SealSqueal
Member
Another interview, a few interesting points:
http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//007254.html
The game is due before Christmas, you must nearly be finished.
We're getting close now. We're post Alpha so the game's complete in terms of its content and now we're into that final polish phase. We're all about polish at Naughty Dog. It's really important for us that the game be in really pristine shape. We've had a good development cycle though, it's been an exciting time.
What were your goals when starting work on Uncharted?
It's a good question, we always really like to have a compact set of design goals for each project that we make. We had three main goals for Uncharted in terms of gameplay. Of course we're very interested in games with great stories, games that push out the story-telling ability of the medium, but the pillars of our gameplay were three-fold. We wanted to do great (what we used to call) platform gaming. We talk more now about traversal gaming. The sense of an environment that you can explore and make discoveries within. And as you've seen, we've spent a lot of time on the animation system for the main character. He's very nimble in terms of his ability to run, jump and climb. So that kind of platforming is one of the pillars.
The second is the shooting gameplay, blazing gunplay based on a cover-based system. Obviously Uncharted has more of an emphasis on gun-based gameplay than any previous Naughty Dog game. (But) the control scheme actually has quite a lot in common with the Jak and Daxter control scheme. Jump is X, camera control on the right analog stick, melee attack is on square, you come into and out of cover using circle, and shooting is on R1. The melee is cool for keeping it mixed up and giving the player alternate strategies as they are working through the game.
The third pillar is puzzle solving. We've put quite a lot of problem solving into the traversal-based gameplay but we also have a number of set piece puzzles with special spot interactions that have their own special animations sprinkled throughout the game.
Do you dislike the "Dude Raider" tag?
(laughs) Of course we love the Tomb Raider games. We actually think it's really funny.
Any way that people get to hear about our game is cool with us. But Drake is actually very distinct I think from Lara Croft. Lara is kind of James Bond to Nate Drake's Indy or (Die Hard's) John McClane. He's more of an every man, he's not a ninja special forces guy. Nathan Drake is not a goody two-shoes character. He has a lot of dealings in the shady underground. He's the kind of guy who's made his living from leading treasure hunting expeditions, whether for private individuals or universities. And as is common in the real world of treasure hunting, because it is a real profession, he has kind of one foot in a shady world. Kind of living just beyond the boundaries of the law. When you're treasure hunting, you might not be quite sure whether you're in international waters, and he's mixed with a cast of shady characters. He knows how to handle himself in a situation, but that doesn't mean that he's going to plough through all the enemies. He's constantly living on the edge of his abilities. I think that's what makes him a bit more interesting as a character.
Tell me about the story.
There's Nathan Drake and his friend Elaine Fisher, who is a young woman who hosts an archeology adventure show on cable television. She's hired Nathan Drake to fish out the coffin of Sir Francis Drake from the seabed off the north coast of Panama. It was where Sir Francis Drake, the famous English adventurer and pirate, was buried at sea back in the late 16th century.
When they open the coffin they find that its empty, but they do find Sir Francis Drake's travel journal, which Nate Drake quickly back-pockets and which ultimately leads him to this abandoned island somewhere in the Pacific. It's meant to be completely deserted and they're very surprised to find evidence of a Spanish colony. From the colonization of the New World, a 16th century Spanish colony. He's even more surprised to find aggressors on the island, pirates, and in the opening sequence he and Elaine are flying in an airplane heading to the island and are shot down by a World War II flak gun. They are south seas pirates from the straits of Malacca, which is plagued in the real world by a pirating problem. There's another camp of enemies that we've just started talking about which are mercenaries, private military types who have been hired by the villains of the piece, these underworld figures.
We were very keen to set our game in the real world. It's one of the things that makes Uncharted stand apart. So many games are set in grim, grey post-apocalyptic settings, we really wanted to get back to the roots of action adventure, going back to the pulp stories from the 30s. The things Indiana Jones were inspired by. We're getting a lot of positive response about the way that our game is more like an adventure movie, we've really stuck to reality.
I remember Jason and Andy were really big on focus testing, do you still use it a lot?
It's still really important to us, yeah. We do call it focus testing but I sometimes wonder whether that's misleading because we're very driven by our own creative instincts. For example, we would never change the ending of a game based on its reception by a focus group. But we do a lot of play testing. I've been very involved in that. We test the game at regular intervals on pretty large groups of players and we capture the data from their gameplay sessions onto memory cards that we then bring back to the office and analyse. We're looking for weak points in the gameplay. We also give them a questionnaire and ask them some key questions about what are the high points and the low points for them.
And what have they typically been?
Gosh, they are so different with every round of focus testing. Early on when we were still polishing the gun-based combat we had a lot of comments about the aiming, for instance. So that let us know that we had to go off and do more work in that area. Our latest round of testing has almost been a bit boring for us 'cause everyone's just loving the game. They really respond well to the characters and the story. People see that it's a really compelling story. The characters are more sympathetic than characters in games often are. They are fleshed out.
And people are really digging the traversal. We put so much time and effort into developing the animation system. It's been one of the big things for us in the development of the game, the animation system for the player character. We are very focused on animation at Naughty Dog, we have a very large crew of animators, more than is usual I think for a game developer. We do a lot of animation blending where we blend one animation into another depending on the actions of the player. We're also doing more layering than is common. He doesn't just play back one animation at once, he's usually doing around 12, and maxes out at about 18 different animations. Sometimes whole body animations that we blend, sometimes animations for say, his face. So if an explosion happens near him he'll wince, but he could be doing that at the same time as he is reloading his gun and transitioning out of combat. People have really picked up on that. It means that he's still very much under your control from moment to moment. And the cover-based combat, it's very intuitive.
There's obviously a big focus on making the game as cinematic as possible, for example, not using a health bar.
Absolutely. It was an important thing for us. We've always been as developers very keen to embody the player through the actions that are happening on screen. We really dislike the clutter that you get with too many elements in the HUD. So we decided to go with the screen desaturation. We had to work hard to make sure it was still very clear to the player when they were about to lose their life, but I think we've managed to pull it off.
But I notice you have exploding barrels...
(laughs) It's a good way to expand the strategic possibilities in a level. That's partly why everyone likes to do it so much. But we don't have an over focus on it, we use them in some interesting situations. And we do have a rationale for it, they are left behind from the Spanish colonists.
Has Naughty Dog changed at all since Jason and Andy left?
You know, there has been some change of course, but most of the people who were at Naughty Dog now got to work with Jason and Andy. I joined the company three years ago, just as we were finishing up Jak 3 and those guys were around for that. They've really left us a good heritage. In terms of the company culture, I think Naughty Dog hasn't really changed. The new presidents of the company, Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra, worked with Jason and Andy for a long time and I know that Jason and Andy were very comfortable leaving the company in their hands. They're the same kind of game developers that Jason and Andy are, they're all about passion, a love for games as a medium, a love for making new characters that really open up games culturally. That's what we're doing with Uncharted.
And I imagine once you have established a strong culture at a studio, you tend to attract similar staff of a high calibre.
Totally right, that's what it's all about. It's such an exciting place to work. It's people from all around the world. We have a lot of Europeans working at Naughty Dog as well as people from North America, Canadians and people from South America as well. So it's a great feeling place, there's a feeling of the best folk from around the world and that's always been a big part of what Naughty Dog's been about. And its still quite a small feeling company as well, we're between 70 and 80 now. We're not a big team. We're big enough to make a PS3 game but still small enough to have that real family feeling.
Do you have some sort of splinter technology or design team who has started work already on the next project?
Actually, the whole company is focused on Uncharted right now.
So being a studio that only works on one title at a time, how do you ensure there's a seamless transition to working on the next project?
Well, that's one of the secrets of the studio, so I shouldn't really dish too much on that! They wouldn't be really happy with me. But we do work very closely on planning ahead, both within the company and with Sony, who own Naughty Dog. And working smart is always a big part of the success of Naughty Dog's projects. We're always keen to make good decisions at the right times. So rest assured that future games will be well taken care of.
Thanks for your time Richard, I'm looking forward to playing the game.
http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//007254.html
