Nice interview with Richard Lemarchand, Co-Lead Game Designer for Uncharted, over Threespeech.
Most of it is about Trophies, but there are some nice bits about other stuff. Some quotes:
About PS3 pawa
About their next project
About cross team communication
Most of it is about Trophies, but there are some nice bits about other stuff. Some quotes:
About PS3 pawa
Lemarchand can talk about another interesting subject, though: the prospect that, in the near future, multi-platform PS3 games will outshine the versions running on rival consoles: Theres a set of tools called Edge that were developed on the Naughty Dog premises, actually, by a group of very, very senior games programmer, some from Naughty Dog and some from elsewhere. I think its tremendously visionary of Sony to make these tools, which are largely low-level libraries.
Here, Lemarchand comes up with an interesting revelation: Thats why we think were probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the PS3 right now, and theres this great, untapped potential. All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years.
About their next project
So we asked him about future iterations of Uncharted: I cant talk about that: our current project is still unannounced. We are very hard at work: were quite a way into our next production cycle now. Its great having all of the Uncharted code and tools, but we havent announced anything yet. I think all the horrible things that Nate Drake alludes to which the South Seas pirates get up to with their prisoners will be inflicted on me when I get back to the office if I spill the beans. Unspecific, perhaps, but it sounds highly promising.
About cross team communication
"Were always trading war-stories with Insomniac and Evolution and Sucker Punch. Were just one block away from Sony Santa Monica the guys who made God Of War and we get our designers together with theirs for formal lunches, and just talk about tools, design approaches and so on. So theres this town square feeling of everybody trading stories about our best practices, and I think it makes everybody stronger and smarter.