Interview with God of War: Betrayal\'s Leading Man

: I would like to first thank you for allowing us to interview you. To start it off, I'm sure our readers would like to know who you are and what you do?

Phil: I’m the Producer, Designer, and Lead Level Designer on GoW: Betrayal. I’ve been working with games since landing a high school job selling them at Software Etc. I eventually got a job as a tester at EA.com, then moved on to Namco for a few years and was promoted to Assistant Producer. I spent a lot of time working with handheld titles and some console work, then got the opportunity to work on casual/mobile games for SOE-LA. I knew nothing about that market, so I jumped at the chance to learn what the buzz was all about and moved to Los Angeles.

: God of War as a franchise has become wildly popular and shows no signs of stopping. What are some of games you guys love to play and draw inspiration from?

Phil: I love and draw inspiration from all types of games! Some of my addictions growing up with a 2600 were Pitfall, Pitfall 2, Dark Chambers, Pole Position, and Solaris. We also had the famously monochrome Mac 512. Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle were probably the holy grail to me as a child. I also played a ton of Double Dragon and Battletoads on the NES. So I guess those childhood memories and lessons have directly inspired me when I approached the task of adapting the GoW gameplay to a 2D side scroller. Currently, I’m playing the heck out of Ninja Gaiden Sigma, GRAW 2, Puzzle Quest, and Civilization IV.



: How long was the development process for God of War: Betrayal?

Phil: I wrote the initial design document between September and October 2005 when I first got hired on, then it sat and stewed for a year before revisiting it in August 2006, the same month development started. The versions for high-end handsets were completed 9 months later in April. We wrapped up the final versions for low-end handset over the next 2 months, completing the 1st 6 handsets in June 2007. After that, the porting team took the game to over 200 handsets in a matter of weeks.

: What challenges did you face when developing Betrayal? What were some of the challenges that you and your team faced in converting the game play of a fast paced 3D platform action game into a side scrolling 2D game on a cell phone?

Phil: The challenge wasn’t so much in capturing the feel of the combat as it was in capturing the feel of God of War’s visual look and gameplay design. You have very limited processing power and memory on most handsets, which makes devising puzzles, traps, environment interaction, and enemy behavior very difficult. With such extreme hardware limitations, there is a fine balance between character art, frames of animation, environment, interactive objects and the cost of the game code for each. If you get too ambitious with a level’s design, filling it with lots of traps, locked doors, animated torches, waterfalls, enemies, etc., you may find yourself faced with a decision to reduce some of the core combat or to revise the level. It was tough to scale back on some of the initial plans for the levels and find ways to keep them engaging over the entire game.



: What is one thing that the team wanted to do with Betrayal but didn't have enough time for, or could not implement?

Phil: I had plans for a few different types of environmental puzzles that included breaking and falling crates, but we were too limited on code size and processor power. We also try to provide the same exact gameplay experience across as many handsets as possible, so we have to keep certain design decisions in check. Keeping this in mind, if you play the super low end 64k version of GoW: Betrayal, and you then play the highest end version (over 300k), the core combat mechanic will be almost identical. This is much tougher to pull off than it sounds! In hindsight, the only thing I would have changed with the final product would be to include Poseidon’s Rage, or a similar attack, in place of Medusa’s Gaze, but that’s really a matter of personal opinion.

: What would you say is your favorite feature of God of War: Betrayal?

Phil: Rip a Minotaur’s arms off, let him bleed for a bit from his stumps, then throw him to the ground, rip his head off, then rip his head in half. Brutal.

Gameplasma would like to thank Phil Cohen and Brad Spahr for taking time out of their busy day to answer our questions!