He had no life ambition to ”make another shooter after Black,” but it was ‘relatively easy’ to do. Codemasters fault wasn’t in creativity but in its execution of development.
City Interactive had hired Black to work on Enemy Front but was made redundant after going on a press tour for the project. He says he doesn’t ”really have an answer for why” they ended his contract.
”All I care about is making games. I really just want to make a really f*cking cool game,” Stuart Black told GamesIndustry.biz. The game designer now prefers to focus more on just production of video games. He believes that City Interactive perhaps let him go because they just wanted to change direction of Enemy Front.
”I don’t really have an answer for why, nobody ever really talked to me about any problems either with how I work, the quality of the work that was being done. It was kind of the opposite, everybody was really happy with the work.”
Black continued: “The only thing that I can think is that when I was off doing my thing in the States telling people there’s going to be a Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare kind of vibe to the game rather than the Saving Private Ryan reverential vibe, and actually they were going ‘no, we actually want Private Ryan.’”
From there he moved to Codemasters but was once again restrained by the higher ups. “When I joined Codemasters I didn’t do it to make Bodycount, I went there to make an open world cop game,” he revealed. “I did about a year and a half pre-production before that became a little bit too rich for their blood. It wasn’t my life ambition to make another shooter after Black, but it was something we could do relatively easily.” Codemasters hobbled themselves in production.
“I don’t think their problems are in the ideas or the creative side, the problems are in production, in getting stuff made… You keep missing dates, assets don’t come in on time, and you just start having to shave that design down. And that tends to be where your quality goes as you go through the course of production, and why you end up with something that gets released and it’s not very good,” explained Black. Now he is more of a freelance developer.
”I’m open to working with anyone, developer or publisher, just not as an ‘employee’, where any creative rights are automatically attributed to the employer.”
“I’m prototyping a game for potential release through Steam. A third person action/adventure thing about survival and creation in a fairly hard sci-fi context. Planning to have something to show in the new year. And I’m looking at a cute iPad/iPhone idea that Leading Light have.”
Check out the full interview between Stuart Black and GamesIndustry.biz.
