Illfonic Interview
with Art Director Chris Holden
This month I had the good fortune to talk to the guys at Illfonic, up-and-coming game studio and makers of urban adventure Ghetto Golf and first person shooter Nexuiz. Illfonic first gained public notoriety last March when their team was cuffed by police at gunpoint on suspicion of robbing the medical marijuana facility next door to their office. (No, it wasn't them.) These days, Illfonic's working hard to make a name for itself for things they actually did do, like making video games.
Consisting of a small development team working out of Denver, Colorado, Illfonic is unusual in an industry dominated by East and West coast mega-developers. The team is also unusual in its efficiency, ambition and free-form approach to making games. I met with Art Director and Lead Artist Chris Holden and other members of the Illfonic team (minus Lead Designer and Creative Director Khedrin Gonzalez who had a prior engagement). The guys gave me a tour of Illfonic's funky downtown studio and let me see both Ghetto Golf and Nexuiz up close and personal.
The Team
Chris Holden: Well here's our basic work area. As you can see, it's very well painted up. We brought in a bunch of local graffiti artists and said, “Here's a canvas – enjoy yourself.” It makes it very bright and colorful; it's almost like working in a Chuck E. Cheese!
AG: Nice. So you have a six-person team, right?
CH: Yeah um...it's seven now. It was six but we just expanded. Bryan here is one of our newest hires...
AG: Artist?
CH: Animator. He's playing Pac Man right now because today is Pac Man's 30th anniversary and Google made the Google logo a working Pac Man game.
Bryan: It's a great day for gamers!
CH: (laughs) Yeah...Bryan just started a month ago and we have another programmer, and he started around the same time as Bryan.
AG: How did you end up opening a studio here (Denver)? I read that it had something to do with music producer, Raphael Saddiq?
CH: Well, Chuck—Charles Brungardt—he was an engineer that worked for Raphael for years on many albums and he's also a programmer.
AG: And he lives here?
CH: Well, a few of the guys live here and they just wanted to start a studio. I wasn't actually here when all of that was founded; I came a little later, but they just wanted to make games and they got it together and made it happen.
Paul Jackson: (lead programmer) Chuck was the one that actually wanted to get into games, he went to school for computer science but he ended up in the recording industry somehow.
AG: There doesn't seem to be a lot of game development in this area.
CH: I used to work out here before at Jaleco, which was in Boulder but now that they've shut down, it's pretty much NetDevil and Idol Minds. Idol Minds just had a game out and it's good to see developers still thriving here in Denver. I love this area and I'd love it to be a place where people could come and work.
AG: Raphael is the guy who owns the whole works, right?
CH: Mm hm.
AG: So how much input does he have in the project?
CH: He's very trusting. He gives us the reins, says, “You guys know what you're doing”. He's a musician, not really a gamer—great at music but...he plays video games and he knows what he likes. So if he plays the game and there's something he doesn't like, he's obviously able to voice his opinion but generally he trusts us and lets us do for the most part, what we want to do. So far he's been really happy with our work. We have a really good relationship. We trust him and he trusts us.
AG: So, does Illfonic have two teams? I read something about Los Angeles...
CH: Well, there's not two teams. We do have a Los Angeles studio—that's Raphael's studio. Of course, it all is in a way...but that's his sound studio, it's well established, a nice studio so any time they need to record sounds or anything they can do it there. But this is pretty much our main game studio.
AG: So is this same team working both on Ghetto Golf and Nexuiz?
CH: Yes.
AG: Wow. How do you manage that?
CH: We manage it without managers. There's nobody in the way. Khedrin's our creative director and he makes the levels. He's not telling people to make it—he's not spending time writing it up and telling somebody to do it—he's doing it.
AG: So he does the designing and then he passes out the other work, like the animation and the art?
CH: Sure, yeah, but it's a sort of visionary type thing. There's a lot of trust like, I do art—that's my thing and I get direction from Khedrin but at the same time, he trusts me just to make stuff and it's gonna be fine.
Bryan: Yeah, he usually gives us like, a small task to do and then we run with it for weeks. He only really talks to us maybe once a week unless something comes up...
CH: Well, he sits right here so we shoot the shit, but he doesn't micro-manage us.
AG: That's incredible. Being able to trust your team to that extent.
CH: Well when you go through the interview process, and you hire somebody, you're supposed to hire somebody that you can trust to do the job. You're not just putting an ass in a seat.
AG: I saw online that someone called your pipeline “unique”. What do you think they were talking about?
