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which was actually our first level in the game, it
really helped us to get the rest of the levels up
to that place. That’s the lighting, and that’s the
materials, and that’s all of the graphic features that
we’ve enhanced for it, including the characters,
the reality scans, and getting Kit Harington (the
Game of Thrones
star plays antagonist Admiral
Salen Kotch) in the game. All these things really
helped to bring the game to what we
were trying to make. Then the whole
team could just crank and get the
other levels done.”
Horton talks us through how
the work his art department
contributes to the game fits in
with the structure of the overall
production.
“We have design, narrative and
tech and we work in what we call
interdisciplinary pods,” he explains. “You’ll
have in a level every single discipline – animation,
effects, design, and art – and we’ll all get around
the screen, play it and go, 'this is what we need to
do', and we start to rattle off all the things we want
to do to make this level and this experience feel
finished.
“Everyone picks up the task and you just start to
see every department organically building this up,
and then, once the sound gets in there, the whole
thing clicks; that’s the experience we’re trying to
land. We have a really close collaboration with all
disciplines as we’re developing the game.”
Does Horton prefer to work on the
campaign or multiplayer? “Obviously,
my comfort zone is campaign,
but now I’m really excited about
the power of multiplayer and the
addictive quality of it. I really want
to get better at it, too – I’m always
rubbish when I play multiplayer for
the first couple of weeks.
“I would say what I love about
campaign is the stories and the
characters and that feeling of
evolution and growth; my heart is
still there.
“But then there are the zombies,”
he grins excitedly. “You can’t forget
about Zombies.”
thing all the way through. It
really immerses you into the
story.”
Part of the challenge for
Horton and his art team was to
get the aesthetic right. Although
the series is no stranger to a
future setting, taking Call of
Duty into space was a whole
new proposition that required a
lot of thought in the design process.
What would the soldiers look like?
What about the tech?
“My team designed everything; characters,
environments, effects, UI, weapons, vehicles – you
name it,” says Horton.
“With a Call of Duty title, the aim is to always
strive for that military authenticity but because
Infinite
Warfare
is in space and in the future, we had to
extrapolate what we thought that would
look like.
“So what we did was to take
the navy and take NASA and put
them together. That was our
driving principal of our aesthetic.
It was something that felt real and
grounded and not too science fiction;
we wanted it to be science fact as
much as we could. I would say that
was our guiding principal.
“We produced hundreds and hundreds
of designs and an absolute ton of it ends up on the
cutting room floor. It’s the “What if it looked like this?
What if it looked like that?”. He leans back and smiles.
“Sometimes you need those two things to find out
what the final answer is.”
Horton encourages his team to always ‘bring their
ideas and passions to the table’ and this forms part
of his overall modus operandi. On
Infinite Warfare
, he
began by posing a number of questions. What are we
trying to do here? What is the statement of quality?
“When I came in we took one level and we said,
this is the level we’re going to focus on and we’re
going to bring it up from where it’s at, which is a
foundational level, all the way up to final quality."
“Once we had that one level with the final quality,
Gargoyles
(1995)
Based on the Disney animated
series, this Mega Drive title
garnered positive review
scores with one contemporary
commentator calling it, maybe
a little too enthusiastically,
‘one of the best games for the
Mega Drive’.
Medal of
Honor
(1999)
Horton’s first experience
with the first-person shooter
genre began right here with
Spielberg’s excellent game
and military shooter forefather,
Medal of Honor.
Marc Ecko’s
Getting Up
(2006)
Not a great game to be fair,
and famously banned here
in Australia. The reason?
The Classification Board
determined that the ‘game
promotes the crime of graffiti.’
Silent Hill:
Homecoming
(2008)
What is it with Horton and
banned games in Australia?
Another title to fall under the
Classification Board’s axe. A
resubmitted, toned-down game
was approved for release the
following year.
F.E.A.R 3
(2011)
A neat survival horror shooter,
the best thing about this title
was that we got to meet a
grumpy horror maestro John
Carpenter – who wrote the
story – in person at E3.
13
FEATURE
GAMES
•
Call of
Duty: Infinite
Warfare
is out now
Five Games
Brian Horton
Has Had a
Hand In.
Horton’s
Handiwork
Kit Harington on set
and in game (left).
We wanted it to
be science fact as
much as we could