To make environments that were fun, beautiful, andĬredible. To have both disciplines work in tandem from day one One clear example is related to level design and art.įrom the beginning we all agreed that it was critical
Us again, and we made changes accordingly. Learned from the previous game, but reality confounded Of a Tomb Raider playground, based on lessons we had Way to design the ruined jungle gyms that form the bulk
We started out thinking that we knew the best Tomb Raider: Underworld, we made a lot of successfulĬhanges when confronted with breakdowns of production To significantly redirect the juggernaut that was Saw the growing concern, created this special sub team,ĭevoted more staff and resources to it, and assigned aĭedicated producer was an example of how well we solved Would have been better off had we foreseen this needĪnd planned for it properly from the start, the fact that we Which proved to be complicated constructs. To the creation of a sub team devoted to these puzzles, Spending production effort across the game. Multiple layers of connected puzzles gave the gameĪn exceptional expression even compared to previous Tomb Raider games, and it also gave us a litmus test for Making large-scale in-game devices and areas with Point to both rally the team around and to use as a unique Many on the team saw that we needed an additional focal
#TOMB RAIDER UNDERWORLD GAME HELP FREE#
More free exploration, we almost fell into this trap. Like making the traversal less linear and bringing back Just like the last one with slightly different contentĪnd a few more features is an easy mistake to make.ĭespite the fact that we had some significant new goals, Reduce the scope by trimming branches everywhere without having to uproot any of the trees entirely. Originally planned for the game made it into the final version, only smaller, and connected to each other in fewer ways. The game was designed to be able to handle this degree of reduction, as seen by the fact that almost all the features and areas Then two months later we would see that we were again coming in too big, necessitating further scope We would assess and determine that the game was too big, and then cut enough content Repeatedly underestimated issues of complexity. This was our first "next-gen" title, and we We also recovered from a fair amount of design deficit that had carried over from pre-production, and on theĬode side we managed to get most of our core functionality up to scratch.Īnother thing we did right during this long Alpha was to have multiple scope reductions. This paid off handsomely with respect to art production, and it's one of the Shorter Beta to make room for more polish time at the end. We scheduled an unusually long Alpha to deal with unresolved pre-production issues and to set ourselves up for a
In light of that, some of the "wrongs" will be discussed in terms of how our methods to avoid known issues fell short. Wrong" because sometimes you make mistakes, but other times you suffer from acts of god and do your best to cope.Īrticle last year ("What Went Wrong?" December 2008) specifically questioned why game development seems to make the same mistakes It's important to note that most postmortems talk about "What Went Wrong" and not just "What We Did It is particularly interesting to note that much of what went wrong in development involved pitfalls that we anticipated but still fell intoĭespite our efforts to avoid them. In many ways this is what the team accomplished, but as is always the case in gameĭevelopment, reality was more complex than we anticipated. Previews for Tomb Raider: Legend were very encouraging, and we felt that there was still plenty of unrealized potential toĮnough so, the reasoning went, that we could focus on content and leveraging existing functionality to developĪ bigger and better Lara Croft adventure in less time. The concept phase of Tomb Raider: Underworld began while its predecessor, Tomb Raider: Legend, was in final QA and nearing submission.
0 kommentar(er)
