Narrative Strategy for Aeon Flux (with no time to spare)

Aeon Flux came out today, two weeks ahead of the film, and it's being pretty well reviewed so far. There are two reviews on gamerankings at this point; both give a 7.8

The IGN review was generally complimentary, but the reviewer interested me by choosing narrative as a point to pick on a bit. This is (probably) not undeserved, and I wanted to share a bit of insight, and do some retrospective pondering.

Coming out of Bloodrayne 2, we began working on Aeon Flux pre-production while Majesco was still inking the deal. We were a little divided between working to the film script versus the original Peter Chung animations - Not because of any internal strife, mind you, but because we weren't totally sure what we'd be allowed/encouraged to do once Mtv, Paramount, and Majesco started commenting on our work. We knew early on that we didn't have to follow the film's story arc, (a lesson learned from previous dealings with Hollywood) but we would be required to follow it's style. Vague; but enough to get started. There was, after all, no time to be lost.

We also knew that the game had to ship in the movie's release window. When that was, we did not know - we were told to expect any time after summer 2005. That gave us a development cycle of around ten months, which anyone in game development can tell you is not an ideal scenario.

Thus; the stage was set. Eight of us were directly involved in pre-production - Creative Director, Producer, Game Designer, and five of us level designers. Given the circumstances mentioned above, we came up with a bold plan of action.

As stated before, we knew that we weren't going to try and follow the movie script directly, and felt a duty to remain faithful to Chung's source material. We also knew that we would have little, if any, time to count on for re-writes, and that we were likely to cut one or two levels down the road. (again; lessons learned) For all of these reasons, we chose to design each level as a self-contained story, in the spirit of the original Chung shorts. The game was not to feature an overarching storyline whatsoever, except that the final mission would attempt to segue logically into the premise of the film. (we also planned to let the player choose in what order to play levels, though I'm not sure if this feature was cut or not)

We felt pretty proud of ourselves.

I'll make it clear at this point that I quit my post at TRI mid-cycle (when opportunity knocks, it is not always polite) and have not been involved in the project since april of 2005. I cannot speak for the team in regards to how well things turned out; a lot may have changed after my departure.

Our strategic decision came to mind after reading the IGN review. Did the reviewer just "not get it", or was our approach a mistake? My initial, gut reaction told me the latter. After some consideration, however; I realized that our approach was clever in it's own way, born out of the grim reality that comes with a ten month dev cycle and a team too ambitious to just re-release Bloodrayne 2 with a sci-fi facelift.

I'd be interested to read what more reviewers have to say about the narrative of the game, and to play the game myself! (I haven't played it in nearly six months, after all) I'm also curious to hear what others involved/interested in game narrative have to say about our approach. Was the concept a good one, even if the execution leaves something to be desired, or did we drop the ball and justify ourselves by hiding behind a (competley insane) schedule?

Vanity forbids me to post this without mentioning that Peter Chung saw an early build of our game around E3 last year and gave us his blessing. I'm very proud of that. I wonder if he feels the same way now?

Comments welcomed. =]