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Postmortem: Monolith's TRON 2.0 What Went Right 1. Publisher compatibility. It was and continues to be a real pleasure working with Buena Vista Games. We were initially concerned that the constraints of the license would be overwhelming, with minute-level detail examination leading to a potentially watered-down game. However, it was just the opposite. While BVG had great input of their own, they encouraged us to run with our ideas. This freedom afforded us the confidence to pursue a game design without the fear of it changing or being altered in some obtuse fashion down the road. Another peripheral benefit was the publisher's strong international standing. There are BVG regional offices across the world. Particularly noteworthy are those in Europe. From the onset of the project we had direct contact with the very people involved with press, retailers, and consumers across multiple European regions. From a design point of view, this exposure to non-U.S. markets was enlightening and useful. It's impossible to be all things to all people, but it is good design practice to consider the entire breadth of your target audience. TRON 2.0 is more accessible and dynamic because of it.
Lastly, BVG granted us access to the talent involved in the original film. On the art side, we were fortunate enough to meet with Syd Mead near the beginning of the project. He shared with us many of his original TRON sketches and paintings. It was a unique opportunity to learn firsthand the design philosophy behind the highly recognizable elements of the TRON world. In a sense, it allowed the TRON 2.0 artists to pick up were the film left off. Although the game achieves an overall look that is more detailed and colorful than the film, the consistency in the overall aesthetics between the two projects remains credible. Mead also contributed the new super light cycle, an exclusive design just for the game. Both Monolith and BVG agreed that it seemed appropriate, not to mention cool, to have the creator of the original light cycle design the next incarnation of the iconic bike. Besides Syd Mead, the team had access to special effects director Richard Taylor and TRON creator Steven Lisberger to review progress of the game. Taylor, on one occasion, popped into the Monolith office and provided some very helpful feedback regarding lighting and camera movement. On the acting side, Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan lent their voices to the game. Most notably, Boxleitner reprised his role as Alan Bradley. 2. Identifying iconic elements from the film. We asked ourselves, what were the core elements that provided TRON with its unique identity? Not surprisingly, we immediately isolated the disc and light cycle as iconic elements from the movie and marked them as mandatory features for the game. However, once we started looking past the obvious, we were a taken aback by the sheer quantity of other essential TRON components. To compound the issue, it became evident that different people - meaning various people on the team, at BVG, in the press, and at TRON fan sites - all isolated different elements or events from the movie as true TRON moments. What began as a simple checklist became a forum of discussion that never really concluded until the completion of the game. To get a handle on the situation, we started prioritizing signature TRON components by how they supported gameplay and to what extent they propagated the TRON identity. We then discussed how to mature these concepts to meet the demands of a contemporary game. What we ended up with is a working mix of old and new - recognizable yet fresh. The combat component of the game still revolves around the disc, but it can now be upgraded. Environments retain the glowing, outlined look but with increased vibrancy and complexity. The story is new but resembles the original through the use of playful analogies, techie metaphors, and light-hearted humor - all hallmarks of the original script. And finally, memorable entities such as Bit, Tanks, and Recognizers make appearances but with altered functionality to represent the passage of time. We avoided simply translating the film directly into a game. It took significant effort to advance the TRON universe beyond the safety of the film. Setting out to improve iconic elements is always risky, but as a team we agreed not to take the easy road and shortchange the property's potential by doing the bare minimum. Solely relying on the TRON name to sell units was not our strategy. 3. No movie license curse. It's a common belief that movie license-based games are substandard. How many times do we see game reviews with the comment "Game X is just another mediocre game based on a movie." We did not want TRON 2.0 to be another movie tie-in casualty. Not only would it be bad for Monolith's reputation, but we genuinely didn't want to waste the opportunity. TRON 2.0 needed to be able to stand on its own as a fun, engaging, and intelligent game, regardless of its lineage. To help realize this goal, we began work TRON 2.0 as we do all our projects by reviewing successes and failures in our previous titles or similar titles so we could learn from past errors. TRON 2.0 is fully contextual to the TRON universe yet iterative relative to past Monolith efforts. With solid game design fundamentals learned from past projects, we were left free to explore unique game mechanics, storytelling devices, and technical enhancements that pushed TRON 2.0 into new territory. 4. Sharing code. The TRON 2.0 team found itself in a unique position. The No One Lives Forever 2 (NOLF 2) team was roughly eight months ahead of the TRON 2.0 schedule. They carried most of the burden of developing Jupiter, the next-generation game systems and tools needed to make NOLF 2 a cutting-edge game. TRON 2.0 was slated to closely follow NOLF 2 and directly use the Jupiter engine.
Although there were trade-offs, sharing code development with NOLF 2 primarily allowed us the freedom to focus a greater amount of our resources toward content, new features, and gameplay. TRON 2.0 certainly had its share of engineering hurdles, such as the glow effect, light cycle technology, and of course the engineering to support all of TRON 2.0's varied game objects. However, we didn't have to worry about creating a new renderer or AI systems. Also, uncertainties that are usually attached to new technologies were for the most part already resolved. We simply learned the parameters of the engine and adjusted the scope of our game to fit. 5. Evolved art direction. TRON 2.0 has received praise for its colorful architecture, glowing streams of energy, and creative level design. Without a doubt, the artists and level designers on the TRON 2.0 team successfully captured the essence of TRON. Not only do the characters and environments look like those found in the movie but in some cases surpass them. The art direction of TRON 2.0 really stands out as one of the primary attributes of the game, especially with the recent trend toward hyperrealistic military games. TRON 2.0 is a fresh alternative. The method the art team used to achieve the look of TRON 2.0 was grassroots in nature. During preproduction, the artists re-created many of the actual sets from the film to get the feel for TRON. From there, they evolved the look to represent how computers changed over the last 20 years. It's interesting to note that keyboards, monitors, and circuit boards have changed little over the years. But TRON is not about the literal interpretation of computers; it's about the abstract world inside, the world of programs, data, and energy. It is here where more significant advancements have been made, and translating that into three-dimensional architecture was the greater challenge. Unlike building recognizable architecture, such as a warehouse or a subway, the artists and level designers had to develop the means to communicate through an abstract language to express what a firewall or PDA looked like to a program. The film also had a distinctive glow about it. Initially, we attempted to build the glow directly into the art by using layers of additive textures. However, that proved to be time consuming and somewhat inconsistent. Plus, it was not a practical solution for characters. Collaboration between Monolith and Nvidia engineers produced a technique that generated a glow effect that was processed in real time by essentially applying a second render pass with a blurred effect. Once we saw this for the first time, it was clear TRON 2.0 was going to have a very special look. The glow effect immediately became an item of note when discussing the game with the press.
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