After giving out their overly positive technical analysis of Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, Eurogamer sat down with Marco Thrush, Owner and CTO of developer Bluepoint Games.
In the interview, Thrush revealed that development began right after Naughty Dog finished The Last of Us Remastered:
We started the day The Last of Us Remastered shipped in June 2014, so that would make it 15 months from start to release. It was definitely our longest project so far, but it was also three full games.
Featuring a team of 48 people at its peak, the core material Bluepoint Games worked with was ” the shipped disk images, access to all source code and all source data that still remained available at this point.”
Throughout the entire development process, Bluepoint collaborated with Sony and Naughty Dog, as Thrush explained:
We worked with the leads of different departments over at ND, and when it came to gameplay tweaks we all played and tweaked based upon our interpretation of what felt best while being guided by Naughty Dog’s and Sony’s feedback. It was pretty cool to get feedback directly from Evan Wells on the UDF grenade throws! All of the enhancements to the music were done by the same awesome sound group at Sony who worked with Naughty Dog on the Uncharted PS3 titles.
Calling the process of bringing three different PS3 to PS4 in one package “tricky,” Thrush added, “The three games don’t run on the same engine, you can’t just switch U1 over to use Havok and expect the gameplay to remain the same. Each game has its own version of the engine ported to PS4 and only the parts that are truly the same (or parts we changed to operate the same with thorough testing) are actually shared across the three games.”
In terms of fitting all three games onto one disc, Thrush says better compression for both audio and video helped, along with removing multiplayer assets, and removing “S3D movies for U3, bonus content for all games, credits movies (we rendered the credits at runtime to save disk space).”
Mostly known for HD remasters and ports, Bluepoint Games is working on Gravity Rush Remastered for PS4 next. When asked about what’s happening at Bluepoint right now, Thrush didn’t mention Gravity Rush, but instead hinted that they’re working on something different:
It’s been great to see the reception of UNDC so far. There was a lot of ground to cover in the three games, and it’s not until the collection was released that we could sit back and feel a sense of accomplishment. We’re enjoying a short breather and are very excited to get into our next project. It’s a bit of a different kind of project this time around, and we’re very excited about the new challenges it brings.
What do you want Bluