15 Years of Ratchet & Clank: A Lombax Story

okay hi everyone thanks for coming of course you have to silence those noise makers devices and don't forget to evaluate us at the end of this talk we'd love to hear your feedback so we are very excited to share our journey on the raft about the Ratchet and Clank franchise and why it has endured but first we should a little bit about ourselves so I'm Brian Allgaier I was a design director on the first Ratchet and Clank game as also the creative director on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 game and I was very fortunate to work with this guy and I'm TJ Fixman I was the senior writer at insomniac games from 2007 to 2013 I worked on all the ps3 and ps4 Ratchet titles with this guy I also served as a creative consultant for Hasbro working on movie properties like transformers GI Joe and Micronauts so before we get started I just want to share a little clip that we like quite a bit and this will help some of you who may be unfamiliar with the franchise

[Music] alright I don't know what just happened there we have a technical difficulty sorry about that it worked when we were rehearsing in our hotel room this morning ok this should not work yeah [Applause] space it's so huge in fact that if you lost your car keys in it they would be almost impossible to find luckily for ratchet captain Copernicus and quark was on the case his mission rescue the lombaxes one and only friend yep without Clank ratchet was alone in the universe alone alone alone you realize this ship has an ejector

seat right sorry I guess you could say I've been a little MC in my pen see if the thought of getting back into the hero business if these wild stallions have been in a stable to log right look just keep your eyes peeled Talyn says this sector is crawling with mercenaries rest easy my friend my vigilance is both eternal and peripheral identify detective hang on shifting to a basic maneuvers [Music] we're gonna die we're gonna die okay I'm wearing clean underwear will you shut up we [Music] negative we're gonna die alright sorry so the

reason why it worked was because it was in presenter view and now we have to go back to presenter view this is like the most Awkward presentation I've ever given okay here we go okay and everything is now going to work for the rest of the presentation okay yeah my computer's might have its own okay so I have to say it's been really hard to believe it's been over 15 years since the first ration Clank was developed and insomniac games back in 2002 I feel very fortunate we feel very forward to be standing here looking back at this long-running franchise so I'm curious how many people played Ratchet and Clank back in the day in 2002 Wow ok that's a lot of hands right it's awesome how many

people worked on the Ratchet and Clank games Hey alright we've got something timing some old old schoolers here ok so never you know did I dream that that very first game would lead to 6 games on the PlayStation 2 6 games on the PlayStation 3 mobile games a manga series a comic book line toys and vinyl figures art prints tattoos and cause talk and cat tattoos and cosplayers that's when you know you've really hit it big adorable plushies a feature-length movie and in 2016 we made a game based on a movie based on the original game and despite how confusing that all sounds the 2016 reboot was actually massively successful is our fastest selling Ratchet game ever and a one-family game of the year at the dice awards and one of the things that surprised us most is that over the years platformers and mascot style games have become kind of a tough sell console gamers have been drifting more towards darker and more realistic fare so it's

really cool to see the Ratchet and Clank still has a place in audience's hearts so the 14 Ratchet and Clank games made in the last 15 years insomniac developed 11 of them we started with the trilogy of the first Ratchet and Clank and for us it's certainly been a journey fraught with both ups and downs insomniac turned out a new title almost every year which feels insane in retrospect I can brag for them because I was an employee at the time but they did this all in-house with a thirty five person team but I promise this is not just going to be a stroll down memory lane we'd like to treat this as a sort of franchise post mortem so we can talk to you about what worked what didn't what really didn't and offer some tips on why we believe some franchises endure but to do that we're going to have to travel back in time and fortunately we have a connection at the great clock this temporal Space Station from a Krakken time that also happens to be 100% real so sigmund are you there yes sir

senior caretaker Sigma zero four to six eight standing by at the great clock awesome can you take us back to March of 2001 I don't know whoever said I'm not supposed to use this thing as a time machine oh I guess I can make an exception for the insomniac folks standby for temporal displacement [Music] alright so the year was 2001 its Omni acts new game was going to be our fifth game we may disrupt her and the three Spyro dragons before that and our team size was 35 people George W Bush was in office phones made just phone calls back then and the laptime laptop gun was all the rage of course there were some classic cinematic masterpieces TJ where were you back then when all this happened I in 2001 I was in college so probably someone Orlando with a really bad slim shadey haircut let's just check

in and confirm yep that's it ooh did you do that to your hair on purpose sadly I did I did do that to my hair on purpose okay so let's talk about Ratchet and Clank the beginning so ratchet and clanks actually started out as a girl with a stick actually our code name was girl with a stick and so we had worked on the Spyro games you wanted to try doing something a little bit older and for about a year we worked on this project which was kind of a mash up of Tomb Raider meets Legend of Zelda and the team just wasn't feeling it and our CEO Ted price saw the writing on the wall he had the courage to just kill the project it's time to work on something that we could all really get excited about so we went back to the drawing board we started coming up with a bunch of ideas and our chief creative officer Brian Hastings offered a simple idea that everyone got everyone really excited and that was an alien that travels from planet to planet collecting weapons and gadgets and as simple as

that sentences actually got us really excited and sparked our imaginations and we started to draw upon inspirations on how to create this new alien so one of Brian's early inspirations was the book the little prince but there were plenty of other influences like Marvin the Martian Star Wars Conker's Bad Fur Day banjo kazooie Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the valley of the wind Super Metroid The Iron Giant Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda so one thing we all loved about Brian's pitch was this idea of exploring the unknown universe our team was excited by the idea of building this living breathing colorful galaxy that people could discover character artist Dave curtain began to sketch our hero starting with this lizard inspired creature who had this massive weapon and extendable arm he was cute

but not very relatable and lacked that charm we wanted he need to be warmer and more approachable and eventually evolved into our famous fairy mechanic here I first heard Ted price actually coined the term long backs to describe ratchets race we also like the idea than having a voice which is very new for mascot characters back then so we needed someone for ratchet to talk to so the original design for clank we painted them as this childlike c3po even experiment having a child voice with a British accent and it just wasn't working it felt like this kind of weird father-son relationship so we decided to put the two on more equal footing and focus on making it more of a buddy story for clanks a particular backstory he was written as being this factory defect who almost got scrapped and was saved from the assembly line Brian Hastings and Ted

imagine the game as feeling almost like an intergalactic buddy-cop story the wisecracking alpha would shoot first and ask questions later while the logical sidekick would act as his foil it's dynamic that we've seen a lot in movies but if you drop it into a game full of anthropomorphic characters we get something really fresh and we all of us imagine sort of like a lethal weapon meets Saturday morning cartoons so you know we certainly wanted humor to be a prominent aspect of the game so he developed another parent franchise favorite which was captain quark he became such a vital part of the series that when he was left out fans would actually be upset we viewed this guy as being kind like a Homer Simpson meets Captain Kirk and the environment artists started imagining ratchets home planet Velden along with places that he would travel like space stations and high-tech cities so we wanted to really get going quickly and start putting these levels into the game but the problem was we were just starting to develop the PlayStation 2 engine and tools and we we

couldn't actually create these level with these long draw distances fortunately we're working with industry legend mark Cerny hi mark hey Mark who actually had this he was helping us design the game he came up with this great idea to create these dioramas which are also now called beautiful corners where we could create the starting level of a game and actually looked like a real game felt like a real game and that started to get people really excited and definitely got interest from Sony and starting to give us the green lights so one of my first tasks was taking Metropolis and turning into a real design and we started to develop the metrics for how fast and far ratchet would run and jump the same metrics that would be used consistently throughout the 15 years of the franchise all of this of course was being done using 2d paper maps we weren't messing with any of that 3d stuff back then eventually our engine tech could handle the long draw distances and metropolis was fully realized here this is the

actual shot of the game now during the prototyping stage quickly became apparent how important weapons and gadgets are to the series so in Sonic designed over 60 weapons and gadgets we abandoned hard science with every figure like who wants to be restricted by physics when we could be you turning gun turning my enemies into rabbits or chickens or penguins so in November 2002 ratchet was very innovative for its time and was of course positively received but we felt like we haven't really pushed it far enough it's to some degree felt weapons optional and we it was it's like a platform game but we want to really dive deeper into more of the RPG elements we're just really kind of dipping our toes in the RPG waters and a story and character the characters need a lot of work to because at the time insomniac was a baby studio they needed to focus primarily on gameplay so they can get to gold get it out the door and then hopefully get to make another one so Ratchet and Clank wasn't really a universe from mythology perspective the

characters showed promise but they didn't have a lot of depth in fact if you play the first game you'll notice that ratchet was kind of a jerk he was too sarcastic too snarky too selfish so for the next game we recast ratchet with James Arnold Taylor and we rewrote him to be a kinder more curious character with a sense of humor that didn't require putting others down so thanks to that first ratchet game insomniac learned a basic but important lesson make the time to develop your your heroes and their relationships like in game design it's very easy to get laser focused on the game because the natural inclination to say hey we have to make the game work before anything else but your audience is not going to care about your heroes if they don't care about their place in the world so over the next two sequels we were finding the franchise on going commando we fully embraced the weapons for our gameplay strategy and added RPG elements we had a lot of variety in this game in the form of mega games we include this battle arena really let people test out their weapons encourage people to buy weapons and try the

out in these really cool spaces we also had these new tiny planets that we called spherical worlds this is actually something that we had prototype for the original Ratchet and Clank we had him flying around went on a hoverboard but we just realized we couldn't do it in time so we saved that idea for this game we had hover bike races and space combat missions too now players appreciated a huge leap forward in terms of gameplay depth and breadth they also loved the double entendre of going commando can think not a lot of stylized franchises could be so subversive so we decided to embrace that going forward and another Ratchet and Clank tradition was born yeah when they pitched going commando to me I didn't know what that meant okay sounds good okay okay so that leads us to of course up your arsenal okay so in that game we introduced multiplayer single-player battlefields and our most iconic villain of the series dr. nefarious he was inspired by old-school sci-fi B movies and quickly became our

most recognizable super villain up here Arsenal was a huge hit with players and critics looking back there were a lot of key elements that made it successful ratchet & clank kind of textured relationship they banter they disagree but you could always tell these guys were buddies we had outrageous weapons with badass upgrades there were gadgets and planet-hopping we had tons of captain quark the visuals were stylized with rich detail and a vibrant palette they had a Douglas Adams inspired humor that I loved so much and a great balance of platforming to shooting but yet this was around this time where we suddenly started to see mascot characters like fading away or they were kind of putting on the back shelf until later and they started going to hibernation but we believe that part of the reason why the Ratchet and Clank series endured was that we dramatically evolved it we transformed from being a platformer with shooting to a shooter with platforming so we had seen that people were very receptive to the guns and we've really integrated that and by

