Kameo: Elements of Power Interview: Background Artist Phil Dunne

Phil Dunne hails from the beautiful city of Dublin, Ireland. He studied Computer Graphics at the Ballyfermot Senior College there. After graduation, he joined Rare and has been there ever since, for the past 11 years. Phil has worked on many titles for Rare, but the first was Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run for SNES. Among his other credits, he lists a vast array from Donkey Kong to Conker. His work continues to improve in both savvy and creativity. Most recently, he’s applied his talents to Kameo™: Elements of Power™, and in the Xbox 360 environment—giving him the chance to show off what he can do. We asked him some questions about his experiences on the game.

How has your vision for the game changed from when it was first conceived to more recent work done to make it ready for Xbox 360?
The style has remained fairly intact. We always wanted to show a big contrast between the bright and peaceful Enchanted Kingdom and the dark and evil Troll lands. We never wanted the game to look photo-realistic—our vision was to make it what we call ‘hyper’ realistic. With the extra power of Xbox 360, we’ve had the opportunity to put far more detail into the locations and as a result make the locations far more immersive.

What can you tell us about the content added after the decision to release the game on the Xbox 360?
Apart from the extra graphical detail we’ve put in all areas of the game, we’ve also been able to greatly increase the size of the locations. Kameo’s world is now so vast she needs a horse to get around. And because the locations are so much bigger, it means more of everything. There’s more puzzles, more secret things to find, and literally thousands more enemies to fight.

Where do you start when you’re developing the levels in a game?
It starts with a rough layout from a designer. Usually we’ll have a long discussion about how everything will work and what the key gameplay elements are. Some areas of a level can change a lot from the original layout on paper, depending on how well the level plays once it’s actually in the game. The key to it is making sure everyone involved stays flexible to new ideas and improving the gameplay.

What was your greatest challenge while working on Kameo?
Moving from GameCube to Xbox and then to Xbox 360 was obviously a real challenge. A lot of things needed to be completely reworked due to the different capabilities of each system.

What is your creative relationship with the artists like?
We set a definite direction for the artwork and we stick to it. However, we do our best to make sure everyone gets the opportunity to be creative and have their own input into the levels. Each artist gets to create the look of the location they are working on, while maintaining the overall art direction, standard, and feel of the game.

If you have to name only one thing that you hope players will appreciate in Kameo, what would it be?
The wealth of abilities at your disposal, because of all the characters you get to play. Players really need to experiment with all the characters, which in turn will allow you to achieve combos, which are really effective.

Kameo gameplay offers many puzzles that players can or must solve in order to advance in the game. Did you have a method for determining the nature of these puzzles or did they come as flashes of inspiration?
Some of the puzzles definitely come from my own personal interests. I’ve done some skateboarding in my time so you can expect to see plenty of half-pipes and quarter-pipes for Major Ruin.

What primary complications does including an Xbox Live-enabled element to the game pose to you as a level developer?
None. To be honest, any problems that have arisen have been fixed by the programmers.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into a career doing what you do?
First of all, keep playing as many games as you can, as it’s important to have a good understanding of what makes a game fun and enjoyable to play. Do as much drawing as you can, especially of places you’d like to see exist in a virtual world. Finally, if possible get a PC and a learning addition of 3D modeling package and create some locations.

If you could be any of the Elemental Warriors or other characters in Kameo, which one would you be, and why?
It would have to be Major Ruin. He’s my favourite character in the game. He can get to the hard to reach places and in a fight he can take out whole lines of enemies with a single move.