"Our pre-production period is a very freeform time where we brainstorm, we talk about gameplay and story ideas, make lots of concept art and pre-visualisation animations and we do as much prototyping of gameplay as we can with whatever tools we have at hand. "The way 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 we don't have anything in the way of conventional deadlines or deliverables," Lemarchand explains. Uncharted 2 was created in a total of 22 months, and six months of that schedule was spent in pre-production. "We knew that at the very least we wanted to make a competitive game with several different game types," says Lemarchand. In addition to that, multiplayer was green-lit for the sequel, with the co-op elements only being added very late on in the development cycle. The first Uncharted worked hard in melding gameplay and story into one coherent, almost seamless experience, and the Naughty Dog team pursued this "playable cinema feel" that would drive many of the different improvements to the technological side of the project, while prioritising a wide range of graphical enhancements to the team's proprietary engine.
"While Uncharted: Drake's Fortune had greed and its consequences as the main 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 in self-interest."Ĭharacter-driven rather than plot-driven sums up Naughty Dog's approach to story in Uncharted 2, meaning that Nate makes some new friends - and enemies - in the sequel. "The other characters would help to show us more of the world that Nate operates in and would act like emotional satellites, revealing more about the good and the darker sides of Nate's character. "Our story in Uncharted is character-driven rather than plot-driven and we decided to include a larger cast of characters in Uncharted 2," Lemarchand explains. Lemarchand and Naughty Dog also sought to expand upon the strong character-driven premise of the first Uncharted, but with even more ambitious aims for the sequel.
#UNCHARTED 2 PC ADHOC MOVIE#
"Our top-line goal was that we wanted to create something that a lot of us at the studio had dreamed 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 drama exploded around him." "We start every new project with a shortlist of project goals and refer back to them throughout development to make sure that we stay on track," says Richard Lemarchand. Here we recap the session in detail and expand upon it with Naughty Dog's assistance and our own unique visual assets.
Just one face in a crowd of hundreds, it's a unique opportunity to get a glimpse at the game-making philosophies and techniques of one of the world's leading developers.
Speaking at GDC 2010, Naughty Dog lead game designer Richard Lemarchand gave a candid presentation on the development of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - a post-mortem of the game-making process that covered, in his own words, "what went right and what blew up in our faces like a red explosive barrel!" Originally published on the March 20th 2010, this is an article we're happy to share with you again.
A remarkably insightful talk that gave us fantastic background into the way Naughty Dog worked, we couldn't help but think that the presentation would translate into a great feature - and to this day this remains one of our favourite pieces. That would be then-Naughty Dog Richard Lemarchand's hour-long journey into the making of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, a title that remains one of the greatest games released in the last-gen era. However, as we make the long journey across to San Francisco, we're reminded of the first - and possibly the best - GDC talk we saw. Digital Foundry is currently en route to GDC 2015, so there won't be a new article published today.