Friday, October 2

Evan Wells to devs: Maintain immersion in your games


Evan Wells is a well seasoned developer, he's Naughty Dog's co-president and has been heavily involved in the making of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. The reviews are in and according to many, Evan and his team have succeeded at doing something that has rarely been done: seamless immersion between cut scene and gameplay. In fact, one of the things he can't stand is when developers break that flow in their games. Playstation: The official Magazine asked Evan what's his biggest game design pet peeve, he answered:

"I do have one, but it's mostly a developer issue, and that's not paying enough attention to the experience of maintaining immersion in a game. It's a pet peeve when developers break that, in loading files or playing a cenematic and then breaking into gameplay. Unpolished pieces like that remind me that's I'm playing a video game. Our animation and audio people hate it here because I point out a one-frame pop, and insist they smooth all that out. But even if it's just one frame among hundreds, if it breaks the immersion, it spoils the experience," he said.

The guy takes his work seriously enough to make sure that every piece of detail small or big is dealt with thoroughly, hence making for the best experience possible for anyone who picks up their final product. And by the look of things, that painstaking thorough inspection is working. Now do you still want a job over at Naughty Dog? What'd you say?

10/02/09 Ernice Gilbert

1 comment:

  1. Hopefully the standard of gaming will be kept at the level Naughty Dog has set, and will only gt better.

    But it's hard to keep that up when the Xbox 360 is way less powerful than the PS3, and since most devs develop for both consoles it'll only be the PS3 exclusives seeing those types of ehancemment.

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