GB: Am I correct in maybe remembering that you worked at Insomniac?
NF: That’s true.
GB: What did you do?
NF: I made the weapons in Resistance: Fall of Man.
GB: It wasn’t Ratchet and Clank, it wasn’t Super-Space Cartoony World, where of course the weapons are gonna be ridiculous.
NF: That was the funny part. It was super-serious stuff.
GB: The first level is about everyone dying but you. And then here’s a gun that shoots through walls.
NF: I worked on some Ratchet and Clank games on the backgrounds, and then I quickly shifted over to the PS3 because it wasn’t out yet. And we were doing a launch title, Resistance. So I worked really hard to prototype a bunch of cool-ass weapons internally, in the company. No one ever saw them except inside the company because I was trying to impress everybody.
It was a big deal for Sony, it was a huge deal for Insomniac. It had to look amazing. So I just visually wanted to make the guns for the game because I like crazy-ass guns, and I thought “Oh shit, if this is the company for it, this is it.” So the guy that was doing the guns for Ratchet and Clank, he was doing something else. He did a bunch of stuff and he was kinda done with it, so it was just open, and I was like “OK.” So I practiced cranking out all kinds of stuff and showing prototypes and then things kind of got going and they’re like “OK, that’s fine, you can do the guns. That’s cool.”
And I wasn’t gonna be the weapon designer. I was gonna be the weapon programmer. The designer just tells you what to do. So whatever. Also, I wanted to do both, the design and the program. And I didn’t do the art, the art is awesome. Some artists did that. But functionally, the gameplay design, I wanted to do that as well. So I went to the designers one day and I looked at them and just said, “Hey, what are the alien weapons gonna be like? What are you gonna do for the machine gun?”
And they were like “Uh, it’s probably gonna be like a plasma rifle or something.” I thought “Oh, that’s weird. What are you gonna do for the shotgun?” They said “Oh, like a tough, you know, tight kind of alien plasma shotgun.” So I was like, “Can I try some stuff.” So that’s when I came up with the Auger that shoots through walls. And it had the shield and all that stuff, and they liked it. And then I made the egg ball blob gun that shoots out giant blobby things that stick to people.
GB: Right, the Egg Ball Blob Gun.
NF: Yeah, and the Hedgehog grenade that shot up in the air and launched spikes everywhere. Everybody loved that. So that kind of sealed the deal and everybody was like, “Alright fine, you can just make crazy shit. Just go for it.”
They were so paranoid about screwing that up because it was like a tentpole game. They were like, “We cannot fuck this up,” and meanwhile, since I was not taking the flak, I could operate with complete insanity in the background there.
GB: I think that’s carried through to your current work. It’s just “let’s make it interesting.” The alien weapons were insane, but you could see logic behind them, like the Bullseye, where you can shoot a tag and then all of your following shots will go there.
NF: Yeah, yeah. It’s a good weapon.
GB: That was a weapon in [director Luc Besson’s film] The Fifth Element, but hey.
NF: Exactly, there’s no apologies there. I totally just copied from The Fifth Element.
The only thing I did to it that was extra other than the Fifth Element gun was that you could put a tag on the ground and send a swarm of bullets to hover over the tag, like this makeshift bomb. Then let go of the tag and the bullets just scatter and kill everything.
GB: I’m gonna do that right now.
NF: It was hard to execute but so cool-looking, so I left it in.
GB: So you’ve described your process as “you just reach down and grab something and build off of it” but what’s the I guess the … .
NF: Design?
GB: Yeah. I don’t wanna say philosophy.
NF: Sure. Gameplay comes first, so I build a prototype and then I work off of that, so I don’t usually start with anything visual. Then I just reach down in my brain and pull out those handkerchiefs tied together of insanity. Then I wrap them around the gameplay and I ship it.
GB: You know, you tie it off, and then you smear some slime on it for some reason.
NF: Dip it in some primordial goo and then bake it for a half hour in the oven and then…
GB: Get an incubator. Incubate it for a little while.
NF: Let it rest there, yeah.
GB: And then Corpse Piling comes out.
NF: Between Gunstacker and Corpse Piling, I’m really happy.