25 Years with Charles Cecil – Part 2 (1997-2015)

[b]Ingmar[/b]: Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon followed in 2003, and is also well known for adding new elements to the series. How did your experience from In Cold Blood influence Broken Sword 3, in terms of new elements put in? Some action, some stealth, and…

[b]Charles[/b]: Broken Sword 3… first of all, we used totally new technology. We used a system called Renderware for 3D rendering. It was pretty expensive to license Renderware, although cheaper than writing your own. Now, with Unreal and Unity, the model is so much easier and cheaper. Or indeed, Amazon’s new system Lumberyard, which is totally free. So things have changed profoundly.

But I think what worked well in Broken Sword 3, was the… sorry, I’ll take a step back. Broken Sword 3 was written when console was absolutely dominant at retail. PC was dying. And because the game was aimed at console, I thought that it should be 3D. And so the puzzles should embrace opportunities made available by 3D. I designed a box puzzle, where, at the start, you have to move a box to balance an aircraft. And then I came up with another one, where you move a box over a pressure pad – not particularly original. But that box is also needed to climb onto to reach a ledge. So far, so good. The mistake came when I asked the level designers to take the box puzzle and scale, and make it more and more difficult. And we ended up putting the box puzzles in the game at points where the player would expect the pace to be racing. So generally the box puzzles were widely disliked. Although I have heard a couple of people say they really enjoyed them, but the vast majority of the people didn’t.

Then also I think another mistake was to put in stealth scenes – it’s very difficult in an adventure to really convey when the character can believably be seen by the antagonists and when they should be in the clear, and I’m not sure we did that particularly well. But broadly the game was well received. I remember Edge gave it 9 out of 10, and it got a wide range of pretty good scores.

[b]Ingmar[/b]: The next game was another Broken Sword adventure, The Angel of Death, in 2006. As I understand it, the development story of this game really differs a lot from all the other Broken Swords, and everything you did before. Can you give us an idea of that whole creative process?

[b]Charles[/b]: Yeah, well, Broken Sword 3 had been commercially very successful for the publisher, THQ. But the way the business model worked in those days was that the developer was paid 7% of the retail price: but against that 7% was deducted the cost of development, the cost of manufacturing, and a contribution to localization and QA. Which was pretty outrageous, really, because that effectively meant that 93% was going to the retailers and the publishers. Which ultimately meant that it was virtually impossible for a developer to ever recoup and earn a royalty. On Broken Sword 3 we’d gone over budget, and hadn’t asked THQ for any more money but had got a bank overdraft of over £200,000. THQ earned $10 million in revenues. Taking off the 2 million they paid us – plus the million for the cost of goods and let’s say another million for all the other things – they made 5 to 6 million dollars. We lost £200,000.

The financial position meant that at the end of Broken Sword 3, we’d had to cut back to a core shell of about 3 or 4 people, because otherwise we wouldn’t have survived. It was very sad.

And THQ came to us and said, “Broken Sword 3 has been very profitable. We would like you to write another Broken Sword.” And we said, “Yeah, we will, but we have to recoup some of this money.” So the nice guys at THQ’s UK office agreed to much more favourable terms, and we started work in good faith. And then the American side of the company sacked all those UK guys, put their own puppets in there, and those puppets refused to accept the new terms. They insisted that we go back to the old terms. And we had no choice.

With Broken Sword 4, we partnered with a local company, who are very well renowned for their technology in particular, called Sumo Digital. Sumo ran the production and took care of the budgets, and scheduling. And I worked on the high-level design.

Now, every other game I’ve written, I’ve been in charge both of the design and the production. Broken Sword 4 was developed using what’s called a Waterfall project management approach, and that’s where you define everything in advance. Which is really not a great approach. Because you are told to finish and lock the story at this point, finish and lock the design at this point, and you’re then given absolutely no scope to change it. Whereas clearly the whole point about any creative endeavour is that there should be the flexibility to improve it throughout development. So Broken Sword 4 was very stifled by that particular approach. The game released in 2006, and some people really enjoyed it, but generally it wasn’t as well received as our previous Broken Sword games.