Aaron Kambeitz Interview
An interview with Aaron Kambeitz, lead artist on the Homeworld team, conducted in December 1999.
1. Ok, for those who don’t know. Who is Aaron Kambitz, and what does he do?
Aaron Kambeitz is lead artist on the former Homeworld Team at Relic. The current team name is, of course, a closely guarded secret. Together Rob (art director) and I designed the ships in the game - he designed the Kushan ships, and I did the Taiidan ships. Rob did the pirate ships while I led modeling and texturing production. I also did all the ‘animatic’ style between-mission cutscenes, and all the effects in the game.
2. What other jobs have employed your wonderfully artistic talents, and along those lines, what was the weirdest/worst job you’ve ever had?
Before getting into videogames, I did a few stints at interactive CD-ROM companies, back in the heydey of the fizzled multi-media revolution. I’ve been lucky to work with some really great people. At Munro Multimedia, I worked under Bill Maylone, who is most well known for his film “64 million years ago”,which he made at the NFB back in the seventies(?). If you ever saw a dinosaur movie in school, this was it. Up until “Jurassic Park”, was the ultimate dinosaur film ever. Bill was a great art director to work under. My mentor in games was Ian Verchere. He hired me at Radical Entertainment (just down the street from us)and everything I know about games I learned from Ian. While at Radical I met a programmer named Alex Garden. Alex is the one who has put my artistic skills, such as they are, to the fullest use. And that’s a big understatement.
As for bad jobs, it’s pretty hard to beat dishwashing in a restaurant. I know it’s totally common as far as bad jobs go, but that doesn’t make it any less bad. I had been waiting tables at the restaurants at at the local beach for a couple of summers when I read ‘Das Kapital’ and ‘The Communist Manifesto’, and decided that waiting tables was too bourgeois for my liking. So I applied the next summer as a dishwasher. An honest day’s labour, working with your hands, all that stuff…I thought it would be great. Boy was I wrong. All of you out there who have done your time in the dish-pits of the world know exactly what I mean. It’s one thing to have to suffer, out of necessity, a tour of duty in the dish-pit, to suffer the soul numbing drudgery that is the lot of a resaurant dishwasher. It’s another thing to wish that upon ones’s self, especially because of some addle-headed teenage infatuation with Marxism. I kept myself sane by assembling a display of uneaten dinner rolls shaped like the heads of famous people. Brother dishwashers - I feel your pain. Unite and take over!
3. I remember hearing a lot about a book or game called “Ender’s Game” being used as inspiration for Homeworld. What exactly is Ender’s Game, for the five of us who don’t seem to know?
‘Ender’s Game’ is a wonderful science-fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. It follows the trials and tribulations of a young boy who is taken to ‘battle school’ and trained to become the admiral of a large space fleet.
4. It might just be me, but it seems that the Taiidan ships are a little more complicated in construction that the Kushan. Was this deliberate, or do the Kushan just like to fly around in boxy looking starships?
That’s just the style difference between Rob and I. His designs tended to be low, flattened, bulky shapes kind of like a bar of soap. Mine tended to be longer and taller, more like a boxcar in proportion. This turned out to have consequences during production. Rob’s ships tended to have large tops and bottoms (in terms of surface area), and small sides, fronts and backs. Mine tended to have large sides, and small tops, bottoms, fronts and backs. The consequences of this were that Rob’s ships needed more texture space - the top and bottom surfaces had to be distinct texturaly. My ships could use the same texture on both sides, so the Taiidan ships were more efficent from a texture-map standpoint. We worked it out in the end, but it always surprises me how these things pop up. You’d never guess in advance that one’s preferenes for proportion would result in major texture usage discrepancies. We dealt with this issue during a final texture pass of the Kushan ships, but you can still see some discrepancies and I think that’s what you are remarking on. Side by side, on the whole, the Taiidan ships look more detailed, simply because were were able to milk more detail out of the same amount of texture space.
5. What tools did you use in helping you to create the designs for Homeworld’s ships?
Tools for creating the designs for the ships or for creating the ships themselves? For the designs of the ships, Rob and I used pen and paper. We drew like absolute madmen. I’m looking at the stack of drawings I did for Homeworld right now, and it measures a little over a foot high. Literally thousands of design sketches. And of course I can’t stand to look at the ships now. All I see is how much better they would be if we were to do it all over again. To create the ships themselves — modeled in Lightwave, textured in Photoshop.
6. Okay, a two-parter. What was the weirdest bit of inspiration you had while working on Homeworld, and what was the strangest idea that didn’t make it into the game (Phallus Frigate and so on…)?
The whole animatic thing was a real weird idea to begin with. We had this big meeting where it became apparent that there was a looming crisis — our story was not being adequately delivered. We decided that we needed cutscenes to go in between the SP missions. It was mid April ‘99, and at that time, our expected deadline was three months away. No time for pre-rendered CG or anything fancy like that. So I proposed doing animatics … a term I learned from being in classical animation in art school. An animatic is basically a filmed storyboard. The camera zooms and pans across a still image. None of the guys had any idea what on earth I was talking about, and I was at a loss for examples. The only thing I could think of was the beginning to the TV ’special edition’ of the ‘Dune’ movie - the one with David Lynch’s director credit removed — it’s credited to Alan Goldstein of something. Sounds obscure? It was, and nobody understood at all. I tried to find a copy of it to show them, but to no avail. This particular version of the Dune movie opens with a sequence of illustrations describing the backstory of the Dune universe … the Butlerian Jihad, the emergence of the Lansraad, the Bene Gesserit, CHOAM and the Guild. I went ahead and did the first scene of the first animatic to demonstrate, and everyone finally got the idea. So I went ahead and finished the fist animatic that night, and was off and running. A couple of days later, Erin Daly dug up a copy of the special edition Dune movie on laser disc, and we went over to his place and watched it. The animatic I had remembered was awful! I was glad I hadn’t been able to find a copy to show to them back at the meeting, because I doubt they would have wanted to go ahead with the idea of animatics if they had seen it first.
Gary Shaw had proposed a giant chainsaw ship that would cut other ships in half. Another classic was a ship proposal we called “the space log”. ‘Nuff said.
7. If there was one thing you could change or add to Homeworld, what would it be, and why?
If I could add anything to Homeworld, it would be the element of surprise. It’s pretty hard to sneak up on anyone in Homeworld, which is too bad since deception plays such a big role in strategy situations in general. If I could change anything in Homeworld, it would be the mothership designs. Looking at them now, I thing both of them are too unorthodox looking to really read as motherships. They were also designed pretty early on in the game and are therefore, in my opinion, among our weaker designs.
8. When I visited, you all were in a rip-roaring game of Homeworld. What was, in your opinion, the coolest game of Homeworld you ever saw/played?
Nothing can rival the first game I won. If you were reading closely my nswer to question six, you’ll note that I committed to doing all the animatics for the game three months before we were due to ship. I became a very, very busy boy. I locked myself in my office all day and all night creanking those out. Three and a half months later, I was done, and very, very tired. And I hadn’t played a single game of Homeworld for four months. Everyone else was playing like mad, because we’d gone beta, and were in bug fixing mode. So I started plaing again for, and I got my ass kicked all the time. Two months later, I still hadn’t won a match. Oh the frustration! When I finally did eke out a win, the world was a beatiful place again, if only for a day.
Another cool moment came after Homeworld shipped. Gary Shaw added a function to the first patch that allows you to set the camera inside a ship, as if you’re in the cockpit. Seeing that working was the coolest moment for me. After all this time, we were able to see the game in a totally new way.
9. How would you use Homeworld to bring about world peace?
A lot of C4 could be stuffed in an empty Homeworld box. We could declare Homeworld “The official videogame of totalitarian dictators, mafia bosses, druglords, terrorist masterminds, cult leaders, militant fundamentalists, and shadow governments” and send them complementary “special” copies. Mever know. Might make a dent.
10. Are there any secrets or easter eggs in Homeworld that you’d like to share?
I heard that a special key combo turns the Kushan mothership into a naked Lara Croft.
11. Other than Homeworld, what games are your favorites?
My favourite game of all time was a game called “Robot Odyssey” for the AppleII, by the Learning Company. Add to the list the original “Castle Wolfenstein” also on the AppleII, Space taxi (C64), Super Metroid and Zelda (SNES), Duke Nukem and Quake. I’m not a huge PC gamer, and ironically, not a huge fan of strategy games or sims. Playing through Half Life was going to be my reward for finishing Homeworld, but I haven’t found the time yet.
12. If the NSP was a cat, what would you do to keep it happy?
I dunno, give it a fiddle and teach it to play “hey diddle diddle”?