Oguro wanted to make up for some of those missed opportunities by making Lost Planet 3 a more cinematic, story-driven experience, which led Capcom to decide that it wanted a Western studio to develop the title. "It's not that [Capcom's] internal team couldn't do [that kind of game]," said Szymanski, "but it's not necessarily playing to their strengths."
According to Szymanski, the first concept meetings for Lost Planet 3 took place in February 2010. At the time, its developers drew up plans for the usual development process on a game like this: hand-animated character models to which voice-over was added later. But the stylized art design that pipeline produced was insufficient to convey the subtleties of emotion that Capcom wanted to bring to the table.
It was then that Spark proposed performance capture, a technique used in games such as Team Bondi's L.A. Noire. The studio told Capcom, "We can try it, but it's sort of uncharted territory. It involves scrapping everything we've done and implementing an entirely new character pipeline."
Capcom agreed, and the developers threw out nearly a year of work — after the concept phase, they had spent nine months putting together a prototype using the original character models. Here, said Szymanski, Capcom pushed Spark to "develop new tools that they were familiar with from the film world, but had never actually implemented themselves."
Many of the studio's employees have experience in filmmaking: Lead producer Kevin Scharff, for example, worked on the 2009 CG-animated movie Astro Boy. Spark had established a performance-capture pipeline for film, but it had to be reworked to interface with the Lost Planet 3 game engine. "That's where most of the work had to go," said Szymanski.
