-assassin's creed
genre: action-adventure/stealth
release date: 13th November 2007
developer: Gameloft + Ubisoft Montreal + Griptonite Games + Blue Byte
publisher: Ubisoft
platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, windows
price when first sold:
units sold/total revenue: 140 million + units sold, est. $4.091 billion (as of 2016)average review score: (PS3) 81/100, (X360) 81/100, (PC) 79/100
age rating: PEGI 18+
Google [name of game] how long to beat and click on the first 'howlongtobeat.com' link. Note down how long the game takes to complete on average
15 hours average, 23 hours leisurely and 10 hours rushed.
Development facts (how was the game made? How long did it take to make? What issues did the team face?)
To trace the history of a game that has made its name largely by giving gamers its own unique twist on well-known historical events, there’s really only one place to start: The amazing Nintendo 64, PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast title, Donald Duck: Goin’ Quackers.
after delivering the B-list platformer in 2000, there were some at Ubisoft who were getting antsy to move up to the big time. In particular, one Patrice Desilets, who had served as lead designer on Quackers.
Another team at Ubisoft Montreal had just developed the wildly successful Splinter Cell franchise, and now the studio was looking to replicate the same magic with another franchise. Enter a video game character who is much more commonly cited as an early influence on AC‘s Assassin than Donald Duck will ever be: The Prince of Persia.
Desilets had the idea to reboot the Prince of Persia franchise and had some interesting concepts to boot. Prince creator Jordan Mechner was flown into Montreal in order to get his blessing. Desilets showed him a short clip of the Prince running parkour stunts along the walls of a city, leaping to his next objective with flair. It worked. Mechner wrote a new Prince of Persia story and Desilets was installed by Ubisoft as lead designer on the new title. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a huge hit. Ubisoft immediately commissioned sequels for the franchise and most of the team, including producer (and eventual CEO) Yannis Mallat, got right back to work. But the company had other plans for its newfound star Desilets. He was given free reign to start work on the next-gen successor to Prince, a title that would eventually release on the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Desilets was a fan of history and started researching the Middle East to try and find something he could use on the next-gen Prince of Persia. That’s when he found the Hashshashin, an order of assassins from the 12th century that would publicly execute their targets in over-the-top fashion in order to get their enemies to fall in line. Desilets essentially took the best of Prince of Persia and mixed in some of the stealth aspects from Splinter Cell to envision a new kind of game where the player would complete amazing acrobatic feats in an open-world environment while jumping in and out of the shadows.
It took some discussion, but Ubisoft trusted Desilets enough to green-light an entirely new franchise. They also teamed him up with Jade Raymond, a new hire who had experience with creating vast open worlds.
With the new team officially in place, Desilets and Raymond got to work. Going back to what Desilets had picked up in the history books, they tried to keep the story and setting as true as possible to the story of those 12th century killers. They recreated Masyaf, which was the home of the Hashshashin as well as the cities of Damascus and Jerusalem. The first Assassin, Altair, was tasked with killing nine prominent individuals based on real historical figures.
That might have been enough to get the franchise going, but Ubisoft wasn’t done. In a development that was likely designed to further remove the game from its Prince of Persia roots, a more modern twist was added. The game’s main plot would be set in modern day. Players would meet regular guy bartender Desmond Miles, who is a descendant of Altair. Desmond is kidnapped by the Knights Templar (now known as Abstergo Industries), long-time rival of the Assassins guild and is forced to relive his ancestor’s actions in the late 12th century through a machine called the Animus.
-tomb raider (definitive edition)
genre: action-adventure game
release date: 5th March 2013
developer: crystal dynamics
publisher: square enix
platform: Microsoft windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, OS X, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Linux, Shield tv stadia
units sold/total revenue: 40 million copies sold, 134 million dollars
price when first sold: £13.50
average review score: 85
age rating: PEGI 18, MA 15+
Google [name of game] how long to beat and click on the first 'howlongtobeat.com' link. Note down how long the game takes to complete on average
11 and a half hours
Development facts (how was the game made? How long did it take to make? What issues did the team face?)
-outlast
genre: survival horror
release date: 4th September 2013
developer: red barrels
publisher:red barrels
platform: Microsoft windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox one, Linux, OS x, Nintendo switch
units sold/total revenue: 15 million units, 64 million dollars
price when first sold: $19.99
average review score: 78
age rating: 18
Google [name of game] how long to beat and click on the first 'howlongtobeat.com' link. Note down how long the game takes to complete on average
5 hours
Development facts (how was the game made? How long did it take to make? What issues did the team face?)
This is the origin story of Red Barrels and the road we took to create Outlast. It’s been an intense and bumpy ride, but we have no regrets, and while we are always open to the possibility of time travel, we would not want to go back and change a thing about the experience.
I decided to leave Ubisoft again in 2009 and try something different. I joined EA Montreal to work on a new IP based on an original concept by Hugo Dallaire, formerly art director of Splinter Cell and Army of Two. I was attracted by the opportunity to start something new with a small team, and Hugo’s concept was too cool to pass up.
A few months later, David Chateauneuf joined the team. David and I had worked together in 1998 on a Donald Duck game and later on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time as well as the first Assassin’s Creed.
We were asked to join a team on another game already in production. I didn’t have much confidence in the success of that project and, with a new year ahead and perhaps too much frigid air in my brain, I decided to quit my job in January 2011. So did Hugo and David.
We eventually met and realized we shared the same ambitions; to start our own company.
There may be a fine line between courage and naivety, and while I think success requires both, I believe I had more of the latter.
A good illustration of this, and an indication of things to come, would be in our estimation of the immediate work ahead. I figured it would take us a couple of months to work out a pitch and produce a trailer. Then another two months to get a publishing deal. In the end it took us 18 months.
And that was just the beginning.
The first thing we needed to agree on was the game genre. We made a list of ideas, and of course most of them sucked, for that is the nature of idea lists. In a short time though, making a horror game became the most attractive choice.
David is a real fan, even a connoisseur of horror. In 2008, he and I had tried to convince Ubisoft Montreal to let us make a horror game, but we were told that they didn’t feel that there was a large enough market for it. We reasoned that since we were going to make Outlast with a small team and a small budget, we wouldn’t have to worry about making revenues like Assassin’s Creed in order to be profitable.
Hugo suggested we use Rubber Johnny as a reference for our game. We immediately agreed it would be a very good starting point for a horror game.
Just like that, it was settled. The first project of our new studio would be a horror game. Starting from scratch with our own studio would allow us to use the expertise we had gained on past projects and execute according to our own priorities. We were excited and eager to meet the challenge.
Out first debate was about the core gameplay. We wavered between a Resident Evil-style approach to guns, but with very limited ammo, and a no-combat-at-all, Amnesia-style approach. We decided to go with no combat because it would allow us to build a more focused experience. We continued to consider having “weapon sections,” but feedback from players at PAX East would later prove to us that we didn’t need those sections.
Having decided that we would use “night vision,” we needed a protagonist that required it. We considered a member of some kind of SWAT team with night vision gear, but we wanted to sell the “no combat” concept, so we dropped any kind of law enforcement characters. At the time, a lot of movies were using the found footage concept, so we thought, “why not games?” Camcorders also have night vision, so it fit nicely.
So, “who’s using the camcorder?” we asked ourselves. The answer came while we were brainstorming about the hero’s journey.
We’d always liked the simplicity of the first part of Half Life. The shit just hits the fan and you immediately have to escape.
We had to find one location from which the player would try to escape and as always, it needed to be doable by a small team. Creativity often comes from such constraints, and once more, we made a list and one option stood out… an asylum. Like camcorders, asylums have been used a lot in movies, but not that often in games, and certainly not in a realistic setting. We felt an asylum offered an opportunity to create really unique and compelling characters that the player would meet along his journey.
A camcorder with night vision, an asylum and no combat -- it was a good start. After more brainstorming, we hit on the idea of a reporter. A reporter doesn’t usually have combat skills, and has a good reason to be carrying a camcorder, particularly if he’s in the course of doing an investigation.
The reporter’s role of investigation was solid on its own, but we had a hard time finding how to mix it with the horror experience. The question was always the same: “How do we motivate the player to record events, when all he might want to do is escape?” We decided on a pure narrative approach that left it to the player himself to decide how much investigation he wants to do, without any game mechanics to re-enforce it. Since I’ve never read anything negative about this aspect of the game, I feel like it was the right choice.
The last thing we wanted to nail before work began on our trailer was the look of the patients; they needed to be frightening. What makes a character scary can be very subjective. For some, it’s the visuals, for others it’s their psychology, their actions, etc. We decided to make use of the profiles of the criminally insane patients you find in asylums. That meant focusing on personalities conveyed through dialogue, like meeting Hannibal Lecter in a closed environment. Still, we were concerned normal-looking humans wouldn’t scare some players.
We did some research into the MKUltra program and other experiments conducted in prisons and asylums up until the 1970s. You can find some examples here.
In this age of health care privatization, we figured it wouldn’t be a stretch to invent a corporation using a private asylum for the criminally insane to perform experiments on patients. In our story, those experiments would create mutations and horrible side effects. We felt, however, that viruses have been done to death, so we wanted to do something different.
We worked on this with our scriptwriter, JT Petty, and came up with the idea that the experimentation would involve morphogenesis, dream therapy and biotechnologies to create nano-bots. We included the work of Alan Turing because he was one of the primary architects of the 20th century. Turing was also key in the theory of morphogenesis, which we only have a layman's understanding of, but is essentially a mathematical definition of how cells differentiate when dividing, and how the same cells can create all our different organs, species, etc.
