This series is fascinating. Loads of stories about weird hacks to make the graphics cleaner, to up the polygon count, to make the animation more cartoonish, writing a dialect of Lisp to define the gameplay.
Did I already say I love this series? Great stuff. Crash is one of my favorites and I read a lot about how it was made already. Of course the LISP part is what makes it really cool. This article is a fantastic read about that. If you think tools/languages are inadequate; just roll your own.
Shame we don't all get paid to do that... (Or even consider that option)
I'd really love to see Naughty Dog do a series of articles with this kind of technical depth on making the Jak and Daxter games, or even Uncharted although I can see why they'd want to keep some of the tech private in that case.
Naughty Dog has always been one of the developers that raised the bar for both visuals and gameplay on the Playstation and reading these articles it's clear to see why.
"Programming languages are not immutable truths handed down from on high, but tools created by people to solve particular tasks."
Or, as the foreword to "Essentials of Programming Languages begins,
"This book brings you face to face with the most fundamental ideas in Computer Programming - the interpreter for a computer language is just another program"
Insightful, but often forgotten, . Great post (and series). There are other thought provoking paragraphs in the other posts in the series.
"my partner and friend Jason Rubin offers the following thoughts on this section:
Andy and I always liked trying to find opportunities that others had missed. Fill holes in a sense. We had done Way of the Warrior in large part because the most popular games of the time were fighting games and the new 3DO system didn’t have a fighting game on it. Our decision to do a character action game on the PlayStation was not only based on bringing the most popular genre on consoles into the 3D, but also because Sega already had Sonic and Nintendo already had Mario. Instead of running headlong into either of these creative geniuses backyard, we decided to take our ball to a field with no competition.
Filling a hole had worked to an extent with Way of the Warrior. The press immediately used Way as a yardstick to make a comparison point against other systems and their fighting games. This gave it a presence that the game itself might never have had. And as a result, ardent fans of the system would leap to defend the title even when perfectly fair points were made against it. The diagonal moves were hard to pull off because the joypad on the 3DO sucked? No problem, said the fans, Way of the Warrior plays fantastically if you just loosen the screws on the back of the joypad.
Why couldn’t the same effect work with a character action game on PlayStation?"
"While all this art design was going on, I, and then in January 1995, Dave, struggled to build an engine and tool pipeline that would make it possible to render these grandiose cartoon worlds we had envisioned on paper.
....
Our motto was “bite off more than we could chew, then figure out some crazy complicated way to make it work.
....
In those days, most people used a simple skeleton system with “1 joint” weighting, and very few bones. This gives a very stiff look, so we went instead with vertex animation. This allowed us to use the more sophisticated 3-4 joint weighting available in PowerAnimator, which the Playstation had no hope of matching at runtime (until the PS2), instead we stored the location of every vertex, every frame at 30 frames a second. No one else had the guts, as while this was easy to render, it required inventing some totally hardcore assembly language vertex compressors. First me (three times), then Dave (twice), then finally Mark took a crack at it. Mark’s was the best — being the best assembly programmer of us three — but also the most complicated.
Complexity became the name of the game at Naughty Dog.
...
So we decided to use an entirely SGI and IRIX based tool pipeline. In fact the game itself even ran on the SGI (with terrible keyboard control). This meant buying programmers $100,000 SGIs instead of $3,000 PCs. Gulp again. No one else did this. No one.
...
Jason says:
The secret to Crash’s success was its Art. And the secret to its Art was its Programming.
Andy and Dave broke a lot of rules. First and foremost, they didn’t follow PlayStation’s library restrictions. Other developers often complained that Crash was using some sort of secret Sony library. That is the exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that Crash used as little as it could of Sony’s library and the programmers basically hacked everything right to the hardware.
Years later Sony tried to create a game called Harry Jalapeño to compete with Crash. No, I am not making that up. Besides the name fail, the internal team in San Francisco also utterly failed to create the complex worlds and characters that we created in Crash. Let me repeat – an internal Sony team couldn’t create Crash. Let the rumors of “insider information” forever rest.
Hitting the hardware directly was against the rules. But by the time Sony saw the results they needed a Mario killer. It was too late for them to complain.
"
if that isn't "hacking a real world system", like the YC app asks for, I don't know what is.
There's a terribly large number of parallels between video-game design (teams) from years ago and the way certain contemporary technical yet creative projects could run. I wish there were articles like this written by members of Sonic Team.
Related: an article about making Ratchet and Clank using some Jak and Daxter rendering code which Naughty Dog basically gave Insomniac for free. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2842/postmortem_insomn...
Another great series: Jordan Mechner's diary about making the original Prince of Persia.
http://jordanmechner.com/category/old-journals/