Interviews// Conduit 2:Art Director Matt Corso

Matt Corso: As far as the potential for the franchise goes… that’s what’s great about Conduit. You can take this thing in so many different directions and really, we can keep reinventing the Conduit franchise and keep it fresh. We can take it into different eras, we can take it to different planets, we can take it all over the place. It really is going to depend on what we decide as a creative team.

Conduit 2 is definitely setting up the story to go in a particular direction, and I think if you play through to the end you’ll see what I mean. And we can go in that direction, or we can take it in an entirely different one.

There’s just so many places we can go right now, I think it’s going to be a matter of seeing how well the second one is received. That will help us decide where Conduit should go in the future. Honestly, I think all of us in the studio have many more Conduits in us that we can still create before we’ll ever get tired of this franchise.


SPOnG: You guys have updated the Conduit engine for this title, but I remember a few years ago seeing the original proof of concept video of what it could do on the Wii, and that was technically impressive. What was your focus in updating the engine for Conduit 2?

Matt Corso: On the visual side there were a lot of things that we could do. Actually, some things we learned from the first game were that some of the way we were handling our neural maps and our special materials weren’t right.

We had this new technology and it was fundamentally great, and for us at the time as long as the art direction was good, you’d have a great looking game. But I don’t think the technical splendour had been fully realised yet.

For Conduit 2, folks were coming to me in the studio and saying “Matt, we’ve figured out better ways to use neural maps, come check it out” and what I would see at their desks were aliens that had a lot more detail, the neural maps showed better.

If you play the game in an early level, you can go right up to a wall and the textures would keep their detail. You can go up to certain glass and you can see all of its bumpy qualities. And that’s really cool. It was something that was kind of there in the first game, but took the development of the second game to actually fully realise that.

But it does go into the gameplay side too because the gameplay and art really do go hand in hand. One has to drive the other to a certain extent, or at the very least they have to work with each other so that you can make the best possible quality game.

Something we learned is that we could do more with the structure of our levels. In the first game, levels were fairly linear because we weren’t able to draw rooms next to each other or on top of each other and stack them like we can now.

Now we can stack levels, we can have rooms be closer to each other, and as you’re moving through the scene we’re turning off unnecessary geometry - so you’re able to get more detail in the quality of the graphics in each room in the level. Also, streaming was something that was dramatically improved between Conduits 1 and 2.

In Conduit 1 we were able to stream to a point, but there were certain aspects of the streaming that didn’t enable us to drop out so we could have more room to load in fresh stuff. Well, this time we’ve improved that so we can drop almost everything and stream in lots of fresh stuff. So now the results are, you can have better level design, you can have better graphics, you can have better audio, you can have a number of significant improvements across the board, because of the engine advancements.

I think that stuff can continually be improved on. We’ve only scratched the surface of some of the realisations we’ve made about how best to use the technology. So we know how to do better streaming, better level design… but now if we get the chance to do say, a Conduit 3, we can do it even better so that we could do more.


SPOnG: Are you guys still dedicated to the Wii? Could Conduit 2 be the kind of game you see ported to the PlayStation 3 with the help of the Move controller?

Matt Corso: Our company has never been 100% dedicated to the Wii platform. We sure do love the Wii, but we’ve always made games for all systems, so if you’ve ever seen Grinder for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 there’s an example.

We’ve made games for lots of different platforms over the years. As far as Conduit in particular is concerned, that can definitely come over to another Nintendo system right now. I’m sure that’s something we’re seriously considering in our studio.


SPOnG: Nintendo 3DS, right?

Matt Corso: Sure, I mean the 3DS is definitely a strong possibility because it’s such an awesome new game system. And as far as bringing it over to other consoles goes… you know that’s always a possibility as well. That’s something we continually discuss in our offices.