Diablo
II
[3/5/98]
GameSpot: Matt, you oversee all the creation of techniques for the Blizzard film department. Explain how that department works. You don't split up the team and have one person on Diablo II, one person on Starcraft, and so on?
Matt: Up to this point, we haven't had to split the team because we've basically been working on one project at a time. We worked on Brood War, and then we moved on to Diablo II. So that's been the way we've been working up to this point.
Now once we get past Diablo II, we're going to have to start working on more projects at once, but the teams will all be within the cinematics department, which means we'll all be central. We won't be split - like you know, Blizzard North won't have a team. We'll all be right down here in Irvine.
GameSpot: So up until now, how has the department worked?
Matt: We've been working in terms of developing the cinematics hand in hand with the games. We've been working closely with the team developing the games to come up with a story we can tell, to come up with characters that we can develop, and then we go and we hunker down and we work on it. Then we check in with them and make sure everything's going well and make sure that we're working along parallel lines. It's worked out pretty decently so far.
The reason we decided to do it was basically that we felt there was a need to focus, to have people who could be focused on creating the cinematics. As I'm sure you're aware, most companies have been doing it sort of as a second thought - you know, it' s just something-to-add-at-the-end kind of thing. Which means that whoever happens to be available, who's not working on game art or whatever at the last minute, will do it, and it just means that the quality suffers - you don't have people who are focused on it day in and day out and who specialize in it. Since we're always striving to be the best we can be, we decided we should devote resources specifically to cinematics and let people focus on it day to day. So that's what we've been doing.
Now we have 14 people over here who are doing nothing but focusing on cinematics. Basically what it means is we're making animated films, you know, we're making feature movies that go into games. Focusing on it has allowed us to get better and better every time.
Next: Working with the designers
Diablo
II