CH: Well, we don't have a guy who sits down and says, “This has to be done by then.” On a small team, whatever needs to be done, somebody has to do it. I think maybe people are surprised that it (Nexuiz) was done by such a small group of people.
AG: I think that is surprising. It's amazing to think that in such a short time, with so few people, you've been able to get so much done. Sometimes teams with a hundred people don't get much done at all.
CH: It's actually a lost art. Games used to all be done by small teams. It was really only recently when they made this “next gen” jump and the industry started making all this money they started developing games wrong in the sense that...somebody came up with this idea of “throw money at it, put asses in seats” and it'll be done better and faster. And what's happened with that is, all these companies hire all these people and they're all great people but the game ships, and then they can't afford them anymore so the cycle of the industry is, hire a bunch of people, lay 'em off and you just end up working with the same people over and over. It's a small industry, just different places. And why is that? It's a fault of the industry. The idea is broken. There's so much money lost severancing and relocating all these people.
Ghetto Golf
AG: So...Ghetto Golf—how did the project get started?
CH: This project started as...just Khedrin working out of his apartment and Chuck was in L.A. They were just going back and forth on instant messenger. They would outsource a lot of the artwork like the cars and the houses, they would get freelance artists that Khedrin knew. They just kind of pieced it together and eventually they started getting more interest from investors.
AG: They were just paying people at first out of their own pockets?
CH: It was out of Chuck's pocket at first. I knew Khedrin, I worked with him at NetDevil. We worked on Warmonger together and after he left I was working on LEGO and they came to me and asked me if I wanted to work with them and I was all about it just because Khedrin comes from the Quake community and so do I. We have a lot of the same ideals as far as like, “What's a good game, what's a fun game?” and we really just meshed well together.
AG: I read online that the game concept came from Raphael? He grew up on Oakland or something like that? How did you come up with the gameplay? I mean—how does it even work?
CH: Again, a lot of that was before my time but I talked to him (Raphael) a little bit at GDC and he had the idea for the golf game and he's actually from Oakland—that's where he lives—and he just had this idea for a game. He and Khedrin put it together and I was kinda the same way about it; I'm like, “Ghetto Golf? What's that even supposed to be?” when he first told me about it. Then I came out here and played and...it's a fun game. It's not a sports game and it's not like Grand Theft Auto. It's an adventure. Khedrin also puts it, it's like Legend of Zelda, it really is. You have to find the holes, you have to talk to people to figure out where everything is.
AG: So what's the story? I'm assuming single player has some kind of a story?
CH: Yeah...there is a story. A lot of it's still partially in Khedrin's head because that's how he works. He does all these documents but it's still trapped inside his brain.
AG: So I don't know too much about him actually and he's not here to speak for himself, but what's his background?
CH: He's a designer. He's worked at a few different game companies over the years and I've known him forever, from way back in the Quake community days just as a modder. Like a lot of us, he got lucky, was talking to somebody, got a job. He worked at NetDevil for a while and he's worked at a few other places designing and just got hooked up with Charles and these guys making this game and kinda pulled us all together. He's the type of guy that—I could tell you about him all day but you have to meet him. He's just a wacky guy. Very strong personality.
AG: I'm trying to imagine golf Death Match and I can't do it. What do you actually do?
CH: You start on a map, you have two different teams of guys, and one guy is the golfer on both teams. You're fighting to get to the hole and the first person to get the ball in the hole wins the match. That's the basic idea. But the thing is, you have a whole 'nother team of guys fighting against you, trying to stop you, and trying to get their own ball in the hole. So there's a lot of hilarious team play and interaction that goes along with trying to protect your one guy, your golfer, while the other guys are trying to protect their golfer...it's such a wacky experience.
AG: So is it a melee kind of thing?
CH: Yeah, there's melee with clubs. There's also weapons; it's a big world where you can go and immediately find weapons. It's still got that adventure aspect. Or like any Death Match map where you run around and pick up guns. There's gonna be stuff hidden throughout the level. You can go—maybe it's worth it for your team to go find that great weapon or maybe you just want to go straight for the hole. The strategies are really endless in that way.
AG: So you said Raphael's from Oakland. Are the game's environments based on Oakland?
CH: There's this thing called “Street View”. Is it called Street View? No, it's a different one. But high-def. High resolution cameras. So we can go through the streets of Oakland and like, zoom in on small details on houses and reproduce them., which we've done. We've got this one level, it's got so many houses and each one has unique stuff—you look at it and think “That's weird, nobody'd do that to a house” but they're ripped directly from these crazy houses you see in the ghetto.
