Interviews

Benoit Hozjan is the co-founder and Managing Director of Kheops Studio, a French game production company comprised of veterans of the gaming and adventure industry.

Their critically acclaimed games include, The Secrets of Da Vinci, Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern, Return to Mysterious Island, and the recently released Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure.

Even though JA inadvertently destroyed the Kheops booth in the French Pavilion at this year’s E3, Benoit still graciously agreed to this interview.

Like all of your previous games, Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure is receiving rave reviews. What do we have to look forward to next from Kheops?

We are finishing a new adventure title based on the novel “Treasure Island” written by Robert Louis Stevenson and we have also recently started working on another game. Both will be with our classical 360° gameplay and we also have a prototype of a 3rd person game.

Does your new title – Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure – bear any relationship to the original Safecracker developed by Daydream Software back in 1997?

Even if there is no relationship, I beleive that we have maintained the same spirit with the new version of Safecracker. DreamCatcher had contacted us with a proposal based on the same kind of game because of the success they had with first one. This was challenging to us - to work on a fully puzzle-oriented game compared to our other story-based productions we’ve done. We quickly thought having to find a will and testament in the game would be compelling as the central goal of the game and DreamCatcher agreed.

Would you be kind enough to provide us with a history of Kheops – how was the company formed, how many people does it employ and what are some of the games they worked on previously?

All of us were colleagues at Cryo Interactive and later at DreamCatcher Europe. Some of us were from the technical department and some from the production staff. So we are credited for many adventure games from both of these companies. Once the production studio was closed in summer 2003 it opened up an opportunity to create a new company! We prefer to maintain a small, permanent staff, so less than 10 people work at Kheops Studio. With this ‘familial’ size, everybody is involved in the production and this is far better for creativity and for the final quality of the game. All of us are continuously proposing new ideas to improve the game and we also all participate in the testing/balancing.

What is the creative process like at Kheops? Can you take us through a game’s development from conception to finish?

As we have limited budgets for our games, we take certain parameters into account very early in development to be sure that we maintain the game’s integrity in the final product. One would certainly be surprised to see this step first, but it means less frustration if these parameters are considered ahead of time! The budget gives us the number of months we have to finish the title and the scope of the game. This determines a schedule that will allow us to deliver the game on time! After that, the ‘creative’ process may start : “Offer the best we can with what we have!”

The game designer begins to work on a plot and we have brainstorming meetings to speed up the process and help him to create challenges/puzzles. The art director helps the game designer during the definition, with the look of the environments and to check if the graphics will be coherent with the budget. If needed, we may decide to concentrate on interactions to optimize the budget without significant impact on the game experience. The whole game is prototyped very early so it’s possible to play without the final graphics. Within 8-9 months after beginning the project we have the gold master!

How do you decide what title to work on next, do you begin development in-house and then look for a publisher, or do you wait for a publisher such as DreamCatcher to approach you and request a specific type of game?

Both are possible, but I believe that it is safer if both parties start to work together from the beginning. It is less frustrating to know what the publisher is looking for instead of proposing something and waiting for comment/feedback. If a developer wants to propose something radically new, he has to work on a prototype to illustrate the concept. For us, our budget is too small to spend months on different proposals until a publisher accepts one! Many studios have closed down for this reason!

Besides Jules Verne are they any other classic authors you would like to adapt to game form?

Robert L. Stevenson is another example. In our remake of “Treasure Island” we have included a tribute to Edgar Alan Poe. There are many treasures in literature for our future games!

When you are working on a new game, do you think you are developing for French sensibilities or American sensibilities? Or is there no difference between the expectations of gamers from different countries?

We can see some differences that are also visible in the reviews. Generally speaking, North American adventure players don’t have a negative opinion of 360° panoramic games. They want a good game experience whatever the type of view proposed. German players tend to prefer 3rd person view and English (UK) players prefer console games. We try to find writers or characters who are well known in every territory to be sure that the game will be easy to sell and we develop our games mainly for adventure players. We have a permanent survey on our website. Thanks to the players who have taken the time to answer, we can now better identify the expectations of gamers.

Do you think that the French government’s subsidizing of the game industry provides an advantage over your North American counterparts?

We are waiting for approval from the European Union to obtain something similar to what the Canadian government has offered for years to help decrease production costs. It’s impossible to have direct government help without this approval. If we obtain this tax reduction, it will help us to be more attractive financially than other territories, but it certainly will not be enough to compare to the government subsidy available in Canada. For the moment we must consider that we have a drawback of 30% compared to US developers and even more of a drawback to Canadian developers due to their real cost. Some parameters are not independent of our industry. Take a look at the currency ratio between the Dollar and Euro: 1.2 to 0.8 in 5 years!

For the moment it is possible to have some help from local organizations and from the region who want to help promote their companies abroad. Thanks to the Capital Games association in Paris and the Lyon Game in Lyon for their efforts.

Kheops has developed four games in the past two years. Are you afraid of company overexposure or employee burnout?

Actually, this month this is our 3rd birthday and we are finishing the 8th game! We have no choice, with our medium-size productions, profits are not high enough to stay unproductive for long. Therefore we have had to optimize our production process to allow for help from external talents. Even with our small structure we have 2 or 3 games under development at the same time. All of our games are coded by the same technical team. They are also responsible for the graphical production, but we have experimented with 4 different game designer sources. They all follow the same guidelines to allow for a better development process with as minimal an impact on their creativity as possible.

Now that the E3 as we knew it no longer exists, what can companies like Kheops do to make themselves known to North American publishers and media?

We now have a solid reputation to help us easily obtain meetings with publishers and E3 was not the only place to meet a publisher. We also have the GDC (San Francisco/San José), the Game Convention in Leipzig (Germany) and the Game Connection Show organized in Lyon (France) as well as many different international shows. By the way, please warn me in advance of our future meetings at a show. I will ask the local organizers for a more robust booth and ask our neighbors to take a break during our meeting! ;-)

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to talk more about our studio and for your support on your website.