A lot of the themes in Outlast concern the crimes of the 20th century, especially in the way technology outpaces our ability to grasp it, and our tendency to project monsters onto things we don't understand.
I believe a lot of the people we met weren’t sure what to think of our format, which I call a "AAA Garage Game." Outlast wasn’t a mobile game that could be done on a very low budget. We estimated that we needed roughly $1.5 million in order to hire the best developers available.
A few private investors made us offers, but the details suggested that they would own us so we turned them all down.
By September 2011, we still didn’t have a publishing deal, but we were not out of options. While working on our trailer, we learned of the existence of the Canada Media Fund (CMF). The program might give us up to $1 million as a recoupable investment. It meant a lot of paperwork, but for $1 million, we thought it was worth it. The CMF accepts submissions twice a year and the next round would be at the end of that September. There was one problem… one of the CMF’s requirements was to have a distribution deal. Without one we’d lose points and other projects with better scores would get the money.
A couple of weeks before Christmas, we heard back from the CMF. The project had been rejected and we would have to wait until after the holidays to find out why. Soon after, we heard from Sony that the Pub Fund would be focusing on the Vita so that too was a dead end for us.
That was definitely our lowest point. It had been a year since we quit our jobs. We took stock of our situation: Twelve months without a salary, no publishers, no money, nothing. It was a bleak moment.
At this point we started thinking seriously about giving up and going back to work for one of the big studios in town, but we decided to wait for the CMF’s feedback before making any decision.
It arrived the first week of January 2012. The project itself had been very highly rated, but we lost too many points due to our lack of a distribution deal and the incomplete financial structure. In short, we lost out on technical elements and not qualitative elements.
The next submission round was in April 2012, in that time we would have to find a distribution deal AND at least $333,333 from sources other than publishers. It also meant going another 6 months without a salary before finding out if we had the money or not. We had to decide if we were prepared to do that.
Because of our meeting with Valve back in July 2011, we were confident we could get a distribution deal to put Outlast on Steam. We started counting how much money the 3 of us could put together. It meant using most of our savings, maxing out our credit, putting our homes on the line and asking our families if they wanted to invest in our company. We managed to find $360,000, which was enough to ask for $1,000,000 from the CMF.
So, in early May 2012, we submitted to the CMF for a second time and waited until the end of June to receive their decision.
Before we heard back from the CMF, a new opportunity presented itself. A publisher approached us to pitch a concept for a contract. They were looking for a studio to make a game based on a license. Since we couldn’t be sure if we would get the money from the CMF, it made sense to do the pitch. The problem was that the license was also in the horror genre and every idea we would put in the pitch would be owned by the publisher, whether we made their game or not. We worried that this might have an impact on our game should it get a green light. We worked on it for a while, but ultimately our hearts weren’t into it. It felt like we were back at work in a big studio. We dropped it, crossed our fingers and hoped the CMF would give us the money.
The verdict came at the end of June 2012.
.jpg)
The celebration didn’t last long. We really wanted to release the game on PC before the new consoles came out. We were afraid the game would get lost in all the noise about the consoles and their games. This meant we had 14 months to make the game, which was also when we projected we would run out of money. $1.4 million may sound like a lot of cash to some, but it goes fast when you’ve got 10 people and a bunch of contractors on your payroll.
The upside of the 18-month delay that happened while we were looking for money was that it gave us a lot of time to think about the game and develop a blueprint. By the time people began to join us, we had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to achieve.
Halloween came and our trailer was made public. It was really well received, beyond our expectations, and it put us on the map. Watching the number of views on YouTube go up was really motivating for everyone.
Not everything was hunky dory. Things were not working out with our animator. We needed somebody more technical and who showed more commitment. Being a small operation meant, among other things, that people needed to take on many responsibilities, be autonomous and proactive.
We hired a new animator, Stefan Petryna, who had worked on Far Cry 3 and had experience with first-person games. We needed him to jump in headfirst and get started right away.
Other issues were the controls of the camcorder and the door mechanics. Both were not intuitive enough and needed to be streamlined.
On a positive note, the atmosphere of the game, set by the music and the visuals, was effective. Players felt the tension we were trying to create and were curious to explore the rest of the game.
We took about two months to fix the issues. During that time, our needs in terms of resources became apparent. We couldn’t ship the game without one more environment artist and an additional animator to focus on scripted moments. Fortunately, it didn’t take too long to find the right people. Patrice Côté was an artist who knew Unreal 3 from working on Splinter Cell: Conviction and Thief. Jamie Helman had about 15 years of experience animating for games like Army of Two and Dead Space 2. Both were ready to kick ass from day one.
By the end of February 2013, we were ready to show our demo to a reporter for an exclusive first look. We watched him play and it was satisfying to see him jump, scream and swear. He wrote a very positive article overall. Not everything was perfect, but we had our recipe. We were ready to move on to making the rest of the game.
No comments:
Post a Comment