Among Friends - An Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Post-Mortem

[Music] good afternoon GDC uh GDC 2010 all right best GDC ever um good afternoon uh and welcome to among friends uh and Uncharted 2 among Thieves postmortem um please uh set your mobile devices to mute and don't forget to fill out your feedback forms at the end of the session thanks uh my name is Richard larand and I'm a game designer at nauy dog I was the co-lead designer of uh Uncharted 2 among Thieves and today I'm going to talk you through how we went about developing our game uh what went right and what blew up in our faces like a red explosive barrel uh as you might know Naughty Dog uh our studio um is the creator of the mul million selling Crash Bandicoot and

Jack and Daxter series of games we're based in Santa Monica in Southern California and we currently have about 120 people on staff in 2007 we released Uncharted Drake's Fortune our first game for the PlayStation 3 which introduced The World To The Adventurous Fortune Hunter Nathan Drake and last fall we released Uncharted 2 among Thieves which has turned out to be the most successful game in our studios's history now we'd had a a rough ride on Uncharted Drake's Fortune including a mid project production reset that saw us throwing away a lot of what we' done and starting over we were very happy with the game that resulted but with our next game we wanted to do a lot more well we got what we wished for because Uncharted 2 was the most ambitious project we'd ever attempted at nauy dog and we chose to tackle some particularly brutal challenges both

Technical and design related so how did we manag not to screw it up uh well there were some things that we nearly did screw up and hopefully this postmortem will help you to avoid at least some of the spiky ceilinged pit traps that we fell into so we start every new project with a short list of project goals and we refer back to them throughout development to make sure that we're staying on track as we completed Uncharted Drake's Fortune we already knew that we wanted to make a sequel and we began to discuss what we wanted to do with it our Topline goal was that we really wanted to create something that a lot of us at the studio had been dreaming about for a really long time that is to say a fully playable version of a big summer blockbuster action adventure movie which kept the player in moment to moment control nearly all the time as the drama exploded around

them when we were making Uncharted Drake's Fortune we'd gone back to the roots of Adventure romance and Pulp Fiction for our inspiration kind of giving them a contemporary spin well this time out we wanted to stick to the same guiding principles for the world of Uncharted in terms of creating a colorful Adventure that didn't take it didn't take itself too seriously um but we also wanted to outdo ourselves in every way that we could think of our story in Uncharted is character-driven rather than plot driven and we decided to include a larger cast of characters in Uncharted 2 the other characters would help us to show more of the world that Nate operates in and would act kind of like emotional satellites revealing more about both the good and the darker sides of Nate's character so going through the process of discussing the goals of the project led us to decide what Uncharted 2 would be a

out while Uncharted Drake's Fortune had greed and its consequences as its theme Uncharted 2 among Thieves would be about trust and betrayal and whether it's better to stay loyal to your friends or to act out of self-interest uh we were going to improve and add to the gameplay of Uncharted of course in a focused way that would service this playable Cinema feel that we wanted to capture and which would drive many different technological improvements in our engine um we also knew that there were a lot of graphical improvements that we could make and finally we wanted to make an online multiplayer game using the Uncharted mechanics we knew that at the very least we wanted to make a competitive game uh with several different game types so armed with our project goals we set out into the pre-production phase of our project which lasted for about the first 6 months of our 22-month development cycle

pre-production is of course a very important phase of any game development Endeavor and messing it up often means messing up the whole project the way that we handle pre-production at naughty dog is one of the things that we think makes us unusual as a studio in that during pre-production uh we don't have anything in the way of conventional deadlines or deliverables our pre-production period is this very free form time where we conduct brainstorms we talk about gameplay and story ideas we make loads of concept art and pre visualization animations and we do as much prototyping of gameplay as we can with whatever tools that we happen to have on hand uh and I'll show you some of our previous animations in a few minutes so by doing this we pretty quickly come up with a handful of ideas that are simply too good not to include in the game one such idea that came to us very early was embodied in a simple photograph that of the parro Tang the

famous Tiger's Nest Monastery in the tiny country of Bhutan uh at the Eastern end of the Himalayas the way that the monastery seems to cling onto the side of the cliff seems perfect for Uncharted so the photo gave us a good grounding in reality for the larger than life scenario that we invented and it was also suggestive of the kind of perilous climbing gameplay that we love so much so we soon began to design and build a level based on the Tiger's Nest uh long before we had any real idea of how it fit into the rest of the game and there's a cautionary Tale in there which I'll tell in a moment another idea that came to us early in pre-production was the notion that Drake would fight along the top of a train as It sped through a landscape the idea was such a perfect fit with the pulp inspired tone of Uncharted that we knew that we had to do it and this piece of concept Illustrated the idea for us

