Interviews// Jacob Minkoff - Lead Designer - Damnation

SPOnG: Blue Omega states that its business model is "is less of an outsource model and more of a short term co-operative", how does that work out for you in actual development?

Jacob Minkoff: The production model we use at Blue Omega Entertainment is akin to the independent film model in that there is a small core production team that develops the concepts then brings together and oversees the groups that make the concept a reality. During a production we act as a group of leads and managers who also go in and get our hands dirty.

Considering the number of games that have 200+ people involved in the production, this sort of distributed production model is what makes sense for us being an independent studio who is looking to survive and develop quality games.

As I will tell anyone who is interested, it is no small feat using this model. Your pre-production and planning have to be near flawless, and your communication and production pipelines need to rock solid.

The reason we consider this distributed development rather than outsourcing is because we are really collaborating with these external teams as though they are in another part of the building rather than across the country. Whether through video conferences, which happen multiple times a day, or email, IM, or the bug tracker, there is constant communication


SPOnG: The character played by the gamer - Captain Hamilton Rourke - likes to jump around the place. Why the decision to go vertical?

Jacob Minkoff: Haha, yes he most certainly does! ?

Well, when we started development on Damnation back in 2004, we were playing Quake 3 most evenings after work. Then, at home, we were playing games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and ICO. We started to think about how awesome it would be if you could have that fast-paced, precise, frenetic type of shooter combat in a vertically-oriented adventure-game-like environment. It would open up the shooter experience to all sorts of new possibilities.

Shooters at the time were, and to some degree have remained, very constrained to small tunnels, room, and flat arenas. By adding in the vertical element and giving the player all sorts of acrobatic climbing moves, it enables us to open up the game world and have huge environments, consisting not only of miles of horizontal distance but also thousands of vertical feet in height. This, in-turn, opens up all sorts of new tactical possibilities for the player.

Damnation is all about being a member of a small band of freedom-fighters who are up against impossible odds. In Damnation, you have to use what we call “Vertical Tactics” – you need to take advantage of the environment during combat.

For instance, rather than running straight towards a building filled with snipers and attempting a frontal assault, you have the opportunity to climb up to the rooftops, smash through an attic window, hang from the rafters, and take out the snipers from above. It’s all about using the multi-layered, organic, vertical environment to get the drop on your enemies. The player has the freedom to play the way they want to, and the verticality simply adds to their autonomy.

What’s really cool about all of our multi-player maps is that they all have this sort of vertical element to them that makes them play in a different way from any shooter you’ve tried before.