so I think that’s cool.”
“The story itself is a very modern retelling of the Robin Hood tale. I noticed looking over the story that there’s a corporation which owns the country. Were you inspired by how things are in present day Britain with the massive multinational companies that we encounter on a daily basis?”
“It is to the extent that our corporation is not a multinational, it’s a British…or even an English company which has taken over. I think it would be fun to play with a very British evil conspiracy. We play with that quite a bit, so yeah, I think there’s bits of everything that goes into it, politics included. Also the thing with Robin Hood is that it’s a medieval story so we really went back and thought “How do we impose medieval politics on the modern world” and we have. So there’s a whole heap of influences there that hopefully come together. It’s a good excuse for a baddie and Andy Serkis just chews up the scenery.”
“How directly involved were you in the voice acting?”
“I write it and direct it, so yeah pretty direct. I write the scripts, I had a story consultant on this one but basically I write the scripts. We literally go into a studio and as you’ve probably seen in our making of documentary, me and our sound engineer behind the desk with soundproof glass and the actor in the room. Recording can vary, with Charlie and Dan we rehearsed a day beforehand because they were in the sound room together and they really bounce off of each other, a really good back and forth relationship.”
“I think for those two main characters it’s definitely important to build a rapport.”
“Yeah, and then with Andy it was basically a case of sitting down with him and talking about the character to let him know what the direction was and then getting him in the booth and directing him. So yeah, there’s not a line of dialogue in this game that I didn’t direct and I enjoy that, it’s fun. I’m getting better at it, I wasn’t great at it with Thomas Was Alone but I’m developing my directing skills.”
“Do you feel that having overall control over how things are developed so you can get things exactly how you want it is important to you? Would you feel happy if certain aspects were passed on to someone else?”
“I’m fine, I do have quite a big team now so obviously you get to a point where you have to stop being the control freak and actually be more natural with everyone and say ‘Well, we’re going to try and left everyone have an impact on this’. So in certain areas I do maintain a lot of control but in other areas I let stuff go. Honestly, the only thing that matters to me that the game is great. My rule is if someone is better than me at something, I let them do it.
For example, I have an amazing art team who go off and do their own thing. Obviously, I’m seeing everything and giving feedback throughout but I’m not getting them to draw exactly what I’m telling them to because if I do that I’m not benefiting from all of their experience. For me it’s just about the game being awesome and the clever bit is getting awesome people to work on the game and then letting them do whatever the hell they want and then slowly pulling them back and saying “No no no…maybe a bit more like this” and then moulding that into something cohesive.”
“When you mentioned the art style it reminded me of one of the important aspects of Volume, which is the level editor…”
“Yep, we use the level editor that’s going to ship with the game.”
“Oh great, so that is the actual development tool that will be shipped with the game?”
“There’s nothing that we make that you can’t make, that was important to us. Also, it allowed us to test it, because y’know, you make one hundred levels and if something isn’t working or isn’t quite as cool as it could be your level design team lets you know. I’ve had emails from the level design team where it’s been something like “Mike, it’s really annoying to do something like this” or “Mike this doesn’t quite work” or whatever. It’s been fun.”
“The premise of the story is that the gameplay is being presented in terms of a “Let’s Play”. How important has the sharing aspect and YouTube culture become in terms of influencing this kind of design?”
“Yeah, y’know I watch a lot of “Let’s Play” stuff. I have friends who make it. I know a lot of the guys who do streaming and “Let’s Play’s” and I find it fascinating. I find it interesting because it’s a whole new way of entertaining people. It’s like using a video game as a prop for a theatre show.
What level editing does is in theory create infinite content. There’s always going to be something you can play with, which is important to us. I want people to let’s play the game and having an infinite amount of content is great. When it comes down to it it’s a solid level editor, but the reality with any level editor in a game is that there’s a vast amound of people who won’t actually use it. The vast majority of people won’t load it because It’s not their thing. The people who do use it will hopefully have a great time with it and make lots of stuff to share.”
“I think when you look at a game and its modding community it can really sustain a community for years. When you look at games such as Skyrim and even older titles in the Elder Scrolls series. Is it a case of getting these people on board and then they create the content for you?”
“Yeah well, it’s not modding. You can’t create a first person shooter in Volume. You don’t have that level of access but I do think that user created content, creating it and sharing it, is great for all of us. I hope people find their way with it and the game does better because there’s more stuff there. I hope so. I do think for people who are just starting out or have always wanted to create a level for a stealth game…it’s quite hard to make a stealth game…giving them the tools to create their own levels and start experimenting is going to be a lot of fun.”
“Is there any particular aspect from another game that you’ve wanted to to pick up and put in this game? Whether it’s AAA or indy?”
“Oh I steal loads of stuff from all over the place. Lots of stuff from a few AAA games. There’s one thing actually that we stole where…say you’re playing a game and say for example the next time you play a third person AAA game you run at a wall at a 45 degree angle.
Now in most Indy games you’ll slowly slide across but in a AAA game it says “Okay, maybe this guy doesn’t want to run into that wall. Let’s nudge it around and smooth it into that.” You won’t feel that, it’ll just feel like the game is controlling a lot smoother.
It’s tricky to get that kind of intuitive clean control and we have that in Volume, so it’s actually very difficult to get stuck on a corner.”
“I suppose given the style of game that Volume is it’s important to make sure that the output is accurate to what the player wants to do. It plays out on screen and just happens.”
“Yeah, it just works. So that one, for me when we got that working it suddenly just felt much better, much more intuitive and they feel like better controls, but it only feels like that because we’re all a bit flawed in our interactions with our thumb sticks. We don’t all do what we mean to, but because this allows you to do what you want to do, it feels more like it’s paying attention to what you want to do.”