August 21, 2007

Insomniac’s Brian Allgeier talks about making Ratchet & Clank’s new adventure
By Michael Lafferty

“Mystery, adventure, variety and spectacle all come together to create that magical type feeling of wonder”

The name of Ratchet & Clank carries with it certain expectations in the gaming world. There is a joy, hilarity, adventure and just all-around fun. The franchise is about to make a major transition to the next generation of gaming consoles – namely it will be hitting the PlayStation 3 on October 23.

SCEA recently hosted a media event at Insomniac Games, allowing the press to get a look at the game as well as the opportunity for some hands-on experience with the Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction title. The game itself is a remarkable bit of animation, with incredible textures, animations and it is all underscored with humor. It is a bigger galaxy, with more to see and do, as well as some mysteries to uncover – like Ratchet’s origins. But other elements creep into the game. The relationship between long-time teammates Ratchet and Clank may become a little strained.

Insomniac’s creative director, Brian Allgeier, sat down for a few moments during the event to talk with GZ about Tools of Destruction.

Question: In your opening presentation you talked about the lessons learned from the making of Resistance: Fall of Man that were applied to Tools of Destruction. What exactly were those lessons?

Brian: Really, we got an opportunity to optimize our technology. We’ve got our own engine, our own tools that we’ve developed in house and we’ve been able to improve our frame rates, our collision, our physics, our texture detail and our lighting. So we’ve got a lot more fidelity, a lot more color out of our lighting, our texture maps are very detailed at a distance whereas before we’d lose that detail and we really just have a better grasp of developing a next-gen game and what it takes. We know what our polygon budgets are, we know what our effects are and we really can get the most out of the PlayStation 3.

One of your statements earlier today was that you were going for the look that mirrored a well-made animated or Pixar movie and you seem to have accomplished that. Even the cut scenes are taken directly from game assets and are not the high-resolution, super glossy studio productions. Did you find it particularly tough, when you were sitting down to conceptualize the game to say we are not going to do any of that, that ‘we’re going to go from ground zero and make this a – as you put it – a visual feast.’ Was that a real challenge for the team?

Brian: I think we really wanted to explore at first and initially we thought we could make simpler graphics but just have a lot more stuff going on. We thought the Ratchet franchise looked really good on the PS2 but as we started to experiment more and figure out, stylistically, how we wanted things to look, we found that really nice stylistic yet detailed and rich look. And so that was something we really had to explore and we had a lot of pre-production time to do that. And that’s where we found that groove.

How hard is it for you, as a company, to sit down and come up with a new concept for a Ratchet & Clank game?

Brian: I think it is kind of funny because sometimes it feels like we are our own worse competition. Like we will bring up an idea and ‘oh, we did that in Ratchet 2,’ or ‘oh, we did that in Ratchet 1.’ And these games are so varied, but there are so many ideas, like the disco ball weapon – the Groovitron – that we had come up with early on and we had put it on the shelf just because we didn’t want to create animations for every character at that time. It eats up memory, it eats up time, and so we remember that stuff and then later on we use it.

Did you find that the hardware itself, enabling you to put more bones in the face leading to deeper emotional animations for the characters, really lent itself to exploring the personal relationships between some of the characters?

Brian: Oh definitely. And that is something I think comes across, to some degree, with the robot pirates and their little conversations, and more of that expression is in their body and how they move, but really, those guys hold up really well up close and that gives you the opportunity to wear your disguise, walk up close, watch them do their animations and listen to their conversation. And that is something we would have shied away from.

Well, even exploring the relationship between Ratchet & Clank – it’s taken a little be more of a turn. Do you credit that exploration with it being on the new system and the creation power enabled by the PS3?

Brian: I think that by starting to delve into what makes both Ratchet and Clank special, about Ratchet’s origins, Clank encountering this new type of race, has kind of fueled and created some new story developments and create that new tension to make it more interesting.

Talking about the four pillars that Insomniac uses when creating a game (mystery, adventure, variety and spectacle), which one did you consider to be the most essential when creating the next iteration of a Ratchet & Clank title?

Brian: I think the key one, really the one word we use to sum it all up is ‘wonder.’ And that is where all those four pillars tie in to. Mystery, adventure, variety and spectacle all come together to create that magical type feeling of wonder. I think that is the hard thing with next gen stuff – we don’t have any gimmicks, well, we do, but it’s the whole package and how everything comes together in this beautiful experience.

As creative director of the title, do you find yourself in an awkward situation where you have so much you would to get into the game, but you have to start cutting?

Brian: I think with all Insomniacs that is part of our problem – we have too many ideas and we do have to figure out what our scope is and what we can do. We save those ideas.

What do you consider, in your opinion, to be one of the most enjoyable aspects of this edition of Ratchet & Clank?

Brian: I think it is the humor, really. We’ve made people laugh out loud with the cut scenes, making a dinosaur dance; it’s just hilarious to watch. That is something I don’t think a lot of games have right now. The focus is on blood and guts and violence, and here we are just having fun and making people laugh.

Is there a standard that you use, or is it just personal opinion, on what is funny and what isn’t?

Brian: I think that we try not to be too satirical, we’ve done it in the past with pop culture references, but it is something that we want to walk a fine line and have everything stay in the Ratchet universe. We can poke fun, we can have disco balls, but we don’t want to be so overt that it really feels out of place.

When you put together a title like this, there is a lot of joy that shines through. Considering the amount of time involved in putting together a game like this how does a company like Insomniac maintain that joy and have it reflected so well in the title?

Brian: It’s an evolution, too. Sometimes we’ll have an inkling of an idea, and kind of work on it. I don’t know if the joy is right there up front. For instance, the Groovitron is a great example. ‘Like what if we had a weapon that made everyone dance? … Ok, that’s kind of fun, what’s another weapon?’ and then we threw out a bunch of ideas and we just kind of threw out a bunch of ideas and then we started to see that weapon that made enemies dance and we saw how funny those animations were and we thought ‘oh my gosh, we’ve got to make every enemy dance in the game, every character because this is just awesome.’ So we get those little rewards and sometimes we don’t quite realize it when we are designing it. So sometimes that joy just comes from playing around and experimenting.

You spoke about being your own worse competition. Tools of Destruction, from what has been shown here today, looks to be the biggest and best Ratchet & Clank title to date. How do you top something like this?

Brian: That is a really question and fortunately I don’t have to worry about that right now. I just have to finish the darn game.

Do you think you have maximized what the PS3 is capable of, or do you think that you have just unlocked some of the potential of the system and that will eventually lead to bigger and better things down the road?

Brian: Definitely unlocking. A lot of developers hit more of a high point several years into (a console’s life) it. It’s very easy for us to develop on the PS3 now that we’ve already done one game prior but we are learning new stuff and we are constantly optimizing and making improvements. I think that there is definitely a lot of growth in the future.

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