Molding Klei: An Interview with Jamie Cheng
Feature
Ever wonder how an indie company makes it big? Jamie Cheng of Klei Entertainment speas about the trials and tribulations of starting a new studio.
Good Eets
Hooked Gamers: Your first game, Eets was one of the first independent games on Steam. Shank, however, was able to launch on XBLA and PSN as well. How do you think these outlets will change game development and the industry?
Jamie Cheng: They already have [changed the industry] in a very significant manner. We’ve been an independent since 2005 and at the time these channels didn’t really exist. When we started Steam didn’t really even exist yet, definitely not as an independent distribution channel. It’s definitely changed everything; we’re a viable business. Plenty of other developers like us are viable businesses now, so it’s changed things dramatically. How that’s going to look in the future, I’m not sure. Obviously Steam is, without using the pun, picking up steam. There’s more sales going on there and it’s becoming more and more viable. That bodes well for independents.
Hooked Gamers: Eets is quite different from Shank. How did you go from one to the other? What was the design process?
Jamie Cheng: Eets was a project we made just for the fun of it. There was no ‘this is the game that we want to make.’ In fact, it was more like ‘Hey, I’ve got this physics engine now that I was making in my spare time, what kind of game can we make out of this engine, because we already have it?’ Then we just started brainstorming and coming up with ideas and it organically grew from there.
Whereas Shank, three or four years later, we were working on another game that was also side-scrolling at the time (Sugar Rush, which was cancelled later – ed.), and we looked at what we wanted to build this time around. What kind of game, where do we want to put it, and Shank fell out of that kind of thing. So it never really was something where we were saying we want to do a bloody game, or a casual game. We really wanted to do another Xbox Live game, and Shank was a really natural fit for that.
Moving on to Mexico
Hooked Gamers: You’ve often interviewed with and shared credits with your lead artist/ creative director, Jeff Agala. How did you two meet?
Jamie Cheng: Jeff and I met through a mutual friend, she also worked at Relic. While building Eets for the Xbox I needed some freelance art. She said she was too busy, but she knew someone I might like, and that was Jeff.
Hooked Gamers: What was your design philosophy for Shank? Did Jeff show you some artwork and you decided to build the game there, or did you come up with a really good fighting system and give it a Mexican theme?
Jamie Cheng: We were brainstorming back and forth and Desperado came up, and that kind of feel of a game, and Devil May Cry came up and how tight those controls were as well, in terms of fighting mechanics. From there we riffed off and said “can we make a game like that”? Over a weekend or two we built a flash demo of Shank in which he looked completely different. He was actually an Army-looking kind of guy, and Jeff did a bit of art and I did the actual script coding to prove it, and just with that you could get the feel of what it’s gonna be.