AG: Would you liken this game to GTA, or if not, what other game would you liken it to?
CH: More Legend of Zelda. In GTA you can go out and get a car. In Zelda you work your way up through completing quests and missions. Things aren't just right there. You gotta work for what you get in the ghetto (laughs). It's the definition of adventure. We're going for a smaller but richer environment than Grand Theft Auto. Instead of having hundreds and hundreds of people walking around that you don't really interact with, that are just kind of filler for the scene, there's gonna be more people you can interact with in different ways.
AG: How do you balance golf mechanics with a shooter?
CH: One of the things that really helps bring the two together is that golfing can be used as combat. So we have different types of golf balls. Exploding balls, spiked balls, sticky balls, steel balls...for example, if someone's coming at you, you can literally throw a golf ball down and whack a golf ball into them and there's a whole aiming system, just like shooting. One of the funniest things is putting an exploding ball into a group of people—it's literally just like throwing a grenade. It's on the Unreal engine so it's similar or not unlike throwing grenades in Gears of War. And you can switch from your golf club to different weapons as well.
AG: What ESRB rating are you going for? Mature?
CH: It's definitely going to be a Mature game.
AG: Pretty bloody?
CH: Well, not necessarily. There's going to be content....language and content. There's not going to be blood and guts everywhere but it's...it's a comedy. There's going to be a lot of jokes. Some of them might be a little off-color. So there's probably going to be some dirty words said every now and again (laughs) what's wrong with these video games these days?
AG: Rumor has it that Ghetto Golf will have “well known musical artists and vocal talent”. Can you say who that might be?
CH: A lot of that goes back to Chuck and Raphael. Those guys, they've been making music forever and they know all these people. There's not any official word but there are a lot of friends, a lot of people who have said, “Yeah, I'm going to do this for you.” Until we have the tracks and until we have the rights behind it officially, we don't want to say anything.
AG: Well who would you get for the VO? Would they be actors or would they be some of these music artists?
CH: It could be both. Like I said, there have been a few people we've been talking to but again, until anything's official it's all speculation.
Nexuiz
AG: So did Ghetto Golf come first or did Nexuiz?
CH: The golf game. Ghetto Golf came first. Nexuiz is actually part of our strategy to show that we're not just a one trick pony. We're not just making urban games. We can make whatever style game needs to be made. Nexuiz is sort of like, it's a fun game for us, it's gonna be a lot of fun for people to pick up and enjoy it real quick, not get too involved, have a good time, quit—walk away, come back later and enjoy it again.
AG: So you guys were that kind of FPS gamer? That's why you latched onto that project?
CH: Well, like I said, a lot of us come from that old Quake community. Paul (lead programmer) was programming Quake mods, I worked on a couple of the Quake II mission packs, so we love the first person shooter kind of game. It's almost natural for us to make one.
AG: How is your Nexuiz different from the existing online Nexuiz?
CH: Oh, it's very different from that. One of the number one—like the major difference is Nexuiz, the current one that's free to play, it's a PC game and our Nexuiz is going to be a console game. We're making a lot of dramatic differences in the gameplay. Generally if there's a PC game, say a hot FPS on the PC, it does not translate well to console. We're doing that translation process, adding in all the little things, making the controls work for a controller and not just being keyboard and mouse and twitch.
AG: What did you find you had to change?
CH: There's aim assist—some weapons just don't work as well on a PC as they would on a console just because auto-aim, the way the controls work, sniping people, precision – it isn't the same on a PC as it is on a console. There's just a lot of little things you have to put in like um...with a PC game, a lot of the social stuff can happen by the PC itself. You don't really need a lot of those attachments. With a console game, you have to put in—you have to design in systems of like, social building, clans or guilds or whatever. Generally we're just cleaning up the game a lot. What it is for PC is it's a free game. It's all hobbyists or mod-authors or whoever is just making art or whatever. There's not really anything cohesive about it. You look at it on the PC and it's not really the best looking game but that's not its fault. It can only have what people give it.
AG: Did you guys play it? Were you fans of the game before you took it on?
CH: Yeah. We had a relationship with the people behind it and just talked to them about putting it on the Playstation or Xbox.
AG: Do you have a release date?
CH: We're hoping for this year. It's not a set date, but hopefully this year.
AG: A story online said something about the game having a Victorian art style. How do you see it as being Victorian?
