Left 4 Dead

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Having amused an older generation of gamers with his writing on seminal games humour site Old Man Murray, Chet Faliszek has moved onto games development. He's already changed Alyx's personality and brought japes to Team Fortress 2. Now he's making some bolder moves with Left 4 Dead. We spoke to him just days before the project wrapped up.

So how long has Left 4 Dead taken?

Faliszek: Oh, about three years. Turtle Rock had made Condition Zero and they wanted to start a new IP. They pitched a couple of things to us - one of those was Left 4 Dead. We thought, like everyone else who plays it for the first time, "Oh, wow". Me and Erik [Wolpaw] were at lunch with Gabe the next day and just babbled about it. Next morning we got an email from Gabe saying to Michael Booth [lead at Turtle Rock at the time] "These guys can be the writers on the game." and that was it.

Was that all it took to pitch the game?

Faliszek: They'd shown some stuff to us before this. And the idea for this one stuck - since we already had a good relationship, it wasn't hard to get behind them.

When did you realise this was going to be the next Valve game?

Faliszek: We realised that last winter. We had people coming off other projects and they started to move onto looking at aspects of Left 4 Dead. I think the team started off at about nine people and grew from there. Turtle Rock had a really good sense of how we like to do things and they'd taken it pretty far in that direction by the time we started to work on it properly. When you've got nine guys, what you can do is limited compared to what you can do if you have another 50 people.

When we unleashed all of Valve on the project there's so much you can do. You could have said two years ago "this is shippable, it works" but there's so much later shaping of the game and detail and polish that has to go in.

The changes from then to now are very evident. Do those all get mapped out at the start, or is it evolving over time?

Faliszek: Well this stuff gets talked about constantly, yet it never happens right away. The artists will be busy elsewhere or there just aren't enough cycles to do it yet. So you plan, but it's a long time before you see it in a build. Like the first time you see the load-screen movie posters - that was a moment when we realised what we'd planned was totally cool.

What was with the changes in the characters part of the way through the project?

Faliszek: Well, partly it came about because we completely changed the facial animation. We moved it to the model we'd developed for TF2, where we'd done new faces that are more expressive - the animation is a little different there.

We also addressed visibility issues, and worked hard to distinguish the characters from Infected. So it was a combination of technical and artistic changes.

How did the character creation process work for TF2?

Faliszek: When we do characters we tend to come up with a bunch of backstories for the characters among the writers and then we'll engage in this collaborative process with the artists. We end up with a load of backup stuff and we don't tend to get married to ideas.

Erik was saying that you guys were pretty pleased with the dialogue and contextual chatter for those characters. How did that develop?

Faliszek: Once we'd done the initial character creation pass we knew who these characters were and what they were likely to say. As we played and watched playtesters go through particular situations, we took note of what we said, or what people said and decided that we should make the characters say that. They also help with navigation, or commenting on things in the world in a helpful way. Little bits of character and backstory emerge too.

Do the solo-games deliver more dialogue?

Faliszek: We made a conscious decision to try and make both experiences very similar, because you shouldn't feel like you're missing out by playing solo. Nevertheless they're a little more talkative in solo because they respond to you slightly more, like if you stare at them they'll acknowledge you. They'll help you out a bit, but it's not significantly different to the amount they'll vocalise in multiplayer.

Let's talk about the role of the boss Infected...

Faliszek: Well, that's changed greatly, especially since we split the game in two. Originally, the whole game was basically Versus mode, with people playing as boss infected. Originally we wanted the director to control everything, which meant that if you were a good infected player your reward was more time spent not playing, which wasn't a good reward. So with Versus split off we've been able to tweak things substantially.

I don't know if you noticed but the maps are slightly different for the Versus mode. The ammo room on the finale of No Mercy, for example, has more access, so it's harder to defend. In co-op mode these are just easier or harder parts of the map, but in Versus it becomes exploitable, so that's less fun and we have to deal with that. Now [with pure AI co-op campaign] we're also faced with how to do difficulty overall - how would you do it in TF2? It's down to who your opponents are. In Versus there are skills you learn and there are a lot more combinations of talents than you might think.

You end up having to be a much better survivor team, because player Infected get to be so inventive. Who you attack and how you attack them is a big deal. We put a lot of work into that.

Learning to play the Infected is a bit tricky, isn't it?

Faliszek: Sure, everyone understands getting a gun and fighting monsters, but when was the last time you played a game with a 50-foot prehensile tongue that you use to choke people?

All games will have them now, like the gravity gun.

Faliszek: Exactly! Tongues and vomit. You learn to use that tongue, you figure out to grab the last guy, or to drag people into more trouble...

The boomer/smoker combination, right?

Faliszek: We love that.

Let's talk about Valve a bit. You've always said that Valve is "bad with titles" like no one seems to have a rigid role or job-title and folks at Valve talk about how there are "no managers"? How can that possibly work?

Faliszek: That's a credit to Gabe, that he created this environment. It's the case that no-one is your manager but everyone's your manager. You're beholden to everyone at the company and you'll get anyone and everyone coming up to give feedback. Equally you have to get people to buy into your ideas.

You learn how to make your pitch and to talk about your idea. The more people that you can get on board, the easier it is to get things done. At first brush I'd have thought that was just going to result in a mess with nothing getting done, but hey, we made Portal.

Yeah, you tend to get people saying that anything designed by committee is going to turn out as a median grey junk and that you need the radical auteurs out there to push through the really great ideas without them getting moderated to death...

Faliszek: At first glance I'd have thought that, but people are adept at seeing and accepting a good idea. Problems arise when you have a bunch of egos, when people are precious about their ideas, but here there's a culture that the best idea should win. Odd ideas can come forward and win, because people aren't precious about their ideas. It's like the characters thing in L4D and TF2 - we come up with a load of backstories, so the concept stays malleable.

Valve's profile has changed radically in the time since Half-Life 2, hasn't it? Probably because of Steam...

Faliszek: I think there's been a polarised view where people have started to identify companies as PC companies or console companies and Valve has very obviously laid a big stake in saying that there's still value in the PC as a platform.

I think that people unfairly paint other companies as console for not doing that. But the truth is that gamers, like the gamers here at Valve, play on all kinds of different platforms. It's just that our heart is in the PC as a gaming experience, a platform, and people understand that. It's the platform that requires the most user-input and that helps us enormously. Additionally, there's just a critical mass of gamers here, even the "suits" are people who play games. That helps us.

Steam was integrated with your own development tools wasn't it? Is that why it's such an effective platform?

Faliszek: Originally we wanted to be able to update Counter-Strike across multiple machines at any one time, which is where Steam comes from. We all play at work and at home, so we need to be able to keep everything in one place. So that's Steamcloud.

We want to have our work profiles and save games at home, so yeah, it definitely helped that we were making the same games we wanted to deliver on Steam. We're consuming our own product and that's going to keep pushing us in useful directions.

Jim Rossignol