Gamasutra has posted a great article regarding Ratchet and Clank Future by Insomniac Games. In this articule Insomniac details development of Ratchet and what some of their challenges were. If you have ever been interested in knowing some of the things that goes on in making a game, this is definitely a read for you.
During pre-production Ratchet seemed very ambitious as I am sure all titles are. Just to quote a section of the article, you will see what the plans were for Ratchet regarding features and environments, and how they were cut due to resources and time:
At the end of preproduction RCF’s design called for 25 unique planets, 5 space combat missions, 1 hour of cinematic cut scenes, a hazily-defined co-op mode, and an even more ambiguous online component.
We wanted the game experience to last about 15 hours — and we achieved this — but the final scope of our game was 16 planets, 3 space combat missions, 45 minutes of cinematic animation, and single player mode only.
Further more, Insomniac speaks about development on two games at a time and following their PS1 and PS2 development scheme. With improvements being made to their development process, they learn and apply to their next game. This has surely allowed Insomniac to release triple A titles on the PS3 including a PSN expansion of Ratchet.
Ratchet By The Numbers
Game Data
Developer: Insomniac Games
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Release Date: October 23rd, 2007
Platform: PlayStation 3Number of Developers: 70 full-time, 30 shared, 25 contractors (music, voice acting, testing, localization).
Length of Development: 23 months: 11 months preproduction, 12 months production.
Hardware Used: Artist workstation: Dell Xeon 3.2G with Quadro FX3400. Programmer workstation: Quadcore PC with as much memory crammed into it as possible.
Software Used: Proprietary engine and development tools. Artist software: Maya, Photoshop, ZBrush, Turtle. Asset management and revision control: Perforce. Design/gameplay scripting: Lua. Compiler: custom GCC compiler provided by Sony. Character lip synching: Annisoft.
Number of Times Art Director Spoke Ill of Dragons: Zero — for he is crunchy and good with ketchup.
Technologies Licensed: SpeedTree, Bink, Microsoft Visual Studio, Anark (UI menus), DevTrack (bug database).
Project Size
Game size: 22.5gb
Project size: 1000gb
Bugs: 16,000
Source Files: 4429
Lines of code: 980,184
Receiving data like this about game development projects is fantastic. I sure hope other developers can be as revealing as Insomniac. As a SCM guy, I do feel the pain as I am currently working on a project with 5600+ source code files. Makes me want to pull a line count…