CH: A lot of the Victorian art has intricate designs in it versus a lot of high-tech stuff you see these days is kind of like robo-vomit or Star Wars style where it's a lot of widgets. It'll either be like a whole lot of weird little shapes or like a robot threw up. Our idea is to get rid of a lot of that high tech stuff and just bring in culture; a society wouldn't just throw away its culture and ideals and make everything high tech and become robots.
AG: Did this idea affect your color palette too?
CH: Yeah. We have three different races in the game and each has kind of a unique look. One of them in particular, their palette is a bit more red and gold...silver, and that's the one that has more of a Victorian—like etchings in their armor and their environments.
AG: How has the game changed since you showed it at GDC?
CH: What we showed at GDC, there were only two characters, and what—four guns? Now we've got a lot more done. The characters are done, all the guns are done. It's just a matter of cranking out the levels and tweaking, getting everything where we want it to be.
AG: So speaking of weapons – you're offering up both ranged and melee right?
CH: Basically every weapon is going to have melee in the sense that if I have a gun in my hand and you get close to me, I can whack you with it. That's something I enjoy about consoles. You don't really see melee on PC at all.
AG: And the Mutator system? How has that been going?
CH: That's really great. Since GDC it's getting refined and better. At GDC we had a few of our early ideas and now we have time to really play and invest time in tweaking those and coming up with new and better ideas. The basic idea behind the Mutators is as you're playing the game, if you go on winning streaks, a character will have a Mutator call-in which is basically...graphically it's like little icons appear on the screen and you can choose one of those and it'll pop up on everybody's screen, letting them know that these rules are about to be enabled. Such as rapid fire, or low gravity or just all kinds of wacky stuff. The idea behind it is as you progress in the game, like, the longer you play the game you can level up your character – not in the sense of “I'm level five and you're level one and that means I can kill you”. It's not stats in the sense that I've got better weapons than you. It unlocks more features. As you have a higher level character, you can unlock higher level Mutators. And again, it still throws them up at a random—it's still a roll of the dice as to what you get. So there's not gonna be a chance of somebody just sitting there killing people over and over and just spamming the rules they want.
AG: Do you do your own play testing in house?
CH: It's real early so we haven't done real extensive testing yet but see those boxes? Those are full of monitors. We have on occasion, set 'em all up and brought people in to have like, big four on four matches. Actually, we had one of those just before GDC and it was really successful. It really made me feel good because I've been making games a long time and I've gone to shows with programmers in the hotel room just frantically trying to make the game work for the first time. Just the fact that we had it running before GDC and everybody played it and it was running for hours, not crashing. It was so unusual.
AG: In porting this to console, are you expecting there to be much crossover between the existing Nexuiz audience and the new one?
CH: It's a different market. People on the console...there's a good chance that people who play it on the console will have never heard of it. That's just really common. Sometimes you just don't see gamers make that cross. I love playing console games and I love playing PC games. I don't really have that limitation but some people are strictly console and I understand that because if you want to play PC games, you've got to spend a lot of money and it's not as easy. That's a totally different market when you have to buy a PC and put it together, make it fast enough to run these games.
AG: Have you had much reaction from the Nexuiz PC community, like how they feel about what you're doing?
CH: Well, I'm not exactly sure what...there's a very clear line the community has. They either love it or hate it and that's just how it is. It's very black and white with online communities. They're just very hardcore. The people who were playing Nexuiz are just very hardcore. Nexuiz on PC—there's a pretty big learning curve. That game has a lot of wacky locomotion mechanics. Like, they have a gun that's specifically for locomotion. It's not for hurting people, but you'll see people who've never played before trying to shoot people with it. There's a big learning curve, and the people who are good at it have been playing it a long time. That's one of the things we want to do for console is get rid of that so that people can just jump in.
AG: How will Nexuiz console matchmaking work?
CH: There's going to be something put in place for matchmaking but in the end, it all depends on the gamers, the way they play it is how it's gonna be played. No matter how you set up a game, the gamers decide how it's gonna be played.
AG: Is there going to be any ability for gamers to make their own maps? Do you have plans for DLC?
CH: I'm not sure that'll be something we'll be doing so much. I do think we'll be doing DLC. As far as custom user content, I'm not sure of the legality of how that would work with what we're planning to do. That would be something I'd be open to. I'd love to see it be moddable but it's not necessarily something that'll be viable for us.
AG: Well, thanks Chris—guys. Thanks for the tour! Keep us posted on the games as they progress.
CH: No problem. Thanks!
