Interviews

Art Director Damon Conn talks about bring the Fantastic Four to videogame life
By Michael Lafferty

“We packed the game full of enemies. I don’t think any fan would be wanting more because there is every one we’ve touched on.”

Call it a labor of love, call it a fascination realized, call it whatever you want, but when you talk to Damon Conn, art director for the Seven Studios/Activision Fantastic Four videogame title, you better come prepared to talk about more than just the surface pinnings of this Marvel-based world.

You see, Damon has had a long relationship with the Fantastic Four, beginning – as with so many – in childhood with the comic books. That he has translated that love affair into working on the videogame project is a true joy – feelings that underscore his talks about the title.

GameZone.com caught up with Damon during an F4 event hosted by Activision in San Francisco recently.

When you create a game like Fantastic Four, what is the first thing you have to have in the game, vision-wise?

Damon: “What was the first thing that I wanted to put in the game? I wanted to put (Dr.) Doom in the game; that was my first thing. I was, like, ‘we’ve got to make sure that Dr. Doom is present.’ The heroes, and the fact that you could play with another person – I guess if we all sat down in the room at that point in time, those were the high-point issues at exactly the point of genesis of this project. The heroes had to be unique and different, just like the F4 are, and that was the stepping-stone right off the bat. And we wanted to be able to play it with friends, so that was another small hurdle of memory requirements.”

We talked a little bit early about how difficult it was to fit Reed into a format …

Damon: “Reed does not fit a conventional spot in an RPG-kind of environment, if you will. Like with the bruiser, the ranged attacker, the stealth/thief/killer kind of thing, which we do – Johnny is the ranged attacker – Reed would not fit into that mold. We created something that is quite unique, and Reed does fill kind of an all-purpose … he is a scientist and we bring that out in a fun way in the game. He has gadgets that he uses, he also uses his fists in great ways, he is a ranged fighter, he is tough enough to take a beating, he is fast enough to keep up with Sue and he has enough technical expertise to bail himself out of some of the harder spots with some of his little droid attack robots. He has, definitely, the most flavor out of all the characters because he does so many different things – but they all are great in their own way.”

Let’s talk about the difficulties of designing Reed, and how the bone structure kept not wanting to do what you needed it to do …

Damon: “There were moments with Reed during the development cycle. He was the toughest one to develop. Literally we would develop a Reed skeleton and get programmer support on filling out the blanks with his stretching abilities and do a lot of work – weeks of work – on getting a good skeleton with IK built into it so it could react to almost every situation we could plan. We would give it rigorous tests and then find out it would fail a test or two, and we would hit the drawing board again, and weeks or days worth of work would just get shoved aside as R&D, at that point, because we would have to completely re-think the rig.

“We turned Reed from an all-purpose – his leg stretched, his arm stretched, his neck stretched to his torso stretched, his arm stretched and his legs stretched to form a perfect circle and roll – there was a tremendous amount of reworking every time we would think we had everything we wanted Reed to do. Then we would be, like, ‘no, we are wrong. We need Reed’s hands to expand, we need Reed’s hands to form different shapes … We need Reed to form a small ball, a big ball …’ And this is one mesh that we are doing this to, and with the way we had to create the mesh, it gave us new ideas on how to cut the character’s arms up to give it enough segments so it would be able to stretch the way it had to. And programmer really supported us, and design was great but at the end of the day, there were a couple of times when we looked at the ground and said ‘are we going to get him or no?’ And we got him, but there were a lot of moments, weekends where I was just thinking on how we were going to get Reed to work.” 

Sue Storm is a little bit on the different side as well, and creating her must have been a challenge. She had attacks, but also great defensive abilities, and you had to balance her abilities to defend with her abilities to attack.

Damon: “She needs to attack, absolutely. What we did is we took a cue from the comics in developing her kung-fu abilities. She had extensive training with Iron Fist for a number of years in the comic, if anybody out there is following, and we tried to get her some fast attacks, some cat-like attacks, to go with her stalwart defense. She is the toughest defender; you cannot break that force bubble. And she has some super attacks. If you build up the cosmic energy, you can really unleash … they’ve alluded to Sue being the strongest member because she can just put you in a vacuum and take away all your oxygen. We can do the same thing in the game. She can do that, but it takes a lot out of her. She is very balanced and a lot of fun to play.”

