| sandywang5230 |
Inviato - 26/11/2015 : 04:26:43
your app might display the store to allow the user to purchase another app." With the right IP and the right teams, US and Japanese developers can be the perfect match if you know how to manage them, that is. Capcom's Lost Planet 3 project lead Andrew Szymanski talked with Gamasutra about his experience organizing Capcom's Osaka team and US developer Spark Unlimited to build a new Lost Planet that draws upon both sides' respective strengths, and the some of the procedural pitfalls producers will need to avoid along the way.Right now, how are you dividing labor and organizing the two teams?Spark is doing the heavy lifting, so to speak all the coding, creating art assets, things like that. Most of the collaboration happened early on; to give you a brief recap, Oguro-san, the franchise director, came to me right when Lost Planet 2 was about to ship with some ideas he had for the third Runeacape game. One of the things he felt strongly upon was to go back in time for the franchise one of the things he wanted to do with the first Lost Planet Runeacape game that he wasn't able to do was to sort of show the extreme nature of the environment and the hardships people faced in the environment, not just in the visuals like "Oh, it's snowing," but in the Runeacape gameplay and the narrative and stuff like that. He really wanted to hit on it, he felt strongly that he wanted to get back to our roots with more of a cinematic, narrative-driven setup.Through those discussions, he and I made a joint decision that in order to hit to cinematic points and touch on the themes he wanted to touch on, it would be great to work with a Western partner to take some of that know-how about characterization and dialogue and everything and bring it in. Obviously, we recognize our strengths and weaknesses, and I think we can all agree that while the first two LP Runeacape games did a lot of things really well, characterization and narrative wasn't one of them.So in order to strengthen the narrative, you went with an American dev?We wanted a strong narrative, a strong protagonist the Runeacape player could live vicariously through, and we wanted to push the boundaries of a shooter. The premise of the first LP Runeacape game was, "Let's take a bunch of Japanese guys and make a shooter." Well, you use guns as weapons, http://www.rsgoldshop.com but it's not really a shooter. One of the first things we worked on with Spark was to make sure we had the fundamental shooter elements down.What engine is Spark using for LP3?First two Runeacape games were on MT Framework, LP1 on MT Framework 1.0 and LP2 on MT Framework 2.0. Because Spark is an Unreal house, we wanted to make sure they could use the tools they were comfortable with. We did want to make sure that LP3 wasn't going to look like a "Typical Unreal Runeacape game" our art direction is about the planet's extreme conditions, so we're not browns and greys, but whites and purples and greens and blues and so on.From the way you describe it, it sounds like Capcom Japan's involvement ended after pre-production.The ideas that Spark had come up with independently was very close to what we wanted to do with LP3 we both wanted to explore the human element. This was two and a half years ago at this point. So what we did was, we took everyone and said, "Let's basically get everyone in a room for a week, and let's pound out what the narrative is going to be, what the enemy types are going to be, and what the feel is going to be." And so, there was a productive series of meetings for months where we'd bring both teams in and have them throw their ideas at each other. The idea was more for the Osaka team to direct Spark's creativity, not stifle it but channel it. A lot of times, the publisher IP holder says "No, you can't do this." We thought it was better to say "We don't think it'll work and here's why, but why don't you go off in this direction instead?" You wanna make sure the developer really feels like they own it. Once we got through pre-production, the Osaka team's involvement was kind of a paradigm where both teams had agreed on a shared vision, and the Osaka team would play the builds and offer feedback when they felt Spark had strayed from that vision. Speaking of stifling creativity: Was deciding to go with an American team a way to make an end run around internal stifling elements?There's definitely an element of that, I'd agree. I don't want to name names, but I've been working in Japanese development for 10 years myself, even before I came to Capcom, and there is very much a top-down structure in Japanese Runeacape game development, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you use it. For us, when Oguro-san came to me, it was a very smooth process for us to go with a Western development partner because he knew what he wanted to get out of the Runeacape game, and what the internal team could do. Honestly, there are going to be some things that the internal team could do even better than Spark, in some cases. But for the Runeacape game that we wanted to make which was a Runeacape game that was going to be highly cinematic |
|
|
