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3DTotal: You have been working within the games industry for almost fifteen years now. What is it about this industry that keeps you interested?
Daniel: I got into this industry for the money, but I stayed for the fun. I could barely make ends meet as a toy designer for a dubious manufacturer, when a young and very talented punk (Dev Madan, of Sly Cooper fame, currently owner of Loose Cannons) opened my eyes to the opportunities in this exploding industry. The early years felt a little bit like being at the source of a Big Bang, and ever since it’s been like riding the shock wave!
3DTotal: Now the “Big Bang” has happened, how do you see the games industry evolving over the next ten years, and what changes do you anticipate with regards to the way games are made?
Daniel: Games are here to stay. More than that, they are here to take over an increasing part of the entertainment market. As new ways to provide interactive experiences are being perfected, this trend will only become stronger. We’ve already witnessed big |
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title releases heavily impacting weekend box office numbers. Film studios are observing the games industry with legitimate concern. We all know that movies are not going away, but film makers will more and more be facing the need to take into account an extra factor when developing their marketing strategy. The leaps in technological advances are creating a void of content that needs to be filled. More content takes more resources, which means bigger budgets. The industry is already experiencing an increased dependence on outsourcing and the project management challenges associated with it. We’ll be seeing more small developers looking in the opposite direction, trying to come up with small, fun games that rely on brilliant ideas rather than brute production power. The bad news is that brilliant ideas are more difficult to come up with and impossible to predict, which makes it a high risk/high return proposition. Big publishers need to make projections, therefore prefer to play it safe and just put even more money on safe bets. |
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3DTotal: Tell us a bit about the concept behind your selected piece for the “Into the Pixel” exhibition this year?
Daniel: It started as a sort of reaction to a trend I see in concept art. There’s a tendency to throw at a piece all the tricks in the book and then some, a “more is more” mentality. In this piece, just as in most of what I consider my better ones, I want to restate the merit of clarity and the monumental quality of simplicity.
3DTotal: You seem to be of the schooling that “less is more”, but in what ways do you refer to simplicity?
Daniel: I believe this to be true on too many levels to cover here. But I’ll give you a couple of anecdotes to make a point. As a little kid growing up in Transylvania, before television made it to our neck of the woods, the puppet theatre was the ultimate experience in entertainment. Props were designed around the shortage of resources and were supported by cheap, yet creative, lighting. It was all about hinting more than showing, about inviting my imagination to participate and contribute. It was the most magical experience because of that, unrivalled by modern-day super-productions where what you see is what you get. I’ll take a tinfoil UFO from the early days of sci-fi TV shows over most modern productions’ interpretations any day. The tinfoil spaceship is a convention that resonates by triggering complex connections; the high tech CG ship is more often than not just that: somebody’s else’s (arguable) take on it. |
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3DTotal: Can you describe the premise behind “Guild Wars” and what it was like to work on it from a creative point of view?
Daniel:The Arena.net art team is by far the strongest I’ve had the privilege to be associated with. The unprecedented abundance of young talent, of top calibre mixed with the experience of seasoned industry veterans, make for a development culture that is truly inspiring. The “style” of the game is the result of a skeletal vision which multiple contributors are encouraged to build upon, at the levels where they have most to offer and feel most comfortable with. We take a dialectic approach to development, striving for a synthesis of polarized ideas, or at least a qualitative transformation in the direction of the dialogue between opposing assertions.
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