Naughty Dog’s panel at PAX East 2010 offered attendees a fairly in-depth look at how the studio created each level in Uncharted and Uncharted 2 . One important aspect of the series’ level design is, of course, coming up with a clever name for each chapter — a task assigned to lead designer Richard Lemarchand. Unfortunately, “the Man” occasionally prevents Lemarchand from putting certain chapter titles in the game, keeping Uncharted 2’s original train segment title card (pictured above) out of the final version. Curse you, unseen managerial powers-that-be! Seen@PAX: The Uncharted 2 chapter title that should have been originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 28 Mar 2010 11:45:00 EST.
The GDC 2010 Microtalks session was a frazzling experience in many ways. The format of the event essentially assures it. Ten lecturers — all from different sectors of the game industry — each spoke for five minutes and each were allowed to use 20 different slides. Naughty Dog’s Richard Lemarchand set the stage for the speakers, announcing the theme of the talks as “come play with us.” The goal of the microtalks, said Lemarchand, was to help game creators capture the “radicalizing exuberance” of games and give them the energy to “transform the world” through the power of play.
There is one drawback to seeing Uncharted 2 ’s co-lead designer, Richard Lemarchand, unfurl the development process behind the most successful and most ambitious game in the studio’s history. A post-mortem panel, held on Thursday afternoon at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, delved into developer Naughty Dog’s pre-production process, its production pipeline and the climactic rush to a spectacular end. It also highlighted some of the studio’s misjudgments, which resulted in a difficult crunch time toward the end of development. And now, every time I play that incredible train level — “an evil monster of a level,” Lemarchand said — for my personal enjoyment, I’ll pull back the curtain and see programmers hunching over keyboards and nodding off into icy cups of coffee.
