Amy Hennig and Jade Raymond Talk Working on Star Wars

Amy Hennig and Jade Raymond have spoken to GamesIndustry about their experience developing Star Wars games for EA. 

While Hennig says "making a game is making a game," the duo admit there are differences between creating a new IP, managing an existing one, and tackling the Star Wars behemoth. 

Despite the level of expectation surrounding a Star Wars project, Hennig adds that it's probably not how people expect. EA, Visceral Games, and Lucasfilm are all said to be agreed on what needs to be done to make the best possible game. 

"It just seems like kind of this perfect collision of everyone being in the right mindset at the right time," Hennig comments.

Raymond, who heads up EA's recently established Motive studio and is working on a third person action game meant to challenge Assassin's Creed – which she also worked on while at Ubisoft – as well as assisting Visceral with its game and leveraging work undertaken at DICE on Star Wars Battlefront. 

Doing so involves working across several times zones and integrating DICE's work with their own but Raymond says there are definite advantages to doing so. 

"I sort of feel like a kid in a candy store because all this stuff everywhere is being made in the same engine," she says.

Despite the project's scope, Hennig adds that the formula doesn't significantly, "I think the same processes of working collaboratively apply whether it's four people or 400."

Hennig continues by noting that everyone involved must have ownership over their own work, the freedom to fail, and the option to announce ideas which haven't been fully formed yet.

Discussing the creative process, she says developers sometimes feels like frauds when they hit upon something successful. "You're almost paralyzed when you have something successful," Hennig explains, "because it's like, 'Holy shit. We did that? Do it again?' So if you all feel like frauds, it's because you're really awesome."