the third game we had full circle strafing with r1 trigger and really made this into a modern-day shooter a third-person shooter terms of mechanics so the lesson here was we really had to adapt or die you know it's really important to listen to what players want to play but then of course you're having to watch the market trends and and learn what other games are doing but then you also want amplify what's great about your own game and what makes it stand out so there's definitely a tricky balance there so we really thought we'd hit our stride with up your arsenal but we started to face a small obstacle here and that is the fourth game slump so really what that is is that this happens all the time with movies and trilogies where you feel like you've said all that you could say with the third game you nail it and you're like oh people want more we have the opportunity to make another game people want to play but what do we do so you

know again it's like that rule of threes and we were concerned too that we've made these three games back to get back one year after the next and what do people want with the fourth game are they starting to get tired and is there some you know level of franchise fatigue happening here so the question was well maybe we need to adapt further maybe with up your arsenal you know we made a third person you know modern shooter but how can you take us even further and we were looking at other games that were really big we're looking at you know I don't know your GTA's and stuff like that and we had a little bit of you know Envy like oh yeah what can we do there so at the time for us it was halo all right now so in 2005 we went dark right off the bat you're gonna notice that we dropped the double entendre we even took Clint's name off the title and the hindsight we got to acknowledge that was kind of not cool now while

other co-op multiplayer features were strong it was still a big departure from the franchise we removed fan favorite captain Qwark we sidelined clank and lost the exploration factor instead we sent a ratchet to various planets simply to survive a running man style game show it was a fun game just not a Ratchet and Clank game and definitely falls into the what were we thinking category the franchise so you know co-op was very well received and the game was a commercial success but their views were not as favorable Dedlock perceived lower than expected scores and even one reviewer called it soulless gun porn which never it's cold at the time we had three huge successes behind us we thought we could not fail now looking back at the checklist I made up your arsenal successful it's easy to see why this was sort of a misstep for us we had no engaging buddies story are customizable weapon feature resulted in reduced personality planetary exploration was gone pork was left out of the fun the color palette was muted and we went overboard with the shooting we even covered ratchets face for the majority of the game insomniac tried to

make the game different but in doing so we swung the needle just a bit too far it was clear that we had just deviated too far from the franchise DNA okay so what do we mean when we say franchise DNA these are the core pillars of the game from both a gameplay and lore perspective no matter what you change from game to game this is the stuff that stays constant so that each entry feels like it was made by a singular voice so one of the things you don't really think about until you see it done poorly and then when it's done poorly it really stands out so we knew we had to return to what made previous games great but also faced a new challenge on the horizon which was the PlayStation 3 for this new platform we needed to overhaul our engine and our tools too spent we needed to build everything from the ground up we couldn't reuse any of our characters any of our sounds any any of our assets we had to redo everything so this was a big technology upheaval for us this is common to most franchises that you know span multiple platforms anyone F course has worked in the industry for a few years knows this

happens quite a bit where you have to kind of do a retooling so we'd promised with tools of destruction though that we were going to make this CG animated movie it was gonna feel like you could play a CG animated movie and we I started to get really caught up in the allure of what the PlayStation 3 could do and I was thinking about oh maybe there could be like procedural worlds or we have multiplayer modes you have this like open space exploration and I started like chatting about this in one of the design meetings and a team member decides walked up to the whiteboard and wrote and giant letters technology is evil and so he was coming from having worked on our other PlayStation 3 game which was a launch title which was resistance fall of man and that game had a ton of ambitious systems we had like procedural glass and cloth and like hoses and crazy AI systems and we

managed to get glass into that game but everything else a lot of others have had to get cut because you know in the end we you have to really be careful when you're starting with new tech there's just it can be a lot of rope that you end up hanging yourselves with the glass was great though if the glass was great yeah so given that we had to rewrite our new engine and tools this meant a smaller scope and so we had fewer cinematics just because of the higher fidelity animation there was no multiplayer or co-op no spherical worlds and no fun stuff like racing or other special modes we had to really go lean on this one so we were wondering how do we please longtime fans if the graphics were taking a step forward and our gameplay and story breadth was taking a step back we need to go lean and deep on our franchise DNA but where to start so the answer for us was to tell a tightly told story about ratchet and

clanks origins rather than following the fly by the seat of our pants approach as we did with our previous games we need to start thinking about world building that's we brought on TJ I've been working on games for a couple years by then doing QA and design support I'm resistants fault man and I also come out to LA at the time to build up a writing career by never written a videogame before that was coming on board several months into production and one of my chief duties was to take the sort of loose mythology of Ratchet and Clank and work with this guy in Brian Hastings to build out a unified lore that could inform future games as well as comics and movies around this time stories were starting to matter more in the gaming space so we really knew that we had to uh step it up we had a great set of characters and planets but the original lore was done 100% on the fly and had to be tied down so that we could satisfy some of the audience's pressing questions here's a horrifying list of things that we did not have the answers to who is ratchet uh simple beyond just guns and wisecracks I believe it not like we didn't know we knew there's surfacey

stuff like what made him fun but what about all the writer e stuff that i like to talk about to make programmers eyes glaze over what drives him what's he afraid of like I love that ratchet was a wide-eyed engineer who prioritized fun and thrills over basic safety protocol but the earlier games never really explored why and to me gradute is constantly struggling with his identity because he was born an orphan and the Olli Lombax as far as he knew so his need to invent came from his need to feel like he had an impact on the universe building on this vulnerability helped us create a more textured character that players could relate to where the lombaxes I would love to tell you all that we had this mapped out in a Bible and under lock and key the insomniac vault but we had no idea it was a white space at the time fans were dying to know what happened to their lawn boxes and we wanted to address this in the new trilogy who was Clank the original game featured him as a factory defect that escaped the junk heap but over the course of four games the studio felt like there had to be more to him Brian Hastings asked me to come up with a reveal for him that would

shed new light on his origins without hopefully feeling too retconned and during one of our brainstorming meetings on Tools destruction the team was very excited about time manipulation as a mechanic so we developed a connection between Clank and a faction of time-bending creatures called the zone II and at the time I had a vague idea of how he was connected to them but felt that this could t up a compelling or a compelling origin story to be revealed in a future game and there was so much more we didn't know these are all questions fans one of the answers to and even though we're going to a new galaxy in a future saga I had to start compiling a franchise Bible so that every team had a place to start and I had to get started halfway through production when all our sets were built our characters were modeled levels were already locked down so like this was truly trial by fire for a first time game writer I'd like to throw people into the frying pan yes you do and once we hit alpha became very clear that we didn't have the time or the resources to answer everything so I had to prioritize while laying the groundwork for the next game that way fans could feel secure knowing that the answers were coming I like to call these

mythology branches fleshing out your world details that serve as flavor in one game but can be a full meal in next so the zone eat arachnoid stage is the court of azmuth as well as other terms that might sound like gobbledygook if you haven't played the series these concepts were seeded in tools destruction without knowing exactly how they would be used going forward but when we paint it off it provided a sense of continuity and the illusion of a plan that I definitely did not have Cheers I thought he had a plan yeah no no have you pulled so what did we learn from all this if fighters do their jobs right the audience will engage with and comb over every crumb of lore they're offered it's the double-edged sword of good mythology work they'll look for cracks and continuity errors they'll create fan-made wiki's to point out every consistency so keep in mind make sure not to define heroes by a game mechanic find something emotional and relatable about them something that they're missing audiences want to see themselves in their heroes and that's going to give your character the kind of depth you'll

need to carry them over the next two or three or in our case seven games whitespace is okay but nail down the critical aspects of your lore use mythology branches to tee up a larger world be specific about those aspects no ambiguity because ambiguity can oftentimes read like plot holes or an unsure writer and consider whatever you write law going forward right for the hardcore gamer when you're deep in crunch it's very easy to say people won't notice but the hard core do I promise you who they always do they will YouTube it they will wiki it they will tweet it at you angrily they will evangelize or viscera at your work I've had both done and I can give you a guess as to which one is better putting in the work benefits not only the team but future partners and ancillary products based on your series so by doing all that work and defining the mythology it just gave us a great foundation for building these worlds and adventures that are for our upcoming

trilogy but as new designers join the team we realized we could not solely rely on oral tradition scene you know over the the six years we had people leaving coming in new designers and so we had to start figuring out how do we develop a Wratten sorry ah Ratchet and Clank and standardize our process one thing that came up which was kind of wild was we had these crates tax and for a lot of us working on the early game some of this is pretty intuitive on how to place them but some of our new designers would either put these giant stacks and people just start getting tired of pressing the square button like hitting all of those crates or they'd have very sparse stacks it wouldn't quite be stacked correctly so Brian Hastings our creative officer actually wrote a four-page document on how to stack crates the subtle art of yeah it was pretty in-depth as impressive so of course one of the most important processes that we had to standardize was how to design great

weapons on deadlocked we had this really cool feature which was you could create customizable weapons and various combinations but they started to kind of lose a little bit of their soul and personality so we thought well you know what are some general guidelines or goals that we could use while brainstorming weapons and so we threw out three one is they had to be comedic strategic or spectacle and they had to hit a ten and one of those categories and so this actually helped us in developing a one of our favorite weapons mr. zerkin where originally he was designed as being synth annoyed which was a character we'd had in earlier games where was a fire-and-forget drone that would kind of hover above even just shoot at enemies and they're kind of fun to have but we thought how do we step this guy up and he was we started building this character he looked like one of these consumer bots on the left here and had very little personality we're like okay there's no strategy here it's not really much spectacle that we can certainly push it in terms of the

comedy factor so I asked the art team we give him a mouth I walked over to TJ I'm like hey we got this guy named mr. zircon he speaks in the third person go this is not the kind of request you want to get during crunch time but I understood Brian's vision I agree with him that was important so I I came up with what in hindsight looked on paper to be the dumbest idea for a character ever I wondered if mr. zircon loved to talk trash but he's happened to be really terrible at it he thought everything around him was stupid yeah he had no inflection in his voice and he lived only to kill what was around him so in a couple days I whipped up four hundred lines of vo and took it to the team and they looked at me like I was insane but when we recorded it got into the game balanced it it worked and it became one of the most iconic character gadgets in Ratchet and Clank history yeah I think it's all because we had those goals early on on how to push all these weapons and bring them up to a 10 so you know one of the weapons that was a big favor of course was the groovy Tron which was a weapon that makes enemies dance and you know it's interesting when