When you talk about the villains in the game – you have Dr. Doom and the Puppet Master in there – was there a point at which you said you had to stop putting all these villains in there?

Damon: “No, it was always trying to get one more villain, that was our goal. Literally, we would add villains – when we said we would not add any more villains, we added one more villain. I am a huge fan of the first Spider-man game, and you got to play against all those classic villains. We wanted to give the fans something to look forward to, we wanted there to be an epic fight at the end of each level. It gives you a constant ride against the greatest villains, in my opinion, that Marvel has to offer. We packed the game full of enemies. I don’t think any fan would be wanting more because there is every one we’ve touched on.”

When you think about the game itself and the look of the game, what were your most difficult challenges in bringing this game to life?

Damon: “I think the sequences when all four are in the picture, it is just brilliant and great and it is just amazing because it is that whole team element, drawing some of the X-Men kind of idea but at the same point a little more unique on our side. You can be a little closer, a little more intimate with the characters, get a little bit better feel for their powers, and more variation and animation in their attacks. Even the two-player levels, most of the game is either two or there is some four-player levels, you have this fun thing with what Johnny and Reed can do together, and then Ben and Sue without Johnny and Reed, and then what Ben and Reed would do. We’ve played all the variables to make very interesting levels that would make you think about who is coming in with you and how you are going to use them in the game. It creates a different dynamic of the Four.

“At the end, you really know every character and you are familiar with them and know what they are really strong at, and what they are not as strong at. When you have a full understanding of the combat, of every character, you really get what they are supposed to do in the game, and that makes the later levels much more interesting.”

Did you find it was difficult to script the AI, not only to control the way the villains respond, but the way that the members of the team that players are not controlling react to situations?

Damon: “The AI handles itself well. We worked very hard to get it to a point to where you felt like you were playing with a friend, even when you didn’t have a friend present. So it knows what to do in situations – it will set people up for cosmic attacks so you can unload on them. It plays like you would want your friend to play, for the most part, although there is nothing that can beat playing with a friend when it comes to the total experience. That cooperative play is great.”

As a fan of the comic books, what was the biggest delight you had in working on this? 

Damon: “Can I say that the biggest delight was the day they said we could do this game and that I had the opportunity to develop the Thing, and Johnny … I mean, I was floored. It was the snowball of the best experience I’ve ever had creatively. I’m a huge fan. If I got to do Reed’s pinky, I would have been happy, much less his whole body.”

A lot of comic book fans likely only see the surface of these characters. Working so close with them, trying to emulate their abilities in a very visual way, do you think you have gotten a lot closer to them?

Damon: “Absolutely. At this point the Fantastic Four is kind of like my dysfunctional second family. And that is what they are in the comics. Honestly, I’m sad that the game is done at this point, and I miss it already that I’m not working with these guys on a day-to-day basis. I still pull up the characters to look at them because I think we did a great job on them.

“And sitting in there and realizing at certain points that Johnny was going to be 70 particle generators and things like that, and realizing that 70 would blow our budget, but then we found a way to make 70 work throughout the whole game, and the dynamic light on the whole time – these are the moments where you say ‘I am really happy I had the opportunity to do it.’ There were parts where we didn’t know if it was going to work and when it does and you feel like you did something good for Marvel. At the end of the day I wanted to make sure I could say I was proud to put this out for Marvel, I love Marvel – I’m a huge fan, and I’m proud to put this out for Fox. And I wanted to make sure the fans on the boards, who really love F4, don’t want to find my house and burn it. By the way, I don’t have a house, so you won’t be able to find that. Like how many eggs do you have up in the air at that point? Talk about the weight of the world. But I felt like we were ready for that kind of challenge at this point in our careers. And we handled it the only way we could have and I think we did great.”