Icyflamez96
Member
Shaun McCabe & Chad Dezern (game director & creative director) wrote a very interesting article about the development of the recently released Ratchet & Clank game. Here are some quotes.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/272694/Ratchet__Clank_2016_postmortem.php
A lot more at the link.
Edit: Wanted to add this in too
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/272694/Ratchet__Clank_2016_postmortem.php
"We needed to make a big game that blew away our previous efforts. It needed to sync up with the just-getting-started film. And we needed to ship it in 10 months to line up with the movie release."
A compressed schedule, a new platform and our first cross-studio collaboration – any single one of these challenges suggested we were in for challenging production. And yet, Ratchet & Clank PS4 turned out to be among the smoothest productions in Insomniac history. Eerily smooth. We still expect to wake up and discover that it was all a dream…
The compressed schedule limited the number of new features we could add to our engine. So instead of the usual laundry list of engine requests we compile at the start of a project, Ratchet & Clank PS4 had only a couple: “PS4 support” and, well, “fur rendering” (cuz Ratchet). And while this meant a number of “wants” had to wait for the future, it also meant avoiding the sort of large-scale changes that end up slowing down production.
We knew that Ratchet & Clank would be the first console game for many kids. If all goes well, we thought, it’ll be a formative memory—the beginning of a lifetime of healthy game playing habits.
We took this responsibility seriously. SCEA’s well-appointed usability test lab and its excellent staff were a godsend; we tested the game early and often with 7-9 year olds, even during pre-production. Our first test used greybox geometry to make sure that we were on the right track with the new Clank gameplay. We were encouraged to see that kids could articulate solutions to the puzzles, even if they didn’t understand all of the component pieces. We didn’t need to make the puzzles any easier, we just needed to clean up some of our messaging.
Later tests revealed that very young players tended to ignore the right analog stick; they didn’t quite grasp the benefit of moving the camera, and weren’t quite coordinated enough to move two sticks at once. So we designed levels with as few sharp turns as possible. And we created a casual control mode that allowed for movement with the d-pad. This broadened our potential audience, with no negative consequences for the other difficulty modes.
We like to start projects with a small preproduction team, grow for production and then roll people off as we hit Alpha, Beta and then Gold. The extra time on Ratchet & Clank PS4, however, really threw a wrench into the gears (knew we’d do that at least once, right?).
In order to make it work, we rolled the majority of people off at our original Gold (which became Alpha) and finished the game with a small polish team.
This is awesome because at a certain point, you can just get more done with fewer people (our project manager would certainly agree). But it also meant that we had to take the work of an entire, full-scope Ratchet & Clank game and spread it among just a handful of people. We had only two programmers responsible and for the last few months, only one designer.
Our tiny postproduction team were champions. They took on a monster of a challenge and delivered as polished a Ratchet & Clank experience as we’ve ever done. In the future, however, we’d like to stick to a gradual rolloff that scales the team size with the work remaining.
A lot more at the link.
Edit: Wanted to add this in too
WHERE DOES THE RATCHET & CLANK SERIES GO FROM HERE?
At this moment, we have no idea. We’re walking around with VR headsets strapped to our faces.
But we’re delighted by the reaction to the game, amazed and humbled that there’s still an appetite for Lombax and robot adventures after three console generations. For all of our initial hand wringing, we’re proud of it. The lessons we learned during development helped us improve our cross-studio coordination, plan our cinematics with more detail, and move through production cycles more gracefully.
So who knows?
What we do know is that Ratchet & Clank games are incredibly fun to make. There is intense passion at Insomniac for the universe and its characters. There are stories to tell, weapons to design, creatures to sculpt, planets to explore. And most significantly, there is a team of talented people here who have come through time and again to deliver games that are full of life and ambition. Above all, that’s why the series endures.