just perfectly however we didn't want to go the same route that train levels in video games had taken in the past where the train is actually static and the background is scrolling by creating the illusion of movement we wanted to do it for real and that gives me a chance to describe how gameplay ideas like these in pre-production can drive the technology path that we take so the desire to create this level which was one of the first that we conceived and one of the last that we completed drove an enormous chunk of the new technology we created for Uncharted 2 technology that became very important for the Cinematic set pieces throughout the whole game uh we called it our Dynamic object traversal system anyone anyone uh this system provided us with the ability to have player character Nathan Drake and all of his allies and

enemies in the game able to use all of their traversal and combat abilities on any moving object now this might not seem like a big deal but for those of us who had been working on 3D character action games for a while it was pretty much the Holy Grail because it would allow us to do things that we had only been able to dream of before it was amazingly complicated to get this Dynamic object traversal system to work our programmers had to touch or rewrite nearly every system in the game from the player control to objects to Collision to the enemies and allies AI once we decided to do it though our programmers got to work on it straight away and they were already busy with it while we were in pre-production finally finishing it partway through full production taking the leap to do something like this as crazy as this took a lot of tenacity and courage and we had to keep going even when it felt like an impossible task but happily it

paid off in countless ways from the collapsing hotel to the Convoy Uncharted 2 was able to stand out from the crowd and wow our players with things that they' just never seen before one more idea that emerged from pre-production was that of Nate collapsing in the snow and being rescued by a mysterious stranger that for a long time we just called The Rescuer uh Nate would then wake up in a peaceful Himalayan Village and discover that his savior was a village leader named Tenzin and that they didn't share a common language we planned that Nate would leave the village with tenzen to explore a puzzling Mountain Cave System uh before returning to the Village uh now to a village now under attack by a very well equipped Army we thought that this would create a particular sequence of emotional experience for the player almost entirely through gameplay and even though much of the rest of the

story was still undecided we were able to stick a pin in this idea and proceed confident that it would find a home in the game now you can hear much more about these kinds of techniques and how we used gameplay and Allied characters to create emotional experiences for the player by heading over to tomorrow's session uh creating the active cinematic experience of Uncharted 2 by our game director Bruce sty and my co-lead designer Neil drugman it's going to be excellent don't miss it so as our list of ideas grew we experimented with putting them together in different orders to see what kinds of story ideas would emerge we used a board full of index cards with story beats and character goals and gameplay moments that we could move around easily to try on different sequences of play so with a lot of conversation lots and lots of in-depth Research into places and history and then with a great

deal of careful thought and hard analytical work sequences of Storytelling gameplay started to come together and we soon had big chunks of the game figured out now this is how we create one of the most important documents of the project and the only deliverable for our pre-production period it's a short spreadsheet uh you can see part of it here that we call our macro design so the macro design is basically a list of the game's levels and corresponding story beats it shows the locations that the game will visit what play mechanics are used in each level and whether they're core mechanics or special gameplay sequences like say a vehical sequence it shows the enemies that the player will encounter and what allies will accompany Drake on each stage of his journey the macro also showed us that we would have a focus on Asia as a location for much of the story that the true

story of Marco Polo's Lost Fleet would provide us with our real life historical mystery for the game and that the plot would hinge around an old friend of Nathan Dres who would ultimately betray him so the macro is something like a game design document but it's a lot more concrete than any 100 page game design ever written at the end of pre-production because it has enough of a level of abstraction that you don't waste time devising details that later get changed the macro design for Uncharted 2 was only 70 rows long and it shows the structure of the game that we shipped a full year and a half later almost exactly to within 5 or 10% so as we progressed through pre-production there were a couple of other important gameplay systems that we decided to get busy with there were a few gaps and spaces in the play mechanics of Uncharted Drake's Fortune so for Uncharted 2 we gave Nate some new

mechanics to fill things out like brachiating on monkey bars uh swinging on free ropes and a Nifty new hand overhand free climbing ability we also wanted Nate to be able to pull out his gun and return fire to an enemy no matter what he was doing in the world whether he was climbing balancing on a fallen beam and even when he was in midair during a jump it didn't take us very long to flesh out these abilities and expanding Drake's traversal gun play like this was good for us when it came to devising combat scenarios because it meant that we could throw down some enemies in just any section of the game and in that way discover novel combat setups in the most unexpected traversal sequences we also started work early in pre-production on improvements to our AI that let players choose to engage with our combat setups in an action stealth way

in order to let players hide out and observe the enemies and figure out how to possibly infiltrate their ranks and even manipulate them into positions that would make them easier to defeat we gave our enemies an investigate behavior that would that they would use when they thought they'd heard or seen something unusual and also a search behavior that they would use when they had seen Drake but they didn't currently know where he was now these techniques paid off right throughout the whole player experience so it was really good that we got started on them early during pre-production one last important thing for us to do during pre-production was to get a handle on how long it was going to take us to create the big set pieces that we wanted to have in the game one particular sequence from Uncharted Drake's Fortune had stuck in our minds and really fired our imaginations it was the one you can see here just a simple sequence at the island waterfall where an explosion near a truck full of enemies flips the truck and forms a

bridge it was a really dramatic moment just like something from one of our favorite action adventure movies but it played out almost entirely in gameplay it made us feel that we had we had only begun to scratch the surface of what was possible in terms of delivering a truly interactive cinematic experience and we thought that making bigger set pieces and moving away from so-called QuickTime events uh was probably a way to go well it was a great way to go and everyone seems to really like the set pieces in Uncharted 2 however they are enormously timec consuming to implement we had foreseen this and so early on in pre-production we got busy building a version of the collapsing bridge in the monastery that you encounter towards the end of the game we confirmed our suspicions about how extremely timec consuming that kind of sequence was to build and so we hired some very

technical scripting designers trying to make sure that we had enough people to get everything done on in time it didn't quite work out perfectly though as you'll hear later on one of the most important things that we had taken away from our postmortem of Uncharted Drake's Fortune was that simply getting on and starting to build something is the very best way to go about the creation of a video game we'd spent far too long theorizing about our games design uh and production during the creation of the first Uncharted and it wasn't until we pressed forward with the construction of some gameplay and levels that we made the real discoveries that allowed us to optimize the production and finish the game in good style so we did our best to hit the ground running with Uncharted 2 uh the team was eager to keep the production momentum that we built up over the previous three years working on Uncharted Drake's Fortune and using the

first ideas we decided that we would use everyone began to create art and Implement game mechanics and layout levels almost immediately now this meant that our artists were polishing their level building approach and making useful assets much earlier than they'd been able to before and by the time we hit full production we were in a much better position than we had been at the same stage of the last project however moving forward so quickly meant that the end of pre-production and the beginning of full production kind of got a bit blurry we came to the official end of pre-production when we finished our macro design but it was something of a soft finish uh the parts of the macro to do with the way that the story came together at the end of the game were a bit light on detail uh and this led us directly into what could have been an enormous disaster for our project and which we only narrowly

avoided it took us a long time to work out how the story would come together uh in the monastery in particular and when you play it through you might notice that there aren't really enough strong story beats there to match the length and the intensity of the game play and it's the first place in the game where the pace of the experience kind of begins to lose steam a bit of course as soon as we realized what was happening we scrambled to patch things up but at the end of the day we had committed too much to the level in terms of its final art and we couldn't really bring about a perfect fix so this is the first major takeaway from this postmortem of Uncharted 2 that it's important to have a strong macro design if the macro is solid and describes a rising and falling rhythm of story that tightly matches The rhythms of the game play then you can be confident that your game is going to rock

however if your macro has any weak spots do make sure you firm them up before you commit too much in the way of final art to that part of the game and tried to pay special attention to pacing issues for parts of the game whose level design starts early and whose story design finishes late so anyway to round off the pre-production section of my talk uh I want to show you guys what is a world exclusive especially for GDC uh while we were making Uncharted Drake's Fortune we had learned firsthand about the power of pre-rendered prev visualization animations by making quickly and Loosely animated sequences pre-rendered linear sequences with blocky low detailed worlds and characters we can very quickly start to refine our ideas uh the kinds of ideas that we'd had for moments in the game they're kind of like moving concept art and we refer back to them all throughout the uh level layout

process um only one of these animations have been seen outside of Sony before so I'm delighted to be able to show them to you guys today um they the the previous animations are silent and I'll kind of uh talk you through them and then we'll look at some comparative pieces of gameplay from the shipping game so uh this first one is very simple just to kind of get you into the idea um I think we were during pre-production when we made this we knew that we wanted to have this sequence of exploration we wanted tenzen to put up a a free swinging rope that Drake would then use uh and uh you can see just how much of the camera blocking in particular um we discovered uh in the process of creating and refining this this animation check out tenzin's awesome hat and pipe

[Music] [Music] okay we're even so you can see how we worked out the camera blocking very early very early this one's in two parts we didn't use these previous conceptions um very much we did use this one Drake taking cover on a corner uh which then gets blown up by the tank we made it so that if you ran directly away from the tank you would get killed by the Tank's ma machine gun in order to be able to push the player around the level while still giving them freedom of movement but it did really help us start to set the tone for the village uh this next sequence you can see much more directly translates into the game you can see the ongoing love

affair that we have with parkour and free running and the fact uh that we've probably recently seen the born ultimatum and uh and if you played Uncharted 2 you will recognize this moment it didn't translate directly and in fact you'll see that the sequence of play leading up to this hey what's up no no

no and then this last one is a little different this shows the use of um previous animatics um just ahead of of full production we made this one uh just before we uh implemented the sequence in the collapsing hotel which was part of our E3 um Sony press event demo and you can see that there's an extremely tight correspondence between this prev visualization and uh and the events should be what the hell is he doing this isn't good cra

down jump we were we were almost in that so hopefully you can see just how valuable these kinds of uh pre-rendered linear animatic movies are um the it's also uh extremely cool to involve your talented animators in the pre-production phase because of course they have so many great ideas about moment to moment action and you can all start to have an on-screen discussion about just how events in the game might play out so we officially started full

production when we finished our macro design in April 2008 of course once we were in full production we needed some Micro Design to go along with our macro design what we call Micro Design is all the detailed design work that needs to be done to create a video game level layout mechanics development and so on we do this macro design work on a just in time basis it's a bit like grommet laying out the toy train tracks only just ahead of himself in the wrong trousers we had gotten a leg up with the Micro Design during pre-production and we were just far enough ahead of the team that we were able to move forward smoothly even though this part of the way that we work might seem like a pretty seat of the pants way to do things we think that it's the way that a lot of game development happens in truth and that we just have the courage to make it an official part of our Pro process one very important important and timec consuming part of the Micro Design

is level layout of course inspired by our philosophy that getting on and building out the game is the best way to go about things we adopted a new level layout approach for Uncharted 2 that sorus spending less time working on detailed paper maps of our levels and instead designing our Levels by creating what we refer to as block mesh which some studios refer to as white box or gray box we started by sketching out an exper iial flow for the player and then meeting with the artists and the programmers who would be working on the level with the designers to get their input and their ideas then we just started building uh simple geometry in Maya to rough out a physical footprint for the level and play testing it on literally anyone who came within Arm's Reach and getting constructive input from as many different people as possible we started to do paintovers with our concept artists to move our conception of the look of the level along uh and after

that it was simply a question of iterating as much and as quickly as we could before we needed to hand off the block mesh to our environment artists who would continue to iterate on the level by making Progressive detail passes until we eventually arrive at the finished art there is one potential downside to rushing ahead with level layout in Block mesh like this which is that there's a danger of not putting quite enough thought into the layout and of missing some opportunities to make it multi-dimensional in terms of its gameplay possibilities you also run the risk of not thinking about whether what you laid out as a blank wall will become filled with attractive detail and look climbable uh misleading or confusing the player and unfortunately this is a pretty serious problem in Uncharted 2 um especially in detail rich areas uh like the one you see here so in the future we're going to try and find a better balance as regards these aspects of our

layout process and we're going to try and have more of a layout focus on realistic architecture earlier and how its details will affect the player's experience in full production our project runs much like a conventionally scheduled game development project um working from the macro design we drew up a simple schedule for the environment art in a spreadsheet blocking out week- long chunks of time for our environment art groups we were able to do this with confidence because the macro design had given us just enough detail to see where our effort should be distributed and we knew that since the creation of the environments was the most timec consuming thing that we had on our plates we could use this main schedule as a kind of backbone of schedule for everything else to hang off and that we could always be sure that we were making solid progress towards our final goal as the level designs firmed up we also got busy making lists of everything

that we needed for each level since we wanted to make each one as functionally complete um as soon as we could so we listed out objects sound effects visual effects and animations that we needed to tie everything together and we got them into the hands of the relevant leads as early as we could we need an enormous volume of entities to make a game like Uncharted 2 for example we had 80 in-game cinematic animations uh what we call igc's in Uncharted Drake's Fortune but we had 564 igc's for Uncharted 2 now this is a pretty amazingly large amount of work to requisition and produce on an ad hoc basis so the leads of each department had to juggle their priorities a lot and they worked very hard to get everything built in the right order they had to be very patient as the designer of each level came up to them bugging them over over and over again for the stuff that they needed and it's

really only because of our ability to work together without much friction um that our games always come together on time so now let's talk Tech for a bit uh we had created an entirely new engine from scratch in the course of developing the first Uncharted and that really allowed us to hit the ground running when we started Uncharted 2 but we had a long laundry list of improvements and updates that we wanted to make and by the time we finished we'd changed so much that we dubbed the engine The Naughty Dog engine 2.0 as you probably heard already if you're interested in PS3 development uh we went cell processor crazy on Uncharted 2 we were famous for saying that Uncharted Drakes Fortune probably only used about 30% of the capacity of the cell processor uh which is of course the powerful chip that lies at the heart of the PlayStation 3's

architecture and so from the very beginning of the project our programs were focused on making sure that we squeezed every last ounce of performance out of the cell the key to doing this was deciding which jobs we wanted to farm out to the cell and then writing hand optimized code to do those jobs as efficiently as possible and you can see just how much of what the cell's spus are doing um has been diligently optimized by a cycle counting programmer in this screenshot probably the biggest technical change from the way that we did things on the first Uncharted was that we used the cell processor as a graphics chip running it in parallel with the PS3's dedicated graphics processor the RSX we only did vertex processing on the spus before Uncharted 2 uh but now we do pixel processing and we get much richer Graphics by doing this by moving jobs to the spus we were free

to do more on the RSX and you can see the graphical Leap Forward that we made as a result of this when you look at the snow and the ice shaders that we created for the ice cave you can also see the fur shaders uh it also made the fur shaders possible for our awesome howling wolves I so wish we could get this t-shirt um we used light Maps uh for the first time to get better detail in our pre-rendered shadowing in Uncharted 2 and to complement them we were also able to use a lighting technique called screen space ambient occlusion or ssao which was hugely instrumental in making our game look as solid and as grounded as it does ssao is a rendering technique for efficiently approximating the computer Graphics ambient occlusion effect in real time and as I move through these slides

hopefully you can notice the effect ambient occlusion is what simulates the real world effect of the darkening that you see in nooks and crannies and in the concave space where two convex objects touch each other uh like uh in between your fingers right here um our ssao is completely on the cell processor spus our graphic postprocessing effects were also completely on the spus these included big improvements in the quality of our Bloom effects and uh the huge leaps forward that we made with depth of field which was kind of a hack for the first Uncharted but which for Uncharted 2 was a much more physically correct solution which of course made the times that we used it in the service of cinemat cinematography that much more powerful as a storytelling tool we also implemented a filmic HDR response curve and Uncharted 2 has a

much wider range of colors in between light and dark than its predecessor making it look much more like the game was shot on film again supporting our goal of creating a cinematic reality so 9 months before launch we suddenly realized that our frame rate was to put it bluntly pretty crap so we had to mobilize to fix it and right up to to the end of the project we had a huge focus on frame rate both our programmers and our artists had to work very hard on the issue to make sure that we hit 30 frames a second consistently throughout the whole game and so banish some of the issues with tearing and stuttering that we'd experienced with Uncharted Drake's Fortune we had to give people the analytic tools they needed to keep the game inside frame rate and we had to make a memory sacrifice in order to achieve the triple suffering solution that finally got rid of the

tearing now this is an issue that plagues many teams I know and we just wanted to stand up and say that the only way that we were able to tackle it was to regard it as a very serious problem that we simply couldn't let slide and then educate those on the team who needed more insight into the specialist knowledge required to fix the problem so it was a ton of hard work but it was totally worth it uh So speaking of hard work and to close out this section on the technological chops of Uncharted 2 uh I wanted to quickly come back to the subject of our train level like I said the train was one of the first levels that we started on and one of the last levels that got finished and to be frank it was an evil monster of a level to create in our train level there is a train of 50 separate train cars that are really moving along through our streaming environments at a pretty good

lick uh you could see all 50 cars at pretty much any time during the level uh and when we first started building the level when you looked at the first car from the last car the little lamp hanging on the front of the first car was still swinging we had developed but we hadn't really used uh a level of detail system for the first Uncharted um but the train certainly made us put it into action in double quick time as I'm sure you can imagine now we had as a design goal that the train should only progress in the world if you were progressing along it and in order to make this happen we had to do a lot of weird stuff uh sometimes teleporting the train into new positions depending on what you did and where you died and this along with just the general craziness of the whole idea of doing a train for real like this led to a lot of bugs as you can imagine particularly with the enemy's navigational systems uh they would get really confused every

time the train teleported for instance um also for a long time when you shot the enemies and they dropped their weapons the weapon would Zoom back off uh down the track where you'd come from as it shifted into the coordinate system of the world even better than that grenades would fly back in your face and blow you up after you'd thrown them uh to cap things off at one point we realized that the players gun aiming raycasts were aiming at where the enemies had been a frame ago now this hadn't made much difference in most of the levels but in the train level the enemy was back down the track uh 2 m a frame ago and so your aiming was suddenly 2 m off uh so that was just another bug that we had to fix and all of this goes to show why even though the train level was a real headache for everyone involved it was a very positive thing to have such an extreme test case around because it helped tighten up our game right across

the board and it made every system much more robust we could say to each other well if it works in train it must work everywhere in other words not only had we made our game run at 30 frames a second we'd also made it run at 60 M hour thanks for the laugh that got groaned at when I rehearsed it so it would have been a real disaster if we hadn't started work on the train level right at the beginning of the project but it now represents a real technological Marvel for us where good game design and an amazing feat of engineering come together to create something that we hope is truly memorable now as I said we decided fairly early on in the development of Uncharted 2 that we wanted it to have a multiplayer component and we were happy looking back that we' made the right decisions at the right times in order to make this happen you can see one of our multiplayer Arenas right here in fact we'd had such a good experience

making the multiplayer part of Uncharted 2 that we think that we would now not want to make a game that didn't have some kind of multiplayer uh or at least networked capability since it's such a good way for us to connect with our community of players and because it affords so many interesting game design opportunities in order to create our multiplayer game all we did was simply take Nathan Drake's mve set from the single player game and implemented it in a competitive multiplayer environment and we were delighted by the way that it immediately felt right we devised a whole bunch of different game types building outwards from pretty simple team death matches to intensely collaborative match types like plunder which is our take on Capture the Flag where you have to get a big gold head back to a treasure chest in your base one of our Studio's co-presidents Kristoff ballestra wrote all of our networking code inhouse from the ground up he gave us a very solid base to build our multiplayer game on and he was able

to support us throughout the whole of development uh even though he had a lot of other responsibilities rather than going with a dedicated server service we chose to use the Amazon elastic compute Cloud uh otherwise known as ec2 for things like our statistics and the Machinima Cinema files that players are able to upload to to the network um Amazon's ec2 service is very scalable basically Al you only pay for as much bandwidth as you use and by choosing to use it we uh have saved ourselves what will probably add up to a large fraction of a million dollars uh across the lifetime of our multiplayer game so that's something to think about uh we' hired a dedicated multiplayer designer in August of 2008 which meant that we had someone acting as a full-time Champion uh of the multiplayer experience for the most important phase of its development as soon as we were able we

started having daily half-hour play tests of multiplayer right after lunch with the whole company invited to take part and the short often very heated discussions that would take place after each play test were really vitally important for helping us to refine our multiplayer gameplay and for troubleshooting the problems that we encountered about halfway through full production we decided that it would be great to have some Cooperative missions and we put another designer that we had just hired in charge of them uh as you'll know if you've played them they're like little alternate reality missions set in levels that we excerpted from the single player game with new scenarios uh for the Uncharted characters to have little short uh mini adventures in um they're a ton of fun and uh we think our players love them but looking back deciding to try and create Co-op missions so late in the day might have been the point where we began

to overextend ourselves um but our multiplayer guys became such a great team uh and they really rocked the huge responsibility that uh multiplayer implied when we announced our multiplayer game um at a special press event um in early 2009 some Internet Posting fans of Uncharted Drake's Fortune were concerned that the single player game of Uncharted 2 was going to suffer as a result of the attention that we would have to give our multiplayer game well even though we did have to do a lot of hard work to realize all of our Ambitions it turned out that the multiplayer actually helped the single player game you see we'd had to tighten up the player mechanics and make them a lot snappier once we' got them into a multiplayer context and uh that actually fed back into the single player game uh and gave it a much better tighter feel these are the kinds of synergies that we love to find when we're building a game uh and we're always on the

lookout for them so that was a terrific one to discover during the development of Uncharted 2 we took our first steps into what was for us our um where we took our first steps into the Brave New World of outsourced art assets uh we worked with XC in Taiwan and Lady Luck in the Philippines and both Studios did a really amazing job for our part we uh made sure that we gave our partners everything they needed to succeed and we almost went as far as training them to make art that we could use we would provide a package of reference materials that included specifications and quite detailed construction instructions um screenshots of the locations where the assets would be used to show their context and prototype geometry to Define precise the volumes that the assets should occupy we ended up Outsourcing all sorts

of work from environments and cutscene stages to characters and accessories uh along with um monotonous work like UV and loding and it's really thanks to our Outsourcing teams that our game is as full of ey candy as it is uh Outsourcing in this way didn't seem to have any uncomfortable or negative effects on our company culture either we were simply very happy to have the additional help uh and it meant that we could scale up and down where necessary without having to strain our internal infrastructure through costly expansion or the horrible discomfort of layoffs it also meant that our level artists were able to spend more time focused on maintaining their levels and iterating on level design with our game designers while someone else sweated at least some of the details so about 2 months out from E3 last year

we started to organize what we were going to show at the event we had two big deliverables uh a playable demo of a section of the game in our fictional nepes city and a movie style trailer that would show a lot of different parts of the game however while we'd started work on everything that we wanted to show a lot of the assets and gameplay were going to need a great deal of Polish if they were going to be as impressive to E3 attendees as we wanted them to be and we often do this with our projects at Naughty Dog uh using a deadline to do with showing our game in public to drive production and the raw Terror that that it inspires certainly helps us to buckle down to some serious polish in the end our E3 demo went very well creating the right impression at the Sony press event uh where our other co-president Evan gave it an amazingly shooted live Drive uh and we were also very pleased with the way that the trailer turned out but the next time you watch our E3 trailer I want you to bear

in mind that the things that you see in there were almost the only things in the game that were finished to that level of Polish and if the camera had turned just a meter to the left or the right you'd be seeing behind the scenes and not in a very good way so making the demo in the trailer was extremely useful because it told us exactly how much work we were going to have to do to bring things up to a level of polish that we were happy with and we found out that that was a lot of work indeed it was round about this time in the spring of 2009 that we realized just how much game we had bitten off and that we were going to have to either chew extra hard or make some Cuts or choke between competitive multiplayer our Co-op modes and our sizable single player game we've been really ambitious probably over ambitious in particular even though we tried to

plan ahead for them the set pieces in the single player game had taken much longer to create and polish than we'd anticipated and putting them together was immensely difficult far worse than some of us had experienced Even in our most brutal crunches can you hear that throbbing it's kind of matching the dramatic tone of this moment we know that a lot lot of developers who enjoyed Uncharted 2 are probably going to be aiming high now in terms of their own set pieces and so another important takeway from this postmortem is a warning about just how long it takes to get that stuff right even though we'd planned ahead the set pieces took much much longer than we'd expected and they contributed significantly to the crunch that we experienced at the end of the project so as Alpha got closer we set about seeing where we could make some cuts and reduce the scope of the game and we managed to make layout reductions

to several levels early enough that we hadn't invested that many art resources in the affected areas we'd also lived with the Prototype block mesh versions of the levels and their gameplay for long enough that we could see fairly clearly what we should keep and what should be cut however we didn't cut to the point where we were going to be able to Coast to the finish line and life throughout 2009 was tough for pretty much everyone naughty dog we have never had mandated Crunch at naughty dog but we have hired people with personality types that make them hardworking willing to accept responsibility and perfectionist and that led to many months of long hours late nights and truncated or skipped weekends of downtime the E3 demo marked the beginning of long hours for almost everyone at the company although many people had been working extra hard for much longer than that and that led to a

summer of stresses on people's family lives and personal health and of course the problem of the reduced productivity of tired people so fortunately no one got into as bad a state as this guy uh and while we don't think will'll ever be a studio that works 9 to5 year round we do take the threat that crunch presents to the Integrity of the studio and the well-being of the Naughty Dogs very seriously we're continuing to discuss ways that we can avoid ever having to repeat the experience of Uncharted 2 in terms of the toll that the Project's crunch took we know that we have to become more disciplined about setting and hitting internal deadlines as well as external ones uh to get more traction on our projects earlier and we're going to try other approaches uh like putting mandatory limits on the amount of time that people can spend at the office so changing track a bit in the course of

Uncharted 2 we did more play testing than we'd ever done before running 15 play tests over the last 10 months of the project compared to only seven over the whole 3 years of the development of Uncharted Drake's Fortune now these were formal play tests with groups of 10 players selected from the general public who would play the game uh or as much game as we had right through we do this in addition to all of the informal play testing that we do every day on each other play testing and Metric data analysis have always been very important tools for us but they were particularly important for Uncharted 2 because several complex sequences of gameplay only came together very late in the project and in order to make sure that we weren't introducing any difficulty spikes we had to scramble to add additional sanity check play tests right up to just days before gold

Master doing the play tests in house was the only way that running so many tests was possible especially when a lot of them took place at short notice and it also had the enormous benefit of allowing all of our designers and QA leads to regularly see their levels in action with brand new players as our play testers played we uploaded metric data about their actions to a database over the network things like how long it took them to complete each part of the game or how frequently they died between continue points when we put that data into a spreadsheet and looked at the maximum minimum and median values for each point of data and then colorcoded cells that had values above certain targets parts of the game that were potentially problematic immediately jumped out at us and we could then start looking at the game playay videos that we had recorded during the play test sessions to

investigate each potential problem notice that one poor player uh had to uh play our trainyard fight 27 times before they finally beat it that was horrifying when we saw it luckily we were able to spot that one and fix it so it took a lot of energy and commitment to properly carry through with diligently play testing every last thing we built but it was definitely worth it in terms of the quality of the game that we shipped as we approached our Alpha deadline we organized a series of rolling deadlines locking down the levels in small groups over the course of the four weeks leading up to each of our Alpha Beta and gold Master dates rather than having the whole game come due on the same day with a game as large as the one that we were making it made good sense to do this in order to have fewer moving Parts uh as we got close to the end of the project we'd always planned to have long Alpha and beta periods of 6 weeks each we simply needed

that much polish and Bug fixing time for the size of the game that we' made and we're firm Believers that allocating sufficient polish time can make or break a game's quality however having said that we didn't have any time for any kind of post production and that was one last small disaster that we just had to suck up and deal with our particle artists and lighting artists and sound designers had to scramble for every second of Polish time that they could grab since the rest of the team designers and artists in particular were making changes and Bug fixes that affected their work right up until the end in the future we're determined to build proper post production time into our schedules so that our games can have the level of aesthetic polish uh that our audience increasingly expect so we hit gold Master on August 20th and after that there was just the

usual work to do copyediting the strategy guide and starting to look towards the press and promotion work for the release of the game we were extremely happy with the way that the game had come together and we thought that we probably had a hit on our hands now all that we could do was wait and see how critics and the public would receive the game happily it seems that everyone agreed with us uh that Uncharted 2 among Thieves is the best game that we've ever made we're delighted to have been awarded a quite staggering 33 Game of the Year Awards so I quickly wanted to thank and congratulate everyone at naughty dog and at Sony and all of our partners beyond the studio who have helped our game become such a big hit so at some point during the development of Uncharted 2 among th we started calling it Uncharted 2 among

friends uh just for a laugh really and to keep ourselves GED up in the middle of all of this hard work that we were doing but it also meant something deeper at least it did to me anyway I haven't really had time today uh to detail all of the unusual things that we do when we're developing a game at naughty dog um if you're interested to hear more about our unusual methods uh please check out a talk that I gave just last month at the dice conference you can find a video of it by Googling Naughty Dog dice G4 in short we work in a very fast loose seat of the pants way that puts an emphasis on our team members taking responsibility for the production and organization of their own work and for the design of the game we encourage our team to stay constructively critical and honest with each other at all times and to always

keep an open mind about our design and production process to make sure that we're working in the best ways that we can possibly work we always take the time to listen to each other respectfully and we never make things personal we always have to remember that we're all in it working together towards the greatness of the game and working in a way that builds strong collaborative Rel relationships between our team members is the only way that we could make a game like Uncharted 2 and there is nothing as satisfying of course as the feeling that you're working at your optimal capacity among peers who respect and trust you one last tiny bit of advice if you're working on a story game make sure that your game is about something apart from just murking on on dudes Human Experience is incredibly

varied and complex and when we discuss it in our games with subtlety and Nuance people invest their most personal values their fears and their hopes into the experience and it becomes not only more entertaining but also more culturally valuable so I'm afraid that I don't have time to take questions on stage but if you wait for me just out inside the room here um I'll be happy to try and answer any questions you might have um don't forget to go and hear the other naughty dogs talk you can see a massive list of their talks right here in addition to Neil and Bruce's talk tomorrow Naughty Dog creative director Amy henig and cinematics animation lead Josh Sher will be talking about the process of capturing the performance of our amazing actors and of animating our characters in just half an hour right now uh 3 p.m. room 303 it's going to be a mustsee session the fans of Uncharted so rush over there to ensure you get a seat we're hiring go see us at the booth fill

out your feedback forms thanks for your time thanks [Applause] guys thanks very much