Mark Healey on Rag Doll Etc.

Gamasutra has an interview up with Mark Healey, an artist at Lionhead who also independently developed Rag Doll Kung Fu, recently released over Valve's Steam content delivery service. The interview kind of wanders around a bit, and though it was prompted by Rag Doll Kung Fu it's more interesting for the other broad range of topics it briefly touches on. Healey reflects upon his attitude towards game development in general, preferring the small team mentality (which makes sense considering Rag Doll was done basically on his own) and noting how important it is for teams to develop games because of a passion for it rather than simply as a job creating a product.

GS: What's it like working under Peter Molyneux? Is he hard to work for? MH: I've got an amount of sympathy [for him], I've worked for him for a while. I never really thought of myself as working for him, more with him, though he did pay my salary. He isn't like someone with a single idea of the game who goes around enforcing it, it's more like he gives in and let's people have their input. That's really Peter's great skill, when he started Lionhead it was just a small number of people, it was like a soup with all these ingredients and he would just sort of stir it. I've really learned a lot from Peter.

Healey has a lot of experience working with Molyneux; his professional relationship with the designer goes all the way back to his work on Magic Carpet at Bullfrog. At this point Healey is one of a very small team, only three people or so, working on developing a project Molyneux first presented at this year's Game Developer's Conference entitled The Room. It's an odd game dealing with odd manipulations of proportions, almost a game version of an Escher drawing--at least, that's what it seemed like when I saw it at GDC. At this point, Healey says, "it could become one of ten different games really."