BAF: Kevin Carthew

Kevin Carthew is the creative manager of Team 17 who started out as a games tester checking for bugs in the system. Team 17 is a independent Studio currently in their 24th year, based in Wakefield.

Their signature and most popular game WORMS started as a competition entry and has spawned over 15 games since its 1995 release. They are currently working on next generation consoles for their new games. Carthew stated "Animation improves interaction," explaining how this is what brings the game and characters to life. The worm is one of the most interactively complex characters in video game history,  with 65 weapons to interact with, they're effect by dynamic moving water and how they can be squished by debris. Even the landscape is fully interactable, laden with traps, environmental hazards, and fully destructible.

Carthew also spoke of games designer Chris Crawford, who described interaction as "a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think and speak." (animation being the speaking part). Carthew said that he think the best demonstration of this is in Worms: Armageddon as it contained a high quality and quantity of animations based of in game interactions (such as the reaction to a explosion). My favouraite example of this is in the game world menu's where the Worms react to your menu choices, e.g. When you go to audio, there is a worm dancing in a disco, and as you turn the sound and music down, he stops dancing and gets annoyed at the user, he then becomes happy and dancing again if you turn it up.

Finally he made a 5 point list of what to do when making a game:
1. Make it Snappy.
Input driven interaction, not animation driven, as there are levels of interaction, for example, Heavy Rain and Dragons lair are based on animations that depend on what button the user presses, and its more user friendly when in, for example, in Shadow of the Colossus players actually have to jump onto a monster, climb it and kill it with animations being small and quick in between stages.. This makes the player actually feel like they have done something worthy.
2. Make it Rewarding.
Quality of visual feedback can be used to modify the players behavior, such as a firework display, or a rainbow shooting across screen, or a particle system shoots coins in the air, to make the player feel like they've achieved something worth while.
3. Make it Playful.
Keep animation fresh so it doesn't get repetitive. This can be done using multiple animations for frequent events, or using procedural animation such as Limbo or Angry Birds, to make deaths and events unique every time they happen. The most popular shared videos are of procedural animated games becuase they often haven't been seen before and can be amusing.
4. Make it Fit.
Think about how the animation fits within the context of the introduction, for example the Menu system in Worms Revaluation, with the Audio reacting worm.
5. Make it count
All the effort and time that will go into a game, you want to ensure it ticks all the right boxes and is successful, so design interactions and use quality rather than quantity, to produce living, breathing, real characters and world.