What Went Wrong

1. GOAL sucks! While it's true that GOAL gave us many advantages, GOAL caused us a lot of grief. A single programmer (who could easily be one of the top ten Lisp programmers in the world) wrote GOAL. While he called his Lisp techniques and programming practices "revolutionary," others referred to them as "code encryption," since only he could understand them. Because of this, all of the support, bug fixes, feature enhancements, and optimizations had to come from one person, creating quite a bottleneck. Also, it took over a year to develop the compiler, during which time the other programmers had to make do with missing features, odd quirks, and numerous bugs.

2. Gameplay programming. Because we were so busy creating the technology for our seamless world, we didn't have time to work on gameplay code until fairly late in the project. The situation caused no end of frustration to the designers, who were forced to design levels and creatures without being able to test whether what they were doing was going to be fun and play well. Eventually programmers were moved off of technology tasks and onto gameplay tasks, allowing the designers to play the game and make changes as appropriate. But without our designers' experience, diligence, and forethought, the results could have been a disaster.

3. Audio. We were plagued with audio-related problems from the start. Our first indication that things might not be going quite right was when our sound programmer quit and moved to Australia. Quickly hiring another sound programmer would have been the correct decision. We tried several other schemes, however, made some poor choices, and had quite a bit of bad luck. We didn't recognize until fairly late in development what a monumental task audio was going to be for this project. Not only did Jak & Daxter contain original music scores, creature and gadget noises, ambient sounds, and animated elements, but there are also over 45 minutes of story sequences, each containing Foley effects and speech recorded in six different languages.

Our audio issues could be broken up into four categories: sound effects, spooled Foley, music, and localized dialogue. Due to the large number of sound effects in the game, implementing sound effects became a maintenance nightmare. No single sound effect was particularly difficult or time-consuming; however, creating all of the sound effects and keeping them all balanced and working was a constant struggle. We needed to have more time dedicated to this problem, and we needed better tool support.

We used spooled Foley for lengthy sound effects, which wouldn't fit well in sound RAM. Spooling the audio had many advantages, but we developed the technology too late in the project and had difficulty using it due to synchronization issues.

Our music, although expertly composed, lacked the direction and attention to detail that we had achieved with the Crash Bandicoot games. In previous games, we had a person who was responsible for the direction of the music. Un-fortunately, no one performed that same role during Jak & Daxter.

Dialogue is a difficult problem in general due to the complexity of writing, recording, editing, creating Foley, and managing all of the audio files, but our localization issues made it especially challenging. Many problems were difficult to discover because of our lack of knowledge of the various languages, and we should have had more redundant testing of the audio files by people who were fluent in the specific languages.

4. Lengthy processing times. One of our greatest frustrations and loss of productivity came from our slow turnaround time in making a change to a level or animation and seeing that change in the actual game.

Since all of our tools (including the GOAL compiler) ran across our network, we ran into severe network bandwidth issues. Making better use of local hard drives would have been a smarter approach. In addition, we found extreme network slowdown issues related to reading file time/date stamps, and some tools took several minutes just to determine that nothing needed to be rebuilt. When we compiled some of our tools under Linux, we noticed dramatic improvements in network performance, and we are planning on using Linux more extensively in our next project.
We implemented the processing of the lengthy story-sequence animations as a hack of the system used to process the far simpler creature animations. Unfor-tunately, this bad system caused lengthy processing times, time-consuming debugging, and a lot of confusion. If we had initially hidden the processing complexity behind better tools, we would have saved quite a bit of time.

We used level-configuration scripts to set actor parameters and other level-specific data. The script processing was done at an early stage in our tools pipeline, however, so minor data changes took several minutes to process. We learned that tunable data should instead be processed as close as possible to the end of the tools pipeline.

5. Artist tools. We created many tools while developing Jak & Daxter, but many of our tools were difficult to use, and many tools were needed but never written. We often didn't know exactly what we needed until after several revisions of our technology. In addition, we didn't spend a lot of time polishing our tools, since that time would have been wasted if the underlying technology changed.

Regrettably, we did not have time to program tools that were badly needed by the artists, which resulted in a difficult and confusing environment for the artists and caused many productivity issues. Since programming created a bottleneck during game production, the added burden given to the artists was considered necessary, though no less distasteful.

We lacked many visualization tools that would have greatly improved the artists' ability to find and fix problems. For example, the main method artists used to examine collision was a debugging mode that colorized a small section of collision geometry immediately surrounding Jak. A far better solution would have been to create a renderer to display the entire collision of a level.

We created plug-ins that were used within the 3D modeling package; however, for flexibility's sake most of the plug-ins operated by taking command parameters and outputting results as text: not a good interface for artists. Eventually, one of our multi-talented artists created menus and other visualization aids that significantly improved productivity.

Many of our tools were script based, which made the tools extremely flexible and adaptable; however, the scripts were often difficult for the artists to understand and use. We are replacing many of these scripts with easier-to-use GUIs for our next project.

The Legacy

Creating Jak & Daxter was a monumental effort by many hardworking, talented people. In retrospect, we were probably pretty foolish to take on as many challenges as we did, and we learned some painful lessons along the way. But we also did many things right, and we successfully achieved our main goals. At Naughty Dog, there is a strong devotion to quality, which at times can border on the chaotic, but we try to learn from both our success and our failures in order to improve our processes and create a better game. The things that we learned from Jak & Daxter have made us a stronger company, and we look forward to learning from our past as we prepare for the new challenges ahead.

	Jak & Daxter: the Precursor Legacy Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Number of full-time developers: 35 Length of development: 1 year of initial development, plus 2 years of full production Release date: December, 2001 Platform: Playstation 2 Development software used: Allegro, Common Lisp, Visual C++, Maya, Photoshop, X Emacs, Visual Slick Edit, tcsh, Exceed, CVS