we started to have that way of evaluating our weapons we look back at this weapon and we realized why it was so successful it actually hit all three of those goals it was hilarious I also had this big spectacle with all these young beams coming out all these enemies dancing it was a very strategic weapon you could toss it out and it was like an AoE stun weapon uh so as part of our return to form on tools of destruction of course we brought back one of our signature levels that which is metropolis or Lee ro city and this time it was featured in stunning detail with enemy fire raining down ration Clank tools of destruction was a big hit with fans it was often praised as looking like a Pixar film and hit all of the key ingredients of our DNA in terms of story it both answered and raised many questions about ratchet and clanks origins but the game's cliffhanger ending left people feeling a bit cheated and if I was to do it over again I probably would not have done it sir

Clarence could be appealing and I think used appropriately they're an effective way of retaining audience interest but I think oftentimes that just ends up leaving players feeling frustrated yeah essentially a cliff Clank got abducted by the zoni and nobody knew what happened to them players were left hanging with this question and we really wanted to address this cliffhanger but our problem was that the next scene was going to be in a couple years and we know people could wait that long but fortunately we received both a blessing and a curse in the form of a it's my fantasy PowerPoint transition their development curveballs and so all projects faced these were out of the blue there's a you'll request the publisher asks for something or some tech change happens and during tools of destruction what happened with us was we originally wanted to do a co-op we have a co-op feature and be able to play the campaign with a split screen or potentially online and we talked to Sony about this we promised it and then about midway through I think we were like yeah that's

not going to happen sorry so the deal we ended up making was like well now we'll make a smaller product instead and would come out in 2008 between tools of destruction and a cracking time which was the next big installment so you know that was DLC at the time was like this brand new concept and we're pretty excited about working on this but unfortunately would eat a lot into our pre-production time so for a while we had a bit of a freakout moment and we realized though that we could turn this obstacle into an opportunity with a smaller game we could experiment with new ideas and new mechanics and they could potentially lead into future games and one idea that was starting to gain traction was doing this 2d space combat game that was similar to geometry wars because that was kind of the flavor of the month but then we thought well we've got this cliffhanger we kind of want to continue Ratchet and Clank story tgd was getting hate mail so maybe we

should you know focus more on the story and the one thing we really loved about the previous game that we wanted to do was space pirates I mean those are just awesome and so that's how quest for booty was born it's actually the title that we usually want to come with Tools of Destruction but it worked much better for this smaller pirate based game and we really loved pirates at the time we actually started to decorate the office with pirate flags we had pirates skulls we felt like the little band off in the corner making this crazy little experimental game but you know we could leverage all of the stuff wave from total destruction but this also gave us the opportunity to start experimenting and we came up with this idea for this wrench tether gadget where the head of the wrench would detach and latch onto bolt so you could kind of pull them down it was really new concept for platforming and puzzles we had he could also pick up flaming lava rocks with it and throw them off of

grind rails and we had this really cool open island that she could freely explore with these towers we also had several NPCs that ragic could talk to an experiment with conversation trees want to see how far we can get pushing features that you often find an RPG style adventure games now to address the cliffhanger we use this game as an opportunity to reveal the identity of the villain who kidnapped Clank and we use dr. nefarious fans have been clamoring for his return ever since up your arsenal and bringing a back felt like a great way to build out our universe which now spans something like three galaxies so we saw a lot of positives with this project we developed of course the new wrench mechanic it was like one of our biggest returns on investment even investment was pretty small it's cool to see that it's still making money and it was for me actually one of the most enjoyable games to work on given its small scope it had much fewer headaches in terms of oops sorry

okay in terms of negatives our Metacritic was actually one of the lowest ones I think insomniac ever got was 75 at the time it was three to four hours long people complained about the length no weapon upgrades there was no quark and then we had this teapot matter which I like to call teapot gates yeah at one point in the game like you're traveling around this level I believe we called Morrow caverns with a decapitated space pirates head on a stick and he would walk around he would talk as you're walking from room to room and I thought it was funny if he just sang I'm a little teapot in order to open one of the doors it was just one of those like dumb funny jokes that you throw in without thinking a lot about it it turns out someone actually owns the rights to I'm a little teapot and that person has lawyers so they got involved in that she became teapot teapot gate so the bonus tip here is don't ever assume that a nursery rhyme is public domain yeah I was actually thinking of playing the clip we probably shouldn't be yeah

okay so for that game we adopted this why not mindset you know we really wanted to turn our curve ball into an opportunity and we felt like we did it gave us a chance to really flush out our universe it really helps you know experimentation we find helps lead to future breakthroughs and you really need to kind of do these on the heels of a success had we done this after deadlock that probably not would not have been a wise choice we're smaller cheaper games have lower stakes as well so for our next game it was Ratchet and Clank future a crack in time crack in time was my favorite and it's still available at hollow game stores everywhere thanks for the plug so we had less than a year to make our biggest PlayStation 3 game because you know quest for booty again ate up a lot of our pre-production time we really wanted this game to be great because we started to think that this was probably going to be the end of the trilogy if not the franchise it was going to be our

