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How
long has High Impact Games been around?
LM: Probably two and a half years now?
How
big is your studio now?
LM: We have about 45 people.
And
do you have multiple, simultaneous projects?
LM: Yes. I mean, you might have heard that
we did Size Matters for the PlayStation
2 as well. And then we also have other things we work on.
It
seems like a lot of the high profile PSP games, a lot of them end up trickling
to the PlayStation 2 after a while. How do you view that, as a developer who's
working on the PSP platform to make a game? I mean, law of averages suggests
that eventually it will be a PS2 game.
LM: Well obviously there are economical
benefits for doing them on PS2, but beyond that, we actually did receive a lot
of requests from people to have that available on the PlayStation 2.
I mean,
there are a lot of people who own PSPs, but it's nowhere near compared to the
size of the PS2 audience, so there was a lot of demand for it. So I think that
it's going to be really popular on both.
High Impact Games/Sony's Secret Agent Clank
It
seems like you have a great relationship with Sony, and obviously with
Insomniac, so is that your focus right now? PSP and PS2 development? Or...?
LM: We focus on one game at a time. Right
now we're finishing Clank, and that's
PlayStation Portable, and we just wrapped up a PlayStation 2 game. We'll have
to see what the future brings.
And
now with this game, it diverges a bit from the formula, because it's a Clank game, not a Ratchet game. So was that a creative direction that had been
brewing, or was it just something, when you were brainstorming ways to make a
game, that really fit the platform and was a natural outgrowth?
LM: I think it had been brewing for a
while. Fans have been demanding a Secret
Agent Clank game for many years; especially after he made his first
appearance in Ratchet & Clank: Up
Your Arsenal. So, it's something that the fans were excited about.
We were
also interested in taking the franchise into a new direction that felt really
fresh to fans. And by making Clank the main character, we were able to explore
some really new styles of gameplay.
This
is one of those franchises that has had so many entries in such a quick period
of time. Does that creative well dry up, or does the fact that there are so
many ideas flying around all the time keep it fresh for you guys?
LM: I think for me, the fact that there are
so many ideas flying around keeps it fresh for me. Whenever I think about Ratchet games, I ended up having more
ideas. Moving toward Clank as a main character just extended that; I think
there's just a lot of rich potential in that universe.
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Personally I think the question of using internal tech vs licensing depends completely on your team size, time line, and experience levels of the individual members. It's not just a simple "yes" or "no". Toss a bunch of juniors in a room and the only engine you'll get is whatever they could piece together from some tutorial website. So put a lot of thought into making your own tech before committing. However, a senior team with a solid plan might be able to wow you. I doubt that Shadow of the Colossus or Okami could have been achieved easily with some pre-packaged engine. Not impossible, just not as easily.
I mean is it just a coincidence that Renderware has gone and the PS3 software catalogue is floundering with a large number of big budget average titles?
Apart from that I bet for those developers who claim they have built their engine and tools from the ground up actually started their engine many, many years ago when it was commercially viable and evolved it over many, many projects, refactoring at every step - DICE I bet sits firmly in this camp.
If there exists a reasonable solution to a problem already then it’s an engineer’s prerogative to at least use it as a starting point: why reinvent the wheel? An engineer should be aiming at all times to engineer themselves out of a job i.e. to solve the problem at hand. Granted we won't be able to do that for many years (if ever) because of the constantly shifting foundations and goals but we should certainly be moving in the direction of older industries for example structural engineers in the building industry where they’ve got to the point that the engineers are contracted in to solve a few specific problems with a project.
Today if you're starting a game and haven't got a low level game engine (graphics system, physics system, sound system etc) / high level game engine (game framework, A.I. system, scripting system etc) and/or tools pipeline (conversion tools, build system, game editor etc) in place - THEN BUY AT LEAST SOME OF IT IN!