Q&A: DAN MALONE
EXPERIENCE THE BITMAP OF BROTHERS WORKING ARTIST ON THE RECALLS CHAOS HIS ENGINE
how long did The Chaos Engine take to develop?
Me and Phil Wilcock started talking about it when we were still doing Speedball 2, so maybe a couple of months before actual production started, and we were just sketching out ideas, characters and look – basically just doing it freestyle, really. When it started coming together and went into development in earnest, I’d say it was six months while I was doing Speedball, I was doing both games, and for about a year and a half after? I can’t remember to be honest, but it was quite a long project. It was two years, basically.
We’d guessed that – based on the early previews we have seen, it was looking advanced as early as late 1991.
Yeah. We were going to do it three-player, and once that was abandoned the game tightened up, because we had a clear target then. The tile sets for each level, they’re pretty much my favourite tile sets that
I’ve ever done – they are squeezing every single pixel possible. And then there was map building and I’d talk to Simon Knight, who was doing the layout for the levels – he’d give me the layout and I’d… tweak it slightly, so that I could get all the features in. It was a pretty efficient process, but there was a lot of work.
it sounds like you had a lot of freedom over the look of The Chaos Engine?
Oh yes, complete freedom. I’d been reading this story in 2000AD, I can’t remember what it was called but it was steampunk, if you like. There was a lot of talk, Phil was reading The Difference Engine and books like that, and the name ‘Chaos Engine’ just popped up like that. Yeah, we had a lot of freedom really – it was the last enjoyable game I worked on that got released!
how did you come up with the designs for the six characters – in fact, was it even always just six characters?
There were about 12 characters originally – there was a female character, a guy with a fencing mask on and a shotgun, there were other characters. But when you’re getting down to it, you need to get the game done, so we took it down to six and committed to two-player, and it worked. The inspiration for the characters, I wanted them to feel exotically old. The Navvie for instance, he’s a railroad worker – he’s a great character because he’s really heavy with the unions, and the industrial revolution. He’s one of my favourites because, ‘What the hell’s a Navvie?’ – well, he works on the railroads, would’ve been in the Crimean War, that kind of thing. So I really wanted to have that Victorian feeling, that feeling that it’s another time.
The Chaos Engine is unusual for a game of this type in that it only has one boss encounter, with the Chaos engine itself. What inspired the design of that imposing enemy?
I only had a few tiles left that we could use, so it was nowhere near what I wanted, but we’d run out! I just put together what I had left and took a few tiles out of the sewer background so I could use them for the end, but you look at it and apart from his head in the middle animating, there’s not a lot going on. We were scraping the barrel by that point! We just couldn’t get that kind of big boss encounter into the game – it would have been nice to, though.