2. Developed a fully destructible world on the DS.

Most of the world in Hulk DS's levels can be destroyed. A tile-based system, the levels contain three states: healthy, damaged, and destroyed. Through punching, smashing and throwing objects, the player destroys the world to open up alternative paths, reveal hidden objects, and just bash the crud out of stuff. Engineering such a system on the DS challenged our programmers and artists alike.

Engineering a fully destructible world, while simultaneously developing the engine for wireless download via the Wii and building the rest of the game, was a significant programming task. However, it was a feat we accomplished successfully.

The four-person engineering team rearranged and reused existing technology wherever possible. Programmers leveraged Maya for level building and Lua for scripting. This allowed the design team to build levels and script enemies and events themselves, thus freeing up the engineering team to continue work on other features.

While the top screen displayed the playfield, the DS's bottom screen featured a scout map. An interactive map of the entire level, the scout map tracked tile destruction in real time.

As the player smashed up or down a building in the top screen, for example, the bottom screen tracked that destruction. Dragging a finger across the scout map automatically paused the game while the player peeked at upcoming enemy configurations or plotted routes.

Our environmental artists created three states for each tile to reflect its descent from healthy, to damaged, to destroyed. While some tiles were reused with levels (Times Square, for example, has urban building tiles repeated throughout), creating three states was an immense effort tantamount to creating three times the number of levels in the game. Despite the large workload, our three environmental artists delivered strong work.

While the destructible environments were tile-based, our artists employed clever tricks to obfuscate that fact.

Healthy tiles formed into skyscrapers, for example, are fairly tiled by design. As the player damages a tile, broken elements -- such as jagged bits of rebar, irregular jags of broken glass -- extend beyond the damaged tile's boundaries and into adjacent tiles, be they healthy or damaged, thus avoiding a clearly defined, checkerboard appearance.

In addition, because the artists had created two damaged states for each tile that we randomly summoned, even fully destroyed buildings did not look repeated or tiled.

3. Found positive compromises with the publisher that added to the game.

Throughout the course of the project there was constant discussion with the publisher regarding various game features.

In most cases, we were able to agree on changes that addressed the spirit of the publisher's concerns, while keeping development in scope and adding to the game's fun factor. For example, publisher feedback resulted in knockback, turning enemies into weapons, as well as a wider variety of weapon objects for Hulk to hurl at his foes.

The best example of a positive compromise with the publisher came with changes to the control configuration and the destructible environment. The control configuration was the source of much discussion over the life of the project.

In short, we came to a good compromise to the control configuration that sustained the lead designer's vision while addressing the publisher's desire to give a broader spectrum of players control over Hulk's amped-up Rage attacks and movement.

A side effect of these changes was that Hulk's attacks destroyed objects with a single button press instead of two. While this added to the sense of Hulk's power and simplified the control configuration, it would make one of our three damage states for each tile irrelevant.

Suddenly tiles could go directly from healthy to destroyed, with no need for a damaged state. As developers, we're used to sometimes having to discard work, but this would result in the aforementioned "checkerboard" look to the environment, a concern for our client.

Our solution was to randomize the damage system to choose either the damaged or destroyed state for any destroyed tile. Rather than abandon the tiles' damaged state versions, we leveraged those tiles to create a more varied, less repetitive environment. By doing so, we addressed our publisher's concerns, validated the effort of our environmental artists, and gave the players a better-looking game.