inFamous’ Empire City Only took a Dozen Good Developers
Sucker Punch’s inFamous was without a doubt one of the best games released in all of 2009. Not only did the game have an incredibly high replay value; it also featured one of the most impressive and explorable cities of 09′, Empire City. Divided into the three unique sections, with each being detailed down to the smallest degree. It must have took over a 75 developers to make such a gigantic city, right? Wrong! You’re not going to believe how small the team was that build the world Cole protected (or destroyed).
The comedic journalists over at Joystiq caught wind of the information during last weeks GDC 2010 during a discussion panel. Sucker Punch’s Nate Fox revealed that it took a team of no more than 12 developers to build the entire city. Amazing! It took over 400 developers to make Assassin’s Creed 2, though it was across 3 different systems. That’s not to say the team didn’t cut corners though. There was only 2 types of cars in the entire game; The same model was modified as needed. Mr. Fox even explained how the city was easily designed to be edited in no time.
The map was partitioned into a hexagonal grid — the inspiration for which came from the popular board game Carcassonne, Fox explained. Edges of each hex were designed to effortlessly fit together, allowing designers to make minor changes to each compartment, and paste the location into another chunk of the city.
Some of you might call this cheating and that the fine folks at Sucker Punch didn’t put 100% into the game, however you gotta realize that the team had limited resources and time to finish the game before release. By easily creating Empire City, it allowed the time to focus on the more creative villain lairs and other memorable areas.
With the price of inFamous dropping to the steal of a deal price of only $40 recently, you have no excuse not to add this super-hero sandbox action/adventure title to your PS3 gaming collection.
[Source]
9 Responses to “inFamous’ Empire City Only took a Dozen Good Developers”
hello …
it is already in my collection, now i need to find time to start playing it, LOL!
Wow that’s impressive, only 12 person, hummm th final copy-paste did pay for the game is wonderful.
i’m so happy with the PS3′s exclusive …
cheers!
not bad. good to hear cause i once climbed to the top of a building once and fell thru the map and into nowhere. good to have a explanation to why there were some bugs and glitches
Makes sense, I’m glad they did this like you said it gave them the time to make improve on other parts of Infamous.
too bad there wasn’t DLC for that game, that was a really fun game to play. would be nice
to visit it again.
@SolidCake_
Why don’t you?
That’s pretty cool it was such a small team…they just need to work on less jaggies and crazy pop in on the cars and buildings.
Good game. Too bad I didn’t finish it cuz I was playing Prototype, now I regret selling inFamous too early :/
@Meghterb
You opted for Prototype?…. now I have to go vomit
@Meghterb – huge mistake – I played and beat both games, and wow… just uh,,, Infamous stomped prototype into the dirt – and then electrocuted it. Ahem…
anyways, funny you guys ran this article – I started playing it again while waiting to go get GOW3 and was wowed by how fun it is – I forgot how awesome this game really is. I did notice I fall through the floor sometimes now, which can be annoying – its wierd though, I bought this on release date and never had this happen on my first couple play throughs – I wonder if a firmware update effected it some how?
Also – that hexagonal grid becomes obvious as you clean up areas of the city – I definitely used that grid in order to find all the blast shards.