Almost all of Cyanide’s staff had read the books before we started to work on the game. Many die-hard fans in the office! We decided to pursue the license because we thought it would make a great strategy game setting (and also a formidable universe for a RPG, the other game we are currently developing on George R.R. Martin’s IP).Yves Bordeleau, Studio Director

Still, simply being a fan of the work isn’t going to cut it; input from the top is required. George R. R. Martin and his team confirmed and validated all the historical points of reference the game touches in its missions, and this gives the team little leeway in crafting a workable singleplayer campaign: “Working with an IP of this magnitude is very hard and we had to make some compromise. For instance, we couldn’t modify the course of history by making a key character die before his actual fate in the history of Westeros.”

In fact, Bordeleau tells us that while they met with George R. R. Martin at the outset of the project to set a design direction and a general game outline, there was constant communication with regards to staying true to the A Song of Ice and Fire saga and history. Key characters and their lineage had to be kept consistent with the books, and locations demanded coordination with the extensive maps present in the novels and appendices. While not every foot-soldier and knight needed an in-novel counterpart of course, in a fantasy series with literally thousands of characters, there was a whole lot for Cyanide to keep straight.

Experience with previous titles always factors into current projects, and in Cyanide’s case, Blood Bowl and Chaos League were the games some of their team cut their development teeth on. In fact, the Lead Designer of Genesis was involved in both of those previous projects. But while the team pulled some manner of influence and inspiration from their earlier games, the focus was on new mechanics and gameplay tactics over looking backward at the old. And if you’ve played A Game of Thrones: Genesis, it’s clear that the game turned out anything but conventional in most respects.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into indie game development with Sandswept.

My name is Geoff Keene, I’m 20 years old and I’m the design director and founder of Sandswept Studios. We started our first projects as a team about 3 years ago, and released DETOUR earlier this year as my first professional title.

How does the developer of a fast-paced transportation-based RTS like Detour get inspired to make a zombie game?

The Dead Linger was actually inspired long before DETOUR (when I was about 15), and wasn’t planned for development until much later. DETOUR came along as a fun idea, something ‘simple’ and ‘easy’ to do. (Boy, we’re we wrong!) While it was fun, we’ve decided to move forward on the games we truly want to make, and The Dead Linger came forward as the chief candidate. It truly is the game I’ve always wanted to create, above all others.

Oh, speaking of Detour, is the same guy doing the music for The Dead Linger? Because the Detour soundtrack was pretty brilliant.

The same 2 guys who did most of the DETOUR soundtrack (Brandon Chapman and Jonathan Churchill) are also doing the music for The Dead Linger. You can expect some incredible pieces, some of which I’ve already heard, which I can confirm will make your hair stand on end.

(Gamers) are looking for a deeper, more gratifying zombie experience, and developers aren’t delivering... Is the genre dead? The imagination within it certainly is.

What lessons did the company learn from the development, release, and sales of Detour that you hope to carry over to The Dead Linger?

I’d have to say pretty much everything. If there was anything we thought we knew before, we know it *much* better now. We’ve learned some incredibly valuable lessons from DETOUR, and we’ve already seen those lessons helping when we apply them to our development of The Dead Linger. Less bugs, better programmed systems, more streamlined art pipeline, just to name a few.

Is the engine built from the ground up, or will you be using pre-made tools?

We’re basing the game on top of the OGRE 3D engine, but we’re developing a lot of the tools and many of the in-game systems that you simply can’t find in any engine, one example being the procedural generation system done at the level we’re doing it.

You guys state that “the zombie genre is dead”. Yet, games like Dead Island and Left 4 Dead are doing pretty well. Care to qualify what you guys mean by that?

I’ve already received a substantial amount of criticism for that line. Simply put, the zombie genre is filled (overflowing, really) with zombie games centered on the idea that the game is about killing zombie hordes while hipfiring a machine gun. If you look at all the games, they revolve around the line; “Look how many ways you can kill zombies!” I’ve heard from gamers time and time again, pleas for a deeper, smarter, more realistic zombie game. I had this plea a few years ago, and like those in chorus, to no avail. People watch zombie movies and discuss the inevitable “zombie apocalypse” with the question always lingering — what if I was in that situation? While zombie gore-fests are fun, they’re simply *not* true survival in the zombie apocalypse. Not one game has really said; “Here is your zombie apocalypse. Act.” I believe there’s a huge majority of gamers out there who are looking for a deeper, more gratifying zombie experience, and developers aren’t delivering. I’m making a game that I want to play. Is the genre dead? The imagination within it certainly is.

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For one California man, his journey is just beginning.

Raymond Macias is a 21-year-old native of Los Banos, California and plans to become a voice actor for video games. He said his passion for voice acting began over a decade ago, when he discovered how much fun it was to make his friends laugh with the different voices he would make.

“I love doing voices all the time,” Macias says. “Throughout high school I really enjoyed making up voices and making people laugh.”

However, making the decision to become a career voice actor wasn’t the first one Macias considered. After contemplating a major in computer science, Macias wanted to stop being indecisive about a career and remembered his talent for doing voices.

Macias found videos of voice actors having a great time doing what they love to do. A little more research into the field of voice acting set a goal of being a paid voice actor in Macias’ sights.

“I realized I had this natural talent to do voices,” Macias says. “I started to do a lot more research on how I could get into the business… and just recently I decided I was gonna take the plunge and start practicing everyday.”

That plunge came in the form of a video voice demo for the popular League of Legends game. In the video, Macias introduces himself as a voice acting hopeful and proceeds to recreate some of the voices heard in the title. He closes the video with voices from two proposed characters, adding in some of his own unique voice to the mix.

Macias opted for the video because as an amateur, voice acting lessons can be expensive. He hoped the video would provide him a medium to demonstrate his natural abilities while getting awareness and constructive feedback.

Awareness was certainly what Macias got. On the League of Legends subreddit (which has almost 20,000 subscribers), Macias’ video is currently ranked the #15 highest post of all time, with 199 comments talking about his first foray into the field.

“I’ve had a ton of feedback, really an overwhelming amount of feedback,” Macias says. “The stuff that I’ve really been trying to take away from all this feedback is that I have to practice more and I need to put more emotion into what I’m saying.”

Macias, who holds voice actors like James Arnold Taylor and Steve Blum as his inspirations, says that voice acting is critical for any medium that requires their talents. He says that the contributions of a voice actor create a connection to fans that is invaluable to the experience of the game or film.

“I would hope to make a character or voice a character that people would remember,” Macias says. “That people would walk away from it saying ‘that character was so awesome and so believable.’”

Being a voice actor holds the simple pleasure of becoming an incredible person and bringing that character alive through their voice, Macias says. Being able to voice a mythical or heroic character really lets the voice actor immerse themselves in the character and experience, allowing the voice to become more emotive and therefore more immersive for listeners.

“I would hope to make a character or voice a character that people would remember.”

That emotive hook is the core of being a voice actor for Macias. While several talents are important for a voice actor, he emphasizes that bringing emotion into a work is what brings that character or scene alive. As the voice actor only has sound to express the dynamics of character, listeners must be able to feel that emotional presence through the delivery alone.

A good voice actor is going to bring real emotion,” Macias says. “A good voice actor is going to portray the emotion of the scene and really grab you… so you can feel it through the voice without even having to look at it.”

The future for Macias is more voice practice, more voice reels, and more awareness of his work so he can someday break into the field of voice acting. You can check out his video voice demo for League of Legends above or check it out on his homepage here.

What we want to do is create a world that is continually in tension, but not necessarily place you in combat all the time. Having a woman with you who has to behave believably is an extremely challenging task.

It’s an intriguing read for anyone interested in game design and the difficulties therein, specifically striking a balance between scripted events and adaptive game events that react to the player’s interaction with the world. Other topics included building meaningful player relationships with NPCs, the possible effects designing for a controller or mouse/keyboard setup can have on the game world, and challenging gaming conventions. Have a look at the full interview over on RPS.

Classic turn-based strategy gameplay with–wait, living dead Samurai!? Where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I’m the artist, lead designer and director, and I lived in Japan for about 5 years altogether, most of it spent working at Sega in Tokyo (worked on Space Channel 5 and Rez, as well as a few others that didn’t make it out.)

I used to spend a lot of time hiking and camping, and my Japanese friends would always tell me we were sleeping on like the site of some huge battle 400 years ago or whatever, and I just couldn’t get these amazing battles in my imagination out of my mind. The very earliest versions of SOTS actually had living Samurai but I figured they’d be way cooler dead!

Skulls of the Shogun has been demoed publicly a few times; has the public’s reaction to the game been up to your expectations?

Public reaction to the game at this point is ridiculously predictable: They play a few rounds, start slobbering, then start attacking me for not being done with it yet because they can’t wait to buy it. I think it features a fresh enough, accessible enough play-style that even people who normally wouldn’t play a strategy game are easily hooked, and people who love strategy games but could do without some of the mind-wracking math and statistics tracking just love it too. And through all the blind testing we’ve done watching people play the game at various trade shows, we’ve been able to focus even more on making the interface as invisible as possible and the entire experience as streamlined and easy to learn as we possibly could.

The members of your team have worked on AAA titles before: why did you decide to leave that development environment to develop games independently?

I’ve had the pleasure of working on some very cool, very cutting edge games, but they are always someone else’s baby and you are always at the whim of the publisher deciding to just cut it or change things, I feel only in independent development (especially at our scale, only 3 full time developers) its a much more streamlined operation, we discuss things between the 3 of us and can execute new ideas almost immediately. It’s incredibly liberating, although its a ton more work because a team of 3 plus a few part time contractors is suddenly doing the work of 40-60 people, only at a smaller scale. Ben Vance and Borut Pfeifer are both engineers, and I’m an artist, and between the 3 of us we handle all the coding, art, gameplay design, most of the animation, PR, business development, marketing, trade shows, story, most of the level design, and manage the sound effects and music being done externally. Its crazy, but super addictive too.

The game has been favorably compared to Nintendo’s Advance Wars series. Would you say this is an apt comparison?

Absolutely. The Advance Wars games are among my very favorite games ever, in fact I would say they would have been my desert island game, until Skulls of the Shogun! When I started planning this game I played a ton of Advance Wars, Shining Force, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics and more and made a huge list of all the things I loved and all I the things I didn’t like. Thats been my bible ever since. But playing Advance Wars with the animations turned off, on some of the smaller simpler maps, was definitely my biggest inspiration. They do all the basics just right. I wanted SOTS to feel like a spiritual sequel to that franchise, getting rid of some of the old conventions and reinventing as necessary.

What are your plans for post-release support? Is there anything in the cards for DLC or future updates that won’t make the launch date?

We honestly haven’t had time to think about it too much, we’re heads down buried in production right now, we’ve been talking a bit about it and have some pretty good ideas for some new gameplay types that we didn’t have time to incorporate into the main game that I think people will really enjoy and appreciate.

What’s your philosophy on game design? Is there a design rallying cry that’s pushing Skulls of the Shogun progress forward?

I’ve been involved in the games industry since 1989 when I was a Game Counselor at Nintendo during the NES days. I talked to thousands of people over my years there (and later at Irem and Enix) and I think the bottom line is that the game just has to be fun to play, and ideally offer an experience that you haven’t had before. The game needs to be super accessible and as easy for people to jump in and enjoy as humanly possible, while at the same time offering interesting challenges and organic gameplay that allows the player to express themselves, no “one way” to do it. All of the team feel that the big budget stuff is really risk-adverse these days and the experiences are getting harder and harder to tell from each other. I want to make games that make people remember what it was like during the NES, SNES, even Saturn, N64 and PS1 days when there were still a lot of chances being taken and a lot of new mechanics coming to the forefront, that were addictive and just fun to try to master.

Are you all personally fans of the TBS genre? Any favorite games?

As I mentioned above my favorites are Advance Wars and Shining Force. Advance Wars (the first one) is by far my favorite, it was the most streamlined and pure experience of all of them, I don’t agree with their philosophy of just adding more units and more complexity as the series went on.

Do you feel that experience at a AAA company is a must before one jumps into the indie scene, or should people interested in making their own games just dive right in?

I’ve seen huge success stories from both sides of the fence but we all feel our experience working on AAA titles for so long was a *HUGE* benefit for all of us. Understanding the pre-production and production processes and pipelines, design processes, ideation, character design, animation tool engineering, animation pipelines, there are a million lessons all of us learned on someone else’s dime and now its paying off hugely. I wouldn’t want to try to figure all that stuff out with my own money with all the additional stresses already placed on small teams with huge challenges already waiting! But it happens all the time and more power to those guys!

Have you thought about future projects for Haunted Temple, or are you totally focused on kicking SotS out the door at this point?

This project has sort of been my baby, the deal is for the next game we do Borut’s (the lead engineer) project which although has some similarities, is vastly different as well. Expect something very different from us next time! I have a ton of ideas I like to think about late at night, no art yet or anything but some very cool concepts that continue to build on the best of classic gaming mixing in the best of modern AI, animation and 2D visuals!

Thanks for your time, and good luck with Skulls of the Shogun and future projects!

Skulls of the Shogun is set to be released for Windows, Xbox Live Arcade, and mobile platforms this year. Be sure to stay tuned to DeltaGamer for ongoing coverage of the game.

I think that both the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy will probably never go away. It sucks when someone can’t even play a game that they bought with their hard earned cash because of DRM but you can’t really blame the developers for adding DRM with piracy as rampant as it is these days. In the end, there needs to be a new system for selling games all together. Something that allows gamers to download and own games for free while the developers still rake in cash. Maybe a digital distributor that lets you download games for free but advertises through the games some how.

These certainly are interesting ideas, regardless of their viability in the short term. You can check out Celestial Mechanica over at its official website, and be sure to take a look at the full interview over at Examiner.

Speaking during a brief interview before the evening Distant Worlds performance in Chicago, famed composer Nobuo Uematsu had a suggestion for fans seeking to make his autograph permanent.

A shot of Uematsu's autograph on the FFVIII Original Soundtrack. Photo from Flickr user Cloganese.

Uematsu, speaking through a translator, said that recently many people have been asking for autographs on their arms which they then have tattooed. While Uematsu appreciates the gesture, he asked that people refrain from such behavior.

“I will not recommend that way,” Uematsu said. “Don’t hurt your bodies with my sign.”

Uematsu was in Chicago for the Distant Worlds concert, a symphony performance of various songs from the Final Fantasy series. The concert plays in various locations around the world, and has been going on for four years. Part of the draw of the show is that every show has a different set of pieces, making sure that audiences never see the same show twice.

Uematsu said that his favorite part of the performance is coming out on stage after the encore of “One Winged Angel.”

“I can see the thousand people all smiling and happy from the stage,” Uematsu said. “I am always touched by the audience reaction.”