Interviews

Benoit Hozjan is the co-founder and Managing Director of Kheops
Studio, a French game production company comprised of veterans of
the gaming and adventure industry.

Their critically acclaimed games include, The
Secrets of Da Vinci,
Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern, Return
to Mysterious Island, and
the recently released Safecracker:
The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure.

Even though JA inadvertently
destroyed the Kheops booth in the French Pavilion at this year’s
E3, Benoit still graciously agreed to this interview.

Like all of your
previous games, Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure is receiving
rave reviews. What do we have to look
forward to next from Kheops?

We are finishing a new
adventure title based on the novel “Treasure
Island” written by Robert Louis Stevenson and we have also
recently started working on another game. Both will be with our classical
360° gameplay and we also have a prototype of a 3rd person game.

Does
your new title – Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle
Adventure – bear any relationship to the original Safecracker developed by Daydream Software back in 1997?

Even if there is no relationship,
I beleive that we have maintained the same spirit with the new
version of Safecracker. DreamCatcher
had contacted us with a proposal based on the same kind of game because
of the success they had with first one. This was challenging to us
– to work on a fully puzzle-oriented game compared to our other story-based
productions we’ve done. We quickly thought having to find a
will and testament in the game would be compelling as the central
goal of the game and DreamCatcher agreed.

Would
you be kind enough to provide us with a history of Kheops – how
was the company formed, how many people does it employ and what
are some of the games they worked on previously?

All of us were colleagues
at Cryo Interactive and later at DreamCatcher Europe. Some of us
were from the technical department and some from
the production staff. So we are credited for many adventure games
from both of these companies. Once the production studio was closed
in summer 2003 it opened up an opportunity to create a new company!
We prefer to maintain a small, permanent staff, so less than 10 people
work at Kheops Studio. With this ‘familial’ size, everybody
is involved in the production and this is far better for creativity
and for the final quality of the game. All of us are continuously
proposing new ideas to improve the game and we also all participate
in the testing/balancing.

What
is the creative process like at Kheops? Can you take us through
a game’s development from conception to finish?

As we have limited budgets
for our games, we take certain parameters into account very early
in development to be sure that we maintain
the game’s integrity in the final product. One would certainly
be surprised to see this step first, but it means less frustration
if these parameters are considered ahead of time! The budget gives
us the number of months we have to finish the title and the scope
of the game. This determines a schedule that will allow us to deliver
the game on time! After that, the ‘creative’ process
may start : “Offer the best we can with what we have!”

The game designer begins
to work on a plot and we have brainstorming meetings to speed up
the process and help him to create challenges/puzzles.
The art director helps the game designer during the definition, with
the look of the environments and to check if the graphics will be
coherent with the budget. If needed, we may decide to concentrate
on interactions to optimize the budget without significant impact
on the game experience. The whole game is prototyped very early so
it’s possible to play without the final graphics. Within 8-9
months after beginning the project we have the gold master!

How do you decide
what title to work on next, do you begin development in-house and
then look for a publisher, or do you wait
for a publisher such as DreamCatcher to approach you and request
a specific type of game?

Both are possible, but
I believe that it is safer if both parties start to work together
from the beginning. It is less frustrating
to know what the publisher is looking for instead of proposing
something and waiting for comment/feedback. If a developer wants
to propose
something radically new, he has to work on a prototype to illustrate
the concept. For us, our budget is too small to spend months
on different proposals until a publisher accepts one! Many studios
have closed
down for this reason!

Besides Jules
Verne are they any other classic authors you would like to adapt
to game form?

Robert L. Stevenson is
another example. In our remake of “Treasure
Island” we have included a tribute to Edgar Alan Poe. There
are many treasures in literature for our future games!

When you are
working on a new game, do you think you are developing for French
sensibilities or American sensibilities? Or
is there no difference between the expectations of gamers from different
countries?

We can see some differences
that are also visible in the reviews. Generally speaking, North
American adventure players don’t
have a negative opinion of 360° panoramic games. They want a
good game experience whatever the type of view proposed. German players
tend to prefer 3rd person view and English (UK) players prefer console
games.
We try to find writers or characters who are well known in every
territory to be sure that the game will be easy to sell and we develop
our games mainly for adventure players.
We have a permanent survey on our website. Thanks to the players
who have taken the time to answer, we can now better identify the
expectations of gamers.

Do
you think that the French government’s
subsidizing of the game industry provides an advantage over your
North American
counterparts?

We are waiting for approval
from the European Union to obtain something similar to what
the Canadian government has offered for years to
help decrease production costs. It’s impossible to have
direct government help without this approval. If we obtain this
tax reduction,
it will help us to be more attractive financially than other
territories, but it certainly will not be enough to compare to
the government
subsidy available in Canada. For the moment we must consider
that we have a drawback of 30% compared to US developers and
even more
of a drawback to Canadian developers due to their real cost.
Some parameters are not independent of our industry. Take a look
at the
currency ratio between the Dollar and Euro: 1.2 to 0.8 in 5 years!

For the moment it is possible to have some help from local organizations
and from the region who want to help promote their companies abroad.
Thanks to the Capital Games association in Paris and the Lyon Game
in Lyon for their efforts.

Kheops
has developed four games in the past two years. Are you afraid
of company overexposure
or employee
burnout?

Actually, this month
this is our 3rd birthday and we are finishing the 8th game!
We have no choice, with our medium-size productions, profits
are not high enough to stay unproductive for long. Therefore
we have
had to optimize our production process to allow for help from
external talents. Even with our small structure we have 2
or 3 games under
development at the same time. All of our games are coded by
the same technical team. They are also responsible for the graphical
production, but we have experimented with 4 different game designer
sources. They all follow the same guidelines to allow for a better
development process with as minimal an impact on their creativity
as possible.

Now that the
E3 as we knew it no longer exists, what can companies like Kheops
do to make themselves known to North American
publishers and media?

We now have a solid
reputation to help us easily obtain meetings with publishers
and E3 was not
the only place to meet a publisher.
We also have the GDC (San Francisco/San José), the Game
Convention in Leipzig (Germany) and the Game Connection Show
organized in Lyon
(France) as well as many different international shows. By the
way, please warn me in advance of our future meetings at a show.
I will
ask the local organizers for a more robust booth and ask our
neighbors to take a break during our meeting! 😉

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to talk more about our studio
and for your support on your website.