makingmusic476 on 15 February 2008
Insomniac has to be one of the greatest dev teams around.
Stolen shamelessly from GAF:
From the latest issue of Game Developer magazine (Feb 2008). Some highlights:
To start, we decided to visualize the Ratchet & Clank universe PS3-style by recreating Metropolis, one of the iconic locations from our PS2 series. We did this by building a "diorama" of the city, adding vehicles, and sending a camera through it. We built our test city using the Resistance engine, stitched together a frame by frame camera fly through, and added audio effects to simulate the experience of being in Metropolis.
We were being compared to feature film CGI, and there was great enthusiasm for the game. When Sony told is that future gameplay deliveries needed to "drop jaws" as Metropolis did we wondered if we could ever match the results in-game.
After our PS3 launch title Resistance had successfully shipped, our 15-person preproduction team began to swell to more than 100 people (70 full time and numerous "shared" resources).
One of the tenets of Insomniac's culture is to allow creative contribution and control at all levels, and we had to balance this with another Insomniac truth - we never miss a deadline.
RFD included a new form of texture streaming that allowed us to add a great variety and lushness to our surfaces and further optimizations meant we could target 60 frames per second instead of 30. By shipping a game on PS3 we proved to ourselves we could do it successfully and gained the kind of understanding that only comes by doing.
Another big help was our "first party" developer/producer relationship with Sony. At a time when PS3 development kits were scarce, we had 150 of them in our studio. Sony Europe and Japan provided localization support for 13 languages, and our games was tested throughout America, Europe, and Asia.
We gave ourselves eight weeks from our project alpha date to "polish" our game and get it out the door.
We prepared a downloadable demo of our game to coincide with E3 but it was an in-progress demo that only ran at 30fps. So we scrapped it and made the demo again as we were closer to finishing the game.
