Breaking new ground

Charles Cecil is one of the best-known figures in the UK games industry, having begun his career more than 25 years ago. In 1990 he set up Revolution Software, the studio behind Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series - both of which were huge hits with gamers.

But despite their success, Cecil found it a struggle to cope with the overheads incurred by a small studio producing just one game at a time. As a result, he took the decision to scale back Revolution's operations. Since then, he has worked on a consultant on The Da Vinci Code movie-tie in, and is currently developing Broken Sword 4 in partnership with Sumo Digital.

Cecil's time is also taken up by his work for the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival, due to be held at the city's Royal College of Physicians between August 21 - 22. A member of the content committee since the very first EIEF, Cecil is producing a session by Professor Ken Perlin of New York University this year. The session, which is titled More Magic Emotions, will explore the issue of creating virtual actors with the power to effectively convey emotion - a subject which is close to Cecil's heart.

GamesIndustry.biz got the chance to sit down with Cecil and discuss how Revolution's business model is working today, whether he'd recommend it to other small developers, and why big budgets and huge development teams don't necessarily equal great games.

Charles Cecil: Yes, absolutely. I enjoy it enormously, and it allows me to see the ways other developers are working. One of the problems with Revolution as it stood was that for two years I was in a little bubble, as was my team, and I did nothing but work on Broken Sword. At the end of it, I had to go straight onto a new project; there was no time to catch a breath.

We had some really good guys, a terrific team, but we were writing one project at a time. And at the end of that project, if we didn't have something else to go on to, we had to make people redundant - so people had gone through an incredible crunch period, and that was their reward. It was terrible.

We had a project cancelled, and I had no choice but to scale right back. In hindsight, it was an extremely good thing to do. Now I partner with larger developers - in the case of Broken Sword 4, we're working with Sumo, who have a team of about 60 to 70 people, and they have the flexibility to move people between projects.

Obviously, if you're only working on one title, you have no flexibility whatsoever. The model at Revolution worked up until 2003 when we released Broken Sword 3 - actually, I would argue that it stopped working some time before then, it was absolutely unsustainable.

Working with Sumo has allowed me to see how other people work, to get new ideas; frankly, as well as being a much more productive and efficient way of working, it's also much more fun.

Do you think it's harder for smaller developers to survive in the industry these days?

The key thing is that it's actually more difficult to be creative when you have enormous overheads, because of the pressures that you're put under. Revolution now has a miniscule overhead, so it doesn't matter if an idea doesn't get signed for three, six or nine months. Previously, it would matter desperately.

We're in a much stronger position now - I'm very happy to work on the project and design it, with very low overheads, until the point at which it gets taken on. Then we'll work with a partner, like Sumo, who will be able to react very quickly and build a team up.

So would you recommend that as a business model to other small developers?

Absolutely. For Broken Sword 4, we've pulled a team of people together, the best people that I could find, and the game will be much better for it.

Have you started work on your first next-gen project yet?

No.

Is that because it's an area you're not interested in?

I think the industry is being split between the massive budgets that people are talking about for next-gen, and if you go to the other end, DS titles, which are still - in comparison - extraordinarily cheap to write. I would be delighted to contribute to next-gen, but if there's a project that I'm going to handle, I'd much prefer a smaller budget.

Not least because you're much more likely to recoup royalties. If a game costs $10 million to write, the chance of actually recouping and earning a royalty is tiny. If a game is costing, at the DS level, several hundred thousand pounds, then it becomes much more viable economically. I write a game in the hope that it's going to be creatively successful, but also financially successful, and that royalties get paid out.

Are game budgets too big now? Is it all getting a bit silly?

Absolutely. I think silly is the right word. The bigger developers talk about games costing tens of millions of dollars; it seems patently obvious to me that they don't need to cost that much, unless, as with a big film budget, you're paying certain key individuals enormous amounts of money.

Part of the reason that Hollywood films cost so much is the enormous wage bill of the actors. I can only assume that the reason the budgets are quite so enormous is because key staff are being paid a huge amount.

It costs X to model a character in 10,000 polygons for Broken Sword 3. It doesn't cost very much more to model it in greater detail for a next-gen title. So there's something slightly strange going on.

EA talks about the fact that they've got teams of 150 people working on a project. To me, that just can't be efficient, either commercially or creatively. I'm not quite sure how these companies have got into the state where they feel that they need to have such enormous teams.

Have you any ideas as to why that is?

I think they want to squeeze the development period, first and foremost. That in itself is probably dangerous, because you reduce by a long way your opportunity for any kind of creative flexibility. A lot of criticism is levelled at these very expensive projects that they lack soul, and I think part of the problem is that they're written too quickly.

In an ideal world, you'd come up with a game design document that specified exactly what that game was going to do and how it would play at the very beginning. Indeed, it's vital that you do come up with that, but through development you've got to be prepared to change, because - yes, you can prototype a certain amount, but you can't prototype everything. If you squeeze the development time too greatly, then you limit your ability to adjust and tweak the feeling of the game.

The other thing is, people want to produce games with the most extraordinary production values, and they're prepared to pay enormous amounts to do that.

What do you think of the news that E3 is becoming a much smaller event?

I've been away this week, so I haven't read much about it. But I think how an event that was patently so successful could go off the rails in such a short time - I suspect there are some fairly intransigent people, as is so often the way, who would prefer to see the thing disintegrate rather than compromise. But I need to read more about it.