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GDC 2008 - Ready at Dawn Artist Muses on God of War PSP
Written by Lance Wang on Wednesday, February 20, 2008
You gotta visualize.
Nathan Phail-Liff is the leading 3D artist at Ready at Dawn, and he took the opportunity to enlighten the audience on some of his game-making strategies at the God of War: Deconstructing an epic panel.
Chains of Olympus, he stressed, was not envisioned as a portable-specific game, nor was the panel about developing for portable platforms.
He outlined the team's creative vision for the game by coining a new term: "epicidal", which basically means that they tried to as hard as they could to keep the player immersed while simultaneously making them feel like they've dropped the soap in a prison crammed with horny inmates. They wanted to create a sensation of intimidation and awe. One of the ways they would do this was by including little previews of upcoming areas or enemies in the background.
Liff also talked about diminishing returns in art design. An extra 10% effort can look more like 40% to the gamer, he said, but past a certain point, the longer you spend on it, the lesser the reward.
While outlining the difficulties the team had developing the game, he coined yet another term, which he calls "non-linear scheduling." That is, they'd fix non-fatal problems as they appeared rather than leaving them to the end of the development schedule. This design philosophy may have also contributed to another interesting piece of information he revealed, which was that the Battle of Attica level took up approximately 40% of the game's development time.
Phail-Liff ended his speech by saying that Ready At Dawn has left the portable port market for now and is working on a new IP for an unspecified platform.
[Original source: Philip Kollar, 1up]