last and best ratchet Clank at the start of the game we revealed that Clank had been taken by the Sony to the gray clock which had fallen under the control of dr. nefarious we pulled the curtain back on clanks origins explaining his connection to the zone II as heir apparent to the station rather than just being a defect we revealed that Clank was destined to watch over the floor the flow of time and I hadn't even started watching Doctor Who yes we had Charles Martin a voice him and meeting the guy who plays Mario was definitely a career highlight for me I'm happy we don't have a picture of when I met him because you would absolutely be able to tell from the look on his face that it was a career highlight for me so Clank story led us to develop a lot of special time puzzles where players could play and record multiple versions of Clank to solve these mind-bending puzzles from our open world layout experimentation that we did in quest for booty we

actually developed this Krell Canyon level in a crack in time and remember that mythology branch called the court of azmuth well from that branch alone we were inspired to create a Lombax character named Aleister azmuth was a huge reveal for fans they helped us answer a lot of questions I mentioned earlier about ratchets history and Lombax lore we paid off other mythology branches as well the track annoyed sages became a full-on faction in the crack in time so this game was massive even featuring space exploration which is something that we really wish we could have done in previous games we finally got to do it with this one you could fly from plan to plan it and engage in space battles and even though our schedule was impossible we kept piling more onto our plates for this one so for example there's this idea that was pitched to our team about space radio where as you travel around the galaxy you can actually listen to different stations I think the audio guys were playing a lot of GTA at the time and it felt like something that could be really fun for a Ratchet and Clank but I had something like three days to write hours of

commercials DJ segways banter news broadcasts implementing it is I'm told the nightmare the other guys did it not me but this was an opportunity to build again build out our mythology take one step closer to the feel of a living breathing universe and everybody loved it it was I think it ended up being one of the biggest sort of selling points in the game and it's always a great sign when you're working on a project and it's not late in production and we feel like we're feature creeps been hitting us pretty hard and then you put in this other request but everyone's really excited to make it happen you see the potential of it so not only could you fly to these different planets of course you could visit these small spherical worlds and this of course was something that we had developed in going commando around the same time our animators were really hitting their stride in terms of making what felt like a feature quality movie I really hope this movie plays yeah

right work you ready to let those stallions out of the stable I was born wait who dr. nefarious has no authority here villain in fact I'm not even entirely convinced he's a real doctor so returned by sidekicks power before I'd bring the Thunder so as you can see our animators had a tremendous amount of fun with captain quark and of course we even had nurse quark I loved him as we headed towards the end of production for a crack in time Brian I talked about what to do with dr. nefarious we were fairly convinced this was going to be our last Ratchet and Clank game and we wanted to kill him off in spectacular fashion

something poetic and nuanced and beautifully tragic then we put him on top of a flying saucer and slammed him into his own space station we even hired an outside effects house to vaporize the entire level after it the crash like we made this guy super dead and I remember feeling really sorry for whatever poor writer would have the task of resurrecting him down the line we felt at the time that this was like the perfect send-off for such an iconic villain but of course if you played other games in the series you know this came back to bite me I remember how in the during the first game ratchet was kind of a sarcastic jerk by this time we had evolved him to the point where he could have moments like this so I can talk you out of this can i ratchet we have been on many adventures but the clock needs someone to protect it it is what I was built for [Music] our animators actually spent more time on that one shot than any other shot in

the in our cinematics and fans sent me messages saying that this is the first time a Ratchet and Clank game ever made them cried and I hope you all realize that there would be spoilers when you came to this talk so so a cracking time hit all of our franchise DNA it was a buddy story with heart imaginative weapons robust space exploration gadgets quark vibrant visuals Douglas Adams inspired humor and a great balance of shooting and platforming and then some it featured many favorites features from past games plus some familiar ones a TJ angry this was definitely our favorite game in the series what we considered to be a peak for the franchise but unfortunately we had a hard lesson here which is don't get cocky so every peak has its valley one of the things that was interesting is that you know a lot of times long-running series space franchise fatigue we'd ship what we thought was our best game and our last one but yet it had done well enough

to warrant some sequels and so we knew that there were still people out there who wanted Ratchet and Clank but reviewers who liked the game were raising concerns that the series is getting a bit long in the tooth so this was another time for us to adapt or die and the next three years the series took a number of detours what we learned after a crack in time was that friendly family games were moving into other popular genres like couch co-op with titles like LittleBigPlanet and Castle Crashers we're also finding that fewer younger players were playing less console games and were migrating towards mobile so we decided to make a four player co-op game Ratchet and Clank all for one and notice that we have our pal dr. nefarious in the bottom right that's the same guy we smashed into a space station so here's another little bonus tip for you never ring a bell if there's even a slight change that the publisher might want it unrig because after we

shipped the crack in time Chad does earn and show him McCabe they pitched this new ratchet game to Sony but one key piece of feedback they received was to make dr. nefarious a playable character I just remember hearing this and my jaw dropped I was like we just flew that dude into a space station and Greg Phillips and some of his like me was just a flesh wound so I used the regimen playing comic to get nefarious off the saucer before it crashed mayhaps not my most elegant retcon but I think you got to give me a pass on this one folks so the game had a number of highlights it took some of our classic ratchet gadgets like the suck cannon and the swing shot and turned them into these really cool co-op devices you could actually grab other characters and like throw them off of platforms you could have a chain of characters swinging along on swing shots and it was also a very gorgeous looking game i also thought it'd be funny to make captain Qwark president pork because I felt like the idea of a lying pompous blowhard celebrity getting elected president would be hilarious it's a joke that has not aged well so Oliver won embrace many

elements of her franchise DNA but excluded some most notably the buddy story and a third-person shooting mechanics one criticism we weren't prepared for was the title fit fans just found it too kid-friendly for the record like Chad and Shawn's original title was foreplay when that one did when that one didn't clear the one that I tried to push there was multiple organisms I and there you go and there you go yeah I think that we have been the fastest no I ever seen Soni okay so all for one did succeed financially and there was a lot of love for it but many fans and critics were also disappointed what followed was a full frontal assault which returned to classic gunplay it had this tower defense context but it lacked this heartfelt buddy story and the feeling of space exploration 2013's into the Nexus

was more of a return to form but felt like a half step towards the epic adventure that people expected so looking at this graph of the series and this isn't like inaccurate like I didn't actually measure out but not the scale it's not just scale yes it's clear that we hit a bit of a lull with these last three games you know while some of these experimental games had done well the reception for pansy drones was mixed but that's okay because what we found is that you really need to embrace the unknown and I know I realized that there's a bit of a contradiction here where I'm like saying well we adapted or died but we also had to embrace her franchise DNA and the truth is that it's it's a tough line to walk you know you have to constantly evolve you have to constantly change but then you also have to know what's made things great and trying to stick that landing is very tricky so we realized that you know to keep our

series going we had to take these bold steps we had to take these experiments to move it into new directions so now around the same time as we were working on into the Nexus development for Ratchet and Clank the movie had begun and for us this was a sign that we had really hit it big never did I dreamed that you know there'd be a movie based on this franchise with Paul Giamatti sylvester stallone rosario Dawson and John Goodman it was a great to know that ratchet Clank and quirk would be voiced by the original actors though and while we had some influence over the film we knew that we had to do right by the fans and make a great game despite being in the position of making a game based on a movie base on the original game the team had the challenges that we never had to face before because after I wrote the original draft in the movie it was handed off to writer director Kevin Munroe and Jerry swallow and the Rainmaker team up in Vancouver and from there things started to change around dramatically so we had to so we got to

experience the thrills of parallel development with an animated movie that was constantly in flux and certain Tommy acts North Carolina's studio director Chad desert and suggested that the ps4 game rather being called a reboot that we thought of it as a reimagine a ssin and the movie was go through numerous rewrites and we were always playing keep up with the changes don't even wanted us to use some of the movies cutscenes as game cinematics and since the movie storyline deviated from insomniacs mythology this presented a challenge how do we make a game that feels like our universe when it's based on a movie that since departed from its source material our solution was to tell the story through the eyes of an unreliable narrator this guy my favorite character Captain quark here is getting the full spa treatment over in Zorah doing prison with this device we could have quark exaggerated we could have live we could have manipulated events so we couldn't divert from the movie where we felt that was necessary so we updated all of our shooting mechanics and RPG gameplay I actually went back and tried to play the

original ratchet Clank and like all the controls were so weird to me I had trouble just like shooting something so he took all the lessons that we had learned over the entire series and we improved the game and brought it up to date metropolis made a return visit to this game where ratchet could fly his ship in a city with an insane amount of detail so ultimately we're raising our original game helped us reom brace what made this series great a robot and furry alien from opposite sides of the galaxy who team up to stop a super villain and become friends in the process we had this wonderful opportunity to have this epic read this epic do-over we took everything we used about what made Ratchet and Clank the world that the characters inhabited and how to face challenges optimistically and at times fire our engines into the unknown and of course the best games are made by the best teams which ourselves very lucky to have worked with some of the incredibly talented individuals over at

insomniac yeah it's been an amazing ride and I just want to thank you thank you snowland north to the voice actually for he's the Nathan Drake sigmund and also a knee headache helped us mentor this talk and I just want to thank Sony all the insomniacs all the creatives and wonderful people that have helped make Ratchet and Clank such an amazing franchise so thanks for coming and it looks like we have about 14 minutes or 13 minutes for questions thank you [Applause] so yeah if you could thank you here yes hi I wanted to ask about my favorite recurring planet planet Burbank and ask why in the first place the insomniac museum was added to the games why some didn't get them and the varying levels of that I feel like it's that Mike's doubt I can barely see oh maybe not okay

I thought so Mike style he was one of our designers I thought I'd recognize someone over there looks just like it's Mike South's doppelganger over there actually he actually we had all this cool like stuff that we were throwing away that we wanted people to see and so he actually spent extra time he was originally helping out QA on the first game and then he started to do some design work and became this great designer and so he just the spare time laid out this level he mapped out the Burbank floor and it was always something that we ended up doing kind of like someone would take on this project we never scheduled it in because all of our schedules were like maxed out where there was no room for them but in into the Nexus we actually did dedicate some time to a museum level and we gave it all the proper artwork and everything but that's something that I feel like should be in every Ratchet and Clank game moving forward certainly are there any other questions feel free to step up to the mic we don't throw anything or

bite oh we had some can you enlighten us on the art of stacking boxes sure so the question is the art of stacking boxes and how did that work I would have to go back and reread that dock but I remember it was in a crack in time that temple level be this big open space and there were giant stacks like ten crates high by like ten crates of detail and there was just like multiple versions of them and we just were like getting really tired because there's this weird compulsion to actually clear out all the boxes and then once we make you do that for like you know 10 minutes and like this one room it starts to get kind of painful so there's this so in his dock even he specified the rhythm the amount of boxes and how to stack them and also to vary it up in such a way where you could have explosive boxes and some

crates that would encourage the wrench throw you'd stupidly stack boxes behind enemies that were explosive so you could knock an enemy into them we actually had special code where the enemy would magnets kind of to the the crates so that you would typically see them getting thrown through them so there's lots of little things like that that just made it so much more satisfying I one thing to stay ahead to that the the bolts that would pop out of those crates I've always interested when I joined insomniac the audio team told me that they actually based that sound on Vegas slot machines because those were designed to make you feel happy when you would collect the coins so it's even like a little bit of psychology in it thank you I got interaction in clay with the ps3 games and that was my first introduction to him and I loved him and I usually don't 100% games but I loved that game so much because I loved that they would just banter during the level and they would banter on the way to a level okay and once I completed the story and I wanted to hundred percent they stopped

talking completely and when you were travelling the ship it's like they were deliberately mad at each other or something like this silence and it's like I never hear their voices again they spend too long together yeah right after our cabin fever says it was so weird I've never experienced that like feeling of it's not a complaint but it's certainly something that we always look into because it's like in a crack in time I remember vividly that there were 10,000 lines of dialogue that I wrote that made it into the game and it's not counting what we cut which was probably another 10,000 to be honest with you and like so when we dumped these massive amounts of dialogue into the game there's always somebody who has to go in there and balance them to make sure they don't play too much too often they don't trip over each other so it may have been a cool down issue it may have just been like they're afraid that it would start to get to repeating something like that it's like balancing dialogue in a game so it doesn't trip over or anything else that you're doing is a full-time job in and of itself so so that we're always constantly working on just to add to

that when we first implemented like mr. zerkin I think that Clank talking we'd have like these updates and at one point one person just like I just want this game to shut up it's like everything was talking all the time so we have actually figure out the right pacing for that yeah my question is with like the newest game and the movie they made righteous Clint face like rounder and like softer and I'm just kind of wondering if you guys know why because it didn't like look like ratchet anymore like he still felt like ratchet but didn't really I don't know it was uncanny yeah I know what you mean I'd first like the plan when we because I was working with the team during the first couple months of the ratchet movie and we sent all our assets basically up to them with the idea that the same assets would be used in the movie but ultimately when they prop when they pulled it into their animation software it didn't translate very well so they actually had to rebuild everything and we had animators and artists who would give as much feedback as they could not just when it came to the models but also the way that

ratchets miles away that Clank ellipses had that kind of thing and unfortunately this is something that goes with the territory any time you have somebody who hasn't been working on that franchise for you know 15 years where they do their best to mimic but sometimes it just doesn't work out the way the way fans expect yeah this was interesting on tools of destruction we did a commercial for a digital domain is this amazing effects house animated ratchet we're like who is that guy because he just was face was off everything was different and even though there had super talented animators we ended up creating like a model sheet where one of our animated poses of his face so that people could follow it it's really hard to get right like when people start to know character really well you can tell when it's off question over here hi um so Ratchet and Clank got me into the games industry so I was just curious like what got you guys into the industry well wow that's a great question well the thing that got me into the game industry I mean I it's fine like when I

I'd always been a gamer ever since I was a kid I even remember when I was 12 I wrote a story for Super Mario Brothers and I sent it into the address on the back of a Nintendo Power magazine because in my mind everything was just in one building they would just like run up in years ago but it didn't really it didn't really work out like that but when I came out to LA to start a writing career I also had a background in computer animation and ended up doing QA and doing like design work over at insomniac and then they found out that I wrote in and that became sort of my my big entrance into that into the industry yeah I actually started playing games in the early 80s I was totally into the Atari I went to the smokey arcades all the time played all the games there and then a certain point I kind of stopped playing games I just really want to figure out how to make them I spent a lot of the time in the 80s messing around my Commodore 64 trying to figure out how to program as like super nerdy and then I didn't realize I could actually get a job in the early 90s as a game designer or an artist so

fortunately this opportunity just came up where I could do art and back in 1991 artists were actually scared of computers they just want to use paintbrushes anyone touch that stuff and I was like one of the few people willing to do that so I ended up getting a job and doing something I really love to do thank you that's a great question I don't know how we're on time is 12:30 but I think we what's the fist thing does that mean one more question gotcha okay one more one more question all right because I remember vaguely that the jak and daxter engine was the same one that you guys used to Ratchet and Clank and when they made a sequel you would update your tech and how long did you guys do that that's a great question it comes up a lot and I unfortunately I wasn't a tech guy working on it I know that we didn't just outright take their engine they like just outright take ours or like lots of components that we tried to share but it's always hard to kind of integrate that technically back then so

that in the very early days there was definitely some some components that were being shared I just don't know the specifics of that because I remember like the patch rendering and then the vehicles got added and jak and daxter too and some other went into writing tank three yeah we typically didn't share any like gameplay it's more on the rendering side okay thanks okay I think we're that's it oh wait wait oh if anybody has any further questions the speakers can go to room 20 22 or 2024 around the area over there for further questions in Q&A with tables okay we will be there it's 22222 okay well thanks a lot everybody [Applause]