different from what other people are doing. And I’ve always liked music and music
games, so, hey, good time.
I mostly wrote code; I did some graphics work for a while and then I actually wrote
all the sound code forFreq, all the low-level IOP sound engine, and then I went to a
bunch of design meetings. Obviously the game was fairly well along before I got there,
so certainly in no way at all was I one of the main designers on that game. I was a coder
who helped out and then sat in on some meetings. I certainly, as I always do, talked a lot
about design and suggested things and this, that, and the other, but I was more just a
guy hanging out and helping and suggesting some stuff and trying some stuff. I mean,
Alex and Greg had a pretty clear idea, “Hey, we want this to be about trying to emulate
the experience of live performance,” with the whole multi-track thing. They had a
pretty strong vision for where they were going. The rest of us just did a lot of “How do
we make that real, and when it doesn’t work, what do we do to fix it?” and “Oh maybe
we need to try this other mechanic” and that sort of thing.
Working onFrequencymust have been a pretty big departure from all of your
reality and simulation-based games. Was that a nice change of pace?
Yeah, I’m not sure I’d want to do it for fifteen years or whatever but it was certainly very
interesting to work on essentially an arcade game. To work on something where a game
lasts for three minutes and you have a score. One of the biggest differences there was
on almost everything else I’ve worked on you can work on how you make it easier on
the player. Do you make the AIs easier? Do you make the player do more damage? Here
you are onFreqand you think, “Hmm, the player has no rhythm. What do we do about
that?” And there’s only so much you can do. You can make the windows bigger and you
can slow the song down, but at some point either they can hit the notes in sequence or
they cannot hit the notes in sequence. So that was interesting, it was definitely very
different.
Almost all the games you have worked on have been first-person perspective
games. Was that a deliberate design choice for you? Do you think first-person
is clearly the best perspective to use?
I think forUnderworldit was because we were doing a dungeon simulator and it was
“OK, well, we’re going to take a flight simulator and put it in a dungeon.” Hey, guess
what, first-person. Going back to the talk about fidelity and how good a conversation
system is, five, ten years ago third-person characters looked pretty bad. Maybe a Mario
looks awesome because he’s iconic, but doing an up close video of a human is not some-
thing that the PlayStation 1 or the early PC was very good at. I think that’s changing
now. I think if you look atSplinter Cell,Thief 3, andPrince of Persia: The Sands of Time,I
think the characters look pretty good. I think we still haven’t quite mastered the anima-
tion as well as we should, so there’s still times where the fact that you’re third-person
forces things to either look bad or to not allow you to do a move you want to do. And
that’s still when I personally get the most frustrated with third-person games: I know
the only reason I can’t do that is because the game doesn’t have an animation for it. And
I still think in a lot of ways first-person has a lot of very compelling advantages.
Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church 527