AmDDRed

HOMEWORLD CATACLYSM: INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW LEIGH

These answers are a part of large questionnaire about Homeworld Cataclysm cutscenes, but the answers below were so good to be made into a separate article. Too bad, I couldn't reach other people from HWC dev team, but it would be good to hear more about the game's development stories. If you have contacts - link me :) Or if you have another interesting questions - ping me to try to ping this mighty guy. I really grateful to him for his time and answers.

The Questions

1.Tell us a bit about yourself

My name is Matthew Leigh and I’ve been in the game industry since 1996.

2. How do you remember the development of HWC? How did you become involved in the project? What was the project like from a management perspective? Was the development rushed? Did the concept of the project change along the way? Were there any other versions of how the final result could have looked?

I was brought on at Barking Dog Studios in November 1998 as employee number 1. My role was cinematics director for this game when I started, but did multiple different art and design roles throughout my time at the company. Homeworld: Cataclysm had been in development for about 3 months or so when I joined on.

3. Maybe there's an original script saved somewhere?

I do not have any original screenplay, but I still have the storyboards that I illustrated for every 3d cinematic based on an early version of the script. I believe some of the material drew for that ended up being fairly accurately animated into the final game. Though I found it was simply easier to animate in Lightwave and set up the photography as I went.

Some history: - We shared an office with Relic for about 6 months. They were under the gun to get the original game out and some of the programmers at Barking Dog were directly helping them on the main game for a short while. Once we moved out of the Relic office space and into our own we never really talked with them or got any kind of art direction guidance from them.

They were so busy working on the original game and trying to meet whatever deadlines they had, that at one point our development on Cataclysm outpaced them and we were too close to shipping our game before theirs was done. That created a time when we moved resources to helping make a DLC for the original game, however our engine and technology was now somewhat divergent to theirs, that after a month or so of exploration that ended and we all went back to developing Cataclysm.

Martin was only brought on as the writer of the project after the first year or so of development. He, Chris Stewart, and producer/project director Michael Gyori pushed hard to beat the game into the final form.

The original story was quite different from what we ended up with. I believe that the first story involved a once in a million year meteor that had to be somehow taken over and then used to smash another object…whatever it was, it wasn’t very good and was extremely complicated.

I remember being given the story outline and then asked to write a screenplay for the in game movies. Some of those scenes still exist almost exactly as I wrote them. The discovery of the Siege Cannon was one, and then later the discovery of the Pirate base as another.

All of the art for the game was modelled in Lightwave and textured in Photoshop. I remember that whenever any art was added to the game for the ships a particular file named textures. It had to be checked out, adjusted and checked back in again. No one could add their work to the game in that capacity unless they updated that one file, and it was somewhat complicated to do so.

All art in games of this era took a thousand times longer to make than it would now. I, and most game artists, could probably model the entire Homeworld fleet in a weekend and then texture them all at a far higher quality level seen in the game over a few more weeks using tools as modern as those found around 2009. Back then the labour was immense and time consuming. It didn’t help that we were using Lightwave as the modeller as 3DS Max was superior in essentially every way. I believe Lightwave was chosen due to its use in film as opposed to its use in games.

I did appreciate the animation and sequencing portion of Lightwave as it was where all of the ship animation for the cinematics was done. What I saw in the lightwave viewport was a good approximation for what was seen in the game. It was just a matter of animating the ships and the camera to capture the action. The difficulty was that all explosions, laser fire, visual effects, etc. had to be triggered in script outside of the editor so there was a lot of secondary labour done to make even the most basic of actions and reactions occur.

My visual design contributions included The Nomad Moon, the Pirate Outpost, and the Naggarok. I also did an unused design for the Bentusi fighter, and a probe that was cut from the original opening of the game. I tried to mimic the style of Rob Cunningham by leaning into the lower polygon shape language when developing these ships. I still have the original sketchbooks from the time.

I was personally a little disappointed by the look of the game. I feel it is too different from the original game in too many ways. Your fleet has too many organic or curved shapes that don’t hold up in low polygon modelling. The UI is much too illustrative as opposed to graphic. Also the color palette across the title leans more rust red. Where Relic was trying to channel Psygnosis and the Wipeout games, we were trying to channel pen and paper RPG or the aesthetic of Heavy Metal magazine.

A lot of that was not having a good line of communication with Relic and their primary focus being shipping the core product. It was also the turn of the century and less care and attention was given to building universes or having cohesive art direction.

However I feel our game is more tactile and strategic with better unit balancing, especially in Multiplayer. Where Homeworld felt like Total Annihilation, Cataclysm felt more like Starcraft.

It was a lot of fun making the game and working with the team for not only Cataclysm but the projects we took on later. We essentially existed as a studio from 1998 to 2003? When we were purchased by Take 2 and made into Rockstar Vancouver. I’d actually like to go back to the Homeworld universe and work in it again if ever the opportunity presented itself.

Read More Of Homeworld

• Homeworld: Timeline
• Homeworld: Cartography
• Homeworld: The Stranger Things
• Homeworld: The Stranger Things II
• Homeworld: XenoLanguage
• Homeworld: XenoLanguage II
• Homeworld: XenoLanguage III
• Homeworld: Population - BHL
• Homeworld: Population - AHL
• Homeworld: Hyperspace Technologies
• Homeworld: Endless
• Homeworld: Bentusi
• Homeworld: Kadeshi
• Homeworld: The Beast
• Homeworld: Kiithid
• Homeworld: Kiith S'jet
• Homeworld: Kiith LiirHra
• Homeworld: Hiigarans
• Homeworld: The Sajuuk-Khars
• Homeworld: Swords of Kharak
• Homeworld: Karan Sjet Ain't Getting Younger
• Homeworld: Taiidani Fleet - The Key to a Victory
• Homeworld: Baserunners
• Homeworld Vast Reaches: Opinion
• Homeworld 3: Opinion
• Homeworld Cataclysm: Interview with Matthew Leigh
• The Pitch. Homeworld 2: Taiidani Mod
• The Pitch. Homeworld 2: Emergence Mod
• The Pitch. Homeworld 2: The Beast Mod
• The Pitch. Homeworld: Kharak Total War
• Gamedesign: Homeworld Series As An Example of RTS Unit Systems
• Games: 3DS RTS