Exclusive Interview: A Conversation with Kaos
We brave the Homefront for an exclusive interview with the developers of our Overall Best of E3 winner.
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Of all the potential masterpieces and wonderful gaming experiences that we were privileged to experience at E3 2010, few stuck with the staff of GamingExcellence quite like THQ and Kaos Studios' upcoming shooter Homefront. With a combination of great storytelling, realised environments, intense shooting action, and superb tech, Homefront looks to be one of those titles that reaffirms our faith in our precious hobby and pastime.
Like any other game, Homefront is only as good as the developers behind it. When we were given a chance to ask the developers a few questions, we jumped at the chance. We asked two of the head honcho level designers some tough questions, easy questions, and we even managed to sneak on a goofy one or two in there. So without further ado, we present a Conversation with Kaos!
GamingExcellence: For starters, who are you and what is your role in the development of the game?
Rex Dickson: My name is Rex Dickson. I am the single player lead level designer for Kaos Studios. My primary responsibility is driving all the single player missions in the game. My secondary responsibility is to manage and mentor the single player level designers.
Zach Wilson: My primary role is Level Design, the process of designing and building levels from initial concept up through final. My other role is as a vision holder for what we call "The World of Homefront". We have an elaborate and detailed back story that we've spent a great deal of time on, and it took a huge amount of research to get us here, and that was my job. I think I wrote something on the order of 120 pages of material. I ended up boiling it down to a power point presentation that I forced my co-workers to sit through. Part of the follow through consists of interacting with the art and story team in that capacity; making sure that everything is coherent and consistent and accurately reflects our back story.
GamingExcellence: What was your inspiration for creating the story in Homefront?
Zach Wilson: One of the ideas that we carried over from our first title was the concept of resource depletion and the potential consequences that that might have for a global economy. What happens when you can't get oil cheaper than a hundred fifty dollars a barrel? What do people go without first? How does that apply to an economy like America's where everything is structured around the assumption of cheap plentiful oil? How would we react culturally, and militarily? What breaks down first? Frontlines explored the military aspect - when the oil runs out, we're going to find where the remaining stuff is and we're gonna take it. Homefront is more about what happens here in America when oil becomes more and more expensive. How does the culture change, what's important and what's not? When researching this we looked at the work of people like James Howard Kunstler and Richard Heinberg. They talk at great length about the role that oil plays in modern society. Michael Pollan has written a lot about how our food production and distribution system is structured around oil, and what that means. Tom Brown Jr wrote a couple of great books about survival in urban and suburban settings that were useful.
The other inspiration was the nature of occupation, and in particular what that means for the civilians living the experience. This is a politically charged topic, one of the inspirations (and I hate to phrase it that way) was the situation in the Gaza Strip. We've pulled from the experiences that people there have had, as well as the point of view of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's a very human, emotional core to the motivations of the people living, fighting and dying in those areas and I think we wanted to ask ourselves, how would we react if we were put in that situation? If someone came into our homeland, regardless of their motivation or stated intention and tried to impose their will on me, how would I react? Che Guevara's classic Guerrilla Warfare talks a lot about how you fight a war in a situation like that. John Milius recommended a book about the apache called In the Days of Victorio which is this amazing "other side of the story" look at the Apache Indians in the 1880s. He also recommended this insane book called The Ultimate Sniper by John Plaster, which is this like instruction manual on how to be a sniper - I can't believe it's legal to publish it it's so in-depth. I actually based one of my levels off of some of the counter-sniper tactics he details in that book.
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