Ben Chandler, the dashing young gentleman also known as Ben 304, has been crafting point-and-click adventures and glorious (mostly) pixel-art graphics for quite some time now.
His work on Wadjet Eye Games' The Shivah: Kosher Edition and the last entry of the Blackwell saga, his graphics for the forthcoming Technobabylon and such freeware games as PISS have already secured Ben's position in the short and bloody history of indie adventure gaming and I simply had to know more.
You've been creating games and lovely pixel art for the better part of this last decade, right?
I started seriously trying to do game development in earnest around 2007, and have been doing more and more each year until finally being able to do it as my full-time job starting November of last year.
That's when you joined Wadjet Eye Games?
I did. I had been working for them in a freelance capacity for a number of years, and Dave and Janet asked me to be a full time member of the team!
And you are mainly handling the art of Wadjet's adventures or do you also dabble in game and puzzle design?
I mainly handle the art for most projects, however the project I'm currently working on I'm also involved in design and coding. It's nice to have some variety, although it's also nice to be able to really focus on graphics and try and push my skills further. The past 10 months have really given me an opportunity to go from making decent graphics to really step up and learn new skills, techniques and styles that let me create more immersive games.
That has been impressively true; so, I take it you find mainly focusing on graphics more, uhm, liberating?
In a way, yes. In the past I'd always do animations and scenery as I needed them, between designing and coding, which means everything got a little rushed. Now I can really focus on adding detail, and honing my skills. I started out doing graphics for games because I wanted to make point and click adventures, and those need graphics. As a result of this I've gotten really invested in illustration - I now keep a sketchbook, paint in acrylics, do regular speedpaint activities on twitter and read art technique and art history books. My interest in these things all stemmed from my interest in designing games.
Meaning that whether art or not (definitely art), games do lead to art... Think you'll be doing anymore solo freeware games in the near future?
At the moment my free time is more focused on getting better at illustration - the fact that I now work on games all day means that my hobby is my job, and I don't really get the urge to make smaller games currently. It's very likely that I'll join in on game jams and stuff in the future, because it's awesome to work in that environment, but I spent a good few years utterly devoted to making games in my free time, and it's nice to have a change for a bit.
So, in retrospective then, which one of your very own games is your favourite. Well, provided you have one -- and why?
Easily PISS, because I didn't rush it. All of the other projects feel like experimental, learning things. That's the one that I really tried to build into a rewarding game, with a fleshed out world, an interesting story and really polished graphics. It's a bit lacking in the puzzles compared to some of my other games, but that's the game that I really put my heart into. It also was really hard to finish, and left me quite worn out.
Do you have some sort of dream project you'd want to work on now that you are a part of Wadjet Eye Games?
Haha, well, this WAS the dream. When I started making adventures, really seriously making them, I thought "I'm going to get good enough at drawing that Dave Gilbert will hire me full time, and then I'll have the best job". Now that I've done that, well, the projects I'm working on really are the projects I want to work on. The game I'm doing now is one I've been planning for over a year, the one before that was a project I started as a fan of and eventually got to work on, and the one before that was the final Blackwell game - and the Blackwell series is the series that made me think "I need to be a part of this team". These really are my dream projects.
Why that's as uplifting a story as they get. And, frankly, how difficult was coming up with excellent pixel-art of the latest Blackwell game? I for one was thoroughly impressed.
Art, like any creative discipline, comes from two places - the skills you learn through practice and study, and your personal creativity. You can't rely entirely on techniques you've learned from books and videos and chatting to experienced artists, but it does help to invest time building the skills that will allow you to understand how to more effectively achieve the ideas in your head. Similarly, you can't just rely on your own creativity to produce interesting graphics, but technique without creativity and vision will result in a lifeless world. Spending time enriching those two fields is essential. As for the difficulty, well, I had enough experience when starting the project to know what I wanted to do. You can see a steady progression of ability in my graphics as you look at my older games, and so the difficult part was being willing to spend the years learning rather than the act of making the game itself.
That makes perfect sense; actually, it's good advice I reckon. Now, care to share any insights as to the way a quality, commercial adventure is crafted? Is Dave Gilbert indeed a sadistic boss and a strict writer designer who enjoys torturing animators with dance scenes?
Dave is hardly sadistic, he's actually a pleasure to work with, as are the rest of the Wadjet Eye crew I've been involved with. We have similar tastes in games, and that makes it easy to connect when you're collaborating and the two elements you are working on need to have a similar feel. I respected Dave's design work from my early days using AGS, and I think he really gets how to tell a story. On the other hand, when it comes to art he offers a lot of creative freedom. He knows what he likes, and isn't afraid to ask for changes when he feels they're needed, but for the most part I really get to interpret scenes in a very personal style, and that's a fantastic thing as an artist.
Blatant lies and propaganda, but I'll accept it. Must admit I had the feeling Dave is a brilliant person all around, but I digress. What I wanted to ask about are your thoughts on (indie, mostly) adventure gaming in general...
I think some of the richest, most rewarding adventure games have come from the indie scene. I don't know any other genres I could honestly say the same about. I find it very inspiring to see what all the other talented people in the scene are working on, and I think back over some of the cool adventures from smaller studios in the last year - such as The Inner World, The Journey Down Chapter 2 and the latest Kentucky Route Zero - and I think: that's a really exciting list of games for people to play. You take into account how people are trying to push the genre with things like Gone Home and it's hard to not be in love with the genre and eager to see what it'll offer us next.
Couldn't agree more. Also, I really have to ask: what's with the MS-DOS thing?
My love of DOS games is a two part deal. Half of it is pure nostalgia - I never had a console as a kid, so my early gaming days were all PC based, and I cut my teeth on stuff like Doom, Command & Conquer, Monkey Island, Sam & Max, etc. The other part is curiosity; the big commercial games of that era were built with much smaller teams, much less defined sets of genre rules and much more individual flavour than you often see in big titles today. You had genres being born every few years, and people tried all sorts of new things because the guidelines hadn't been established clearly yet, and so you have games with these really creative ideas rather than the same old mechanics with a different coat of paint. It's almost like finding old indie games, in a sense. There's a lot to be learned - both mistakes to avoid, and amazing ideas that've been forgotten.
Is there anything, anything at all, you'd like to add?
Games are young, exciting, and we've hardly tapped their potential. Make games, and make them your own.
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