[Los Angeles-based High Impact Games are the folks behind Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters for PSP/PS2 - and the upcoming Secret Agent Clank for PSP - and Gamasutra chats in-depth to design director Lesley Matheson on the PSP, game engines, and the LA dev scene.]
Lesley Matheson, design director of High
Impact Games, has a background with the Ratchet
& Clank series at Insomniac. But she's splashed out from that
established studio, along with other experienced developers, to found High
Impact Games... which has found her new studio working on... more Ratchet & Clank games.
Is this a happy accident or an
inevitability? And how about working on the PSP -- is that an engaging challenge?
Coming from Insomniac, does she share the company's preference for total
reliance on in-house tech?
And how is it working with Sony -- are first parties
better publishers for independent developers? These issues, and more, are
covered in this wide-ranging interview.
So
how do you feel about developing on the PSP right now? Has everything, do you
think, matured to the level where you can actually get like really good
console-quality results out of it?
Lesley Matheson: I think we got
console-quality results out of, even, Size
Matters. I think the PSP always had the potential there; it was just a
matter of tapping into it. Fortunately, we have a very veteran, very talented
technology staff, so they were able to pretty much pull out the full power of
the PSP. I don't know if you played Ratchet
& Clank: Size Matters.
I
just dabbled with it.
LM: In the giant Clank space sequences, we
have like 20,000 particles on the screen at once.
High Impact Games/Sony's Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters
And
you said you have a background with the series -- you worked at Insomniac
before.
LM: That's right. At Insomniac Games, I was
a designer on the Ratchet & Clank PlayStation 2 series, as well as a lead designer
and project manager on Resistance.
This
is interesting, because it seems Daxter
was developed by Ready at Dawn, because they have a previous relationship with
Naughty Dog, and you have a previous relationship with Insomniac. I'm assuming
that it's not a coincidence.
LM: Well, it's a coincidence between us and
Ready at Dawn I think. We had decided -- several of us had decided to form a
company, because we were just really excited about doing our own thing.
When this opportunity came up, we just got
a number of options with Sony, that they were really anxious to find somebody
that could handle this game on PlayStation Portable. And really we were the
only team who could take such a complex game and bring it over, so it seemed
like a good deal to me.
The
PSP is very cool because you can do very high quality, console-like experiences
on it, but it's also sort of a weakness in the portable space, to the extent
that because it's hard to do the kind of pick-up-and-play games that people can
actually play when they're on the go. Do you find that from a design
perspective that you have to find a contrast between those two ideals?
LM: I don't know. I mean, I think that the
PlayStation Portable holds as much potential to do a pick-up-and-play game as
anything else. Anything that we did for the Portable, including the Ratchet games, we wanted them to be
something that people could fairly easily play, and come back to without much
of a penalty.
I think, basically, it's all about what you design your game for,
and if you really realize you're designing it for Portable, you make it more
accessible.
I
guess my question is in relation to keeping it consistent to the franchise that
had its genesis with a more sit-down experience.
LM: That certainly was true with Size Matters; we were really trying to
match the exact flavor of the Ratchet
games. With Secret Agent Clank we've
had the opportunity to diverge a bit -- to keep the Ratchet feel to it, [and preserve] the humor, but at the same time
it's really got new and different kinds of gameplay.
So that allowed us to
really take it and push it even more in a portable direction. I think -- I
would say it's even more accessible than Size
Matters in that respect.