The rise of middleware means Remedy can stay small and agile, while making a game that might be better than one they could make in-house. "I think Havok is a perfect example," he says. "Today, it would be crazy ... to write your own physics module." While it was common several years ago to write your own physics, today it's unlikely you'll compete with the top packages, and you'll have to fund a much larger team to build out your own physics engine. He also called NaturalMotion's Euphoria system "very interesting," adding, "We are not using it at the moment, but that's something I can clearly see is the way of the future," partly because it's a good engine, and partly because something like Euphoria can replace a lot of animators. This seems to be a natural progression for the industry, he says, and while he wasn't authorized to tell me exactly what middleware Remedy was licensing, he was adept at discussing the various packages and how they fit into their overall development strategy.
The reasons for changing the development model into a more distributed one are numerous. For one, he says, "There are only so many great physics programmers in the world, so if every company tried to hire some of them, you would end up in a situation where you would have a few, but nobody would have a critical mass of, like, physics programmers." In that case, it makes sense, in an industry-wide sense, to focus all those programmers on making a single great physics platform, rather than half a dozen good ones.
The second factor, he says, is "games are getting so complicated and so demanding that you need specialists for each area." While 10 years ago, a small team could handle all the physics, animation and programming you'd need to make a game, to compete with the big boys today, you need either a huge in-house staff working on each area, or to license from someone who spends their time doing nothing but physics, animation or programming.
Part of what makes a great game, though, is a unified vision. Play a Blizzard game, and you know it's a Blizzard game in everything from the story to the visual look of the world to the silly things units say when you torment them too much. I asked him how Remedy keeps its own unique vision, with a game assembled by so many third-party pieces. "I think it's actually easier when we have the components from the outside," he said, "because those components are well-known, and we can just analyze them, and we can just lay out what their limitations are." The real key, he says, is their small team. "We have few enough people to have a conversation and reach consensus." Keeping a unified vision is possible, he says, when the team is small enough to fit in one room, which is what their small and agile approach is all about.
Shannon Drake rides a polar bear to work.
