Interviews// Singularity Producer: Kekoa Lee-Creel

SPOnG: Is there a kind of logic to what gets arranged and re-arranged or is it very much restricted to what the developer’s code allows you to do?

Kekoa Lee-Creel: The technological limitations are pretty obvious with a concept for a game like this, so you can’t really make everything in a completely ‘free’ nature – but there is a fiction to the game that helps you understand what you can and can’t do in regards to your abilities. The Singularity itself is an explosion that occurs on a distant island in 1950. This explosion creates a time rift between 1950 and 2010 (the current setting) and messes with Element 99, which has been heavily experimented on by Russian forces. So, whatever got sprinkled with the E99 during the course of the explosion are things that can be manipulated in the game with your TMD.


SPOnG: It’s a very ambitious premise. Have you run into any problems during development so far?

Kekoa Lee-Creel: It’s actually been a constant battle in terms of the development of hardware and the engine technology to do as much as we possibly can within the boundaries that we have. We often find ourselves putting in so much that we have to take stuff out again because we’ve exceeded the limitations of the hardware.

Raven has a top notch team in terms of trying to create an experience for the player, so we’re just throwing everything we have in there and when we look back we think “Oh, we can’t fit that in” so we have to come up with a reason why certain things don’t work in the game.

We really do want the player’s experience to be so over the top… there were points where everything was TMD-based and it all got a bit chaotic with the hardware, so we have to kind of pull ourselves back and make it the best we can within those technological limits.


SPOnG: Using the abilities that you get with the TMD, does that open up possibilities for alternate paths throughout the levels? How have you incorporated an interesting level mechanic with the unique gameplay style you have?

Kekoa Lee-Creel: We did consider multiple paths in the levels… One of the biggest things was that we were really up against technological limitations, so in the vein of a typical first-person shooter we’re staying pretty linear and a lot of our multiple path innovation is really in the story. As you go through the storyline you find loads of twists and turns that really grab you emotionally and dramatically.

In terms of level design it was really tough because what we’re actually facing here is this 2010 and 1950s version of the same space. With this sort of experience it’s very challenging to create loads of alternative routes to go down, where you’re constantly flipping in between times and things dramatically change between each period.


SPOnG: That must have been hard to pull off, trying to figure out whatever you do in the present affecting the past and vice-versa… How did you overcome the obstacles that would arise from things like time paradoxes?

Kekoa Lee-Creel: There was actually a long process getting to that stuff, as everything in the game had to be looked at in terms of how it would function, whether it would have been experimented on in a particular time-space, who you would expect to meet in each era… It was actually quite difficult.