“EA is not necessarily known for new IP,” says Chuck Beaver, a senior producer who worked on Dead Space. Electronic Arts' Redwood Shores studio is steeped in licensed intellectual property like The Godfather and The Simpsons. It usually buys its canons and audiences, he says.

The last intellectual property from that studio was Road Rash in 1991.

Electronic Arts was eager to get involved in new intellectual property. Executive producer Glen Schofield pitched what became the horror game Dead Space. Since it was one of the first new intellectual properties that EA was working on, it was cautious. The publisher gave Schofield three months to figure out whether his concept would work.

The small, assembled Dead Space strike team was composed of multi-talented developers who could design, program and produce. The strategy behind this, says Beaver, was a need to break from Electronic Arts' typical production philosophy.

Generally, you write a design document and hand it off to engineers, he says. Once that happens, it is near impossible to change anything. The Dead Space team adopted a prototyping philosophy similar to the the rapid iterations found in the Experimental Gameplay Project. It was a complete reversal from EA's typical way of doing things.

“There should be less on paper and more on the screen,” says Beaver. “When you start a new intellectual property, everyone is so excited,” he says. But there isn't enough time or money to reinvent everything all at once. The team had to choose where it would focus its efforts.

Beaver recommends finding a game similar to your project to use as a starting point because it has already solved a lot of the design challenges the team would run into later in the development cycle.

Dead Space is based on Resident Evil 4.

“Fearlessly use standardized features,” he says. “If too much is new, people get lost.” You need to include enough that's familiar in order to help players grasp other innovative features in your game. Also, ensure you're using current systems because consumers will critique outdated control or camera schemes.

Once you have found the basic template for your game, you need to distance yourself from that design. Don't build a kitchen sink. Your innovation should be deliberate; you should count your ambitions on one hand, he says. For Dead Space, the team focused on enemy dismemberment, HUD-less navigation, and zero G gameplay.

Beaver also delved into the difficulty of making a scary game. He noted that “boo” just doesn't work—it wears out quickly. Dread is much more effective. By quickly introducing that nowhere is safe, players fear every door, vent and elevator. He also recommends making combat lethal, so there is a genuine sense of trepidation at each encounter.

And thanks to the team's focus on polish, protoyping and focus testing, Dead Space was finally green-lit in April 2007—a year and a half after they started development.