Developer Interview: Insomniac Games

By Tristan Clark

We sit down with Brian and Ryan from Insomniac Games.

We recently had the awesome opportunity to sit down with Brian Allgeier and Ryan Schneider from Insomniac Games, creators of Ratchet & Clank and Resistance: Fall of Man for the PS3.

NZGamer: Tell us a little about yourself and your role in the company.

Brian: Okay sure. My name’s Brian Allgeier, I’m the creative director of Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction. We work at Insomniac, located in Burbank, California. We’ve been going for over 13 years now, and have been making games since Disruptor, a first person shooter for the PlayStation 1. Then we moved on to creating the Spyro games. After that was Ratchet & Clank - we made four Ratchet & Clank games on the PS2, before moving onto Resistance on PS3, and now we’ve just wrapped up Tools of Destruction. And I’m here with Ryan Schneider…

Ryan: Hi, I’m the marketing director at Insomniac Games, and I oversee our community as well. I’ve been at Insomniac for nearly four years now; and I’ve been in the games industry for almost six years. Prior to that, I had represented some of Sony’s first person titles on PS2, from Jak & Dexter and EyeToy to the Ratchet & Clank games. So I’ve actually worked with every Ratchet title in some capacity, so that’s how I got to know the guys at Insomniac.

NZGamer: So now that Tools of Destruction is out (in some places), are you happy with how it’s been received in the press and by gamers?

Ryan: We’re extremely happy. We’ve been getting great scores from reviewers – I think we’ve got both a metacritic and gamerakings aggregate score of about 9.0. All our fans are saying some really positive things as well, so we’re really, really happy with how it’s been received. You’re never quite sure, no matter how happy you are with a game, how people are going to receive it, so it’s been great.

NZGamer: The Ratchet & Clank series has been around for a while now, but do you remember where the original inspiration for the games came from? What made you want to create this type of game?

Brian: Yeah, well we were actually working on the Spyro games, and we wanted to work on something a bit older. We were actually working on a game called Girl with a Stick - which was a temporary title! – and we weren’t really happy with it. The creative juices weren’t flowing (for some reason), so it was decided we should cut it, because we should make something we were passionate about. And we were passionate about platforming, and colourful characters and scenarios. Then Brian Hastings, our chief creative officer, came up with the high concept of being an alien going from planet to planet collecting lots of different gadgets. So we all jumped in on that one, roughing out a sketch of what the original Ratchet & Clank would ultimately be.

NZGamer: How are you finding developing for the PS3? What kind of things has the hardware allowed you to do? What kind of challenges has it presented?

Brian: We’ve been having a great time! Our engine director is a big fan of multi-threading processing; it gives us a ton of flexibility on how we want to spread our processing power around. With Resistance, the big challenge was that it was new hardware – we were just developing our engine. It’s a first generation game, so with Tools of Destruction, we got the opportunity to really refine our engine. As a result, our frame rate is twice as fast, our physics are four times faster, we can display a lot more effects and particles onscreen, and we’ve improved our collision and our lighting – so overall it’s created a much more spectacular and vivid experience. We feel that players are going to feel much more immersed in this Ratchet game than they ever have before.

NZGamer: Yeah, it looks like Disney, really impressive!

Ryan: That’s great to hear! That was actually one of the big goals for us – to have a CG animated-type experience, to have these expressive characters, and to really make you feel like you’re in a CG animated movie.

NZGamer: With your background in cartoony platform games, Resistance might seem like a bit of an odd departure – but you mentioned your first title, Disruptor, which was also an FPS. How did Resistance come about? It also became a seminal launch title for the PS3 – how did that all come together?

Ryan: Yeah, you’re right on about that, we talk a lot about how Tools of Destruction is returning to our roots, but overall Resistance really represents the true return to our roots when you look at Disruptor. So when we had the opportunity to create a launch title, there was an element that was very pragmatic, in terms of we knew that a hardcore early adopter audience would be buying PS3s right away, and we knew that a first person shooter would make a lot of sense to satisfy that market, and we knew that we had experience that led to critical acclaim with Disruptor.

Resistance actually had its own long, strange trip to reach its final version. It started off as a sort of intergalactic space opera, far more sci-fi than what it ended up being. The reason why it changed was that we ultimately wanted to ensure that the story was easily grasped, and the way to do that was to root it in a more familiar environment, which was earth, but we wanted to turn earth on its head. From the moment we first decided to do Resistance to the moment it changed to its final version was a bit of a six-month journey, before we really got comfortable with its final direction.

Brian: It was a tough journey - it was pretty remarkable! We had to create a big-scale game in quite a short time!

NZGamer: How long was it before you got final dev kits? Did that make things a bit…interesting?

Ryan: Oh yes! I’m trying to find a good metaphor…making a launch title is like going to a firing range. But when you get to the firing range, you don’t know what weapon you’ll be firing, and the target is constantly moving and changing at the same time, so you’re learning to fire a new weapon at a constantly moving target! So as you can imagine, it’s challenging, but we grew so much as a studio. Tools of Destruction is so much a better game because of the lessons we learned on Resistance.

Brian: Yeah, I mean, not only could we improve our technology and engine, but we also realized that the technology and our engine was not going to make our game for us. You’re very tempted to just make a technical showcase when you’ve got the tech to do it – it’s fun to play with all the flashy toys. But ultimately, you have to make a great game, something that people will want to sit down with and have a satisfying experience with, and you have to put all those hooks in that keep things compelling – like a great story, characters and gameplay variations. That’s something that we kind of learned from Resistance, so from the get go on Tools of Destruction we decided that that was what we were going to focus on. So really the beauty of the graphics and so forth were meant to enhance it, but not be the biggest part of it.

NZGamer: The focus on humour in the series is something that you don’t see often enough in video games. What’s your take on humour in games? What made you approach the series from this angle?

Brian: Well we have a lot of funny people at Insomniac, and there are just a lot of jokes tossing back and forth, so we’ve always liked putting a bit of that fun into our games, from Spyro onwards. It’s kind of funny cause a lot of people will complain that there’s not enough emotion in games, and humour is an amazing way to get a lot emotion out of players, so that’s something we’ve had fun with in our games. Something else we’ve been conscious of is getting that humour both in the gameplay as well as the cutscenes.

And there’s always a temptation for people to go realistic when you have the tech that’ll allow you to do so. So you know, people don’t want to go more stylized, because it’s more of a risk generally, so they go darker and more serious. On some level people view humour as being for younger audiences, so the desire to appeal to an older group is equated with wanting to take the humour out.

Ryan: There is actually humour even in Resistance – we had an alternate ending that ultimately had to be cut because it was a bit too silly to put it in, but if you finish the game you can find it as an extra! So even in our ‘mature’ game we still tried to fit some humour in there.

NZGamer: You’re an independent developer that nevertheless caters exclusively to Sony platforms. What kind of relationship do you have with Sony, how did it come about, and what’s advantageous about it?

Ryan: We’ve been with Sony for 10+ years now. The type of relationship is just so flexible and strong, because many of the people who started out working at Insomniac 10+ years ago are still with the company – and you can’t put a price on that sort of loyalty and the trust that comes with it. And the team at Sony are very respectful of our development phase – they’ve never killed any project idea we’ve had; they’re very open to how we create our games.

From a marketing standpoint – well, we’re here in New Zealand, having the opportunity to talk about our game to more people. We’ve put a real premium on the importance of helping Sony, and they in turn for 10+ years have certainly more than reciprocated in taking good care of us. Even as the marketplace continues to evolve, we’re very Sony-loyal.

NZGamer: So what’s next for the team at Insomniac? Are you still on a break, or is it right into the next title?

Ryan: A lot of people are coming off of post-production time; Insomniac is actually one of the top 5-10 best small companies in America to work for, partly because we get four paid weeks of vacation a year. I’m not sure how good that is in New Zealand, but in America that’s quite a lot! Two of those weeks are post-production – so after you’ve finished your work on a project you can take some time off.

And we’ve started to think about the future of our franchises, and where we go from here. Right now, we’re just taking a collective breath, and just starting to think about where we’d to take things moving forward.

NZGamer: Well thanks a lot guys – is there anything else you’d like to say to your Kiwi fans out there?

Brian: Well we’re very excited that Kiwi folks love the PS3, and are going to be playing Tools of Destruction, and it’s just great that the reception we’ve been getting has been really enthusiastic.

Ryan: We came here and we found out that New Zealand as a country is really loyal to PlayStation as a brand, and as developers from a Sony-exclusive company it means a lot to us. We know you have a lot of choice with your consumer dollar, and so the fact that people overwhelmingly support the PlayStation here is great, so it’s great to be here and let you know that we really appreciate that. So we hope you Kiwi folk enjoy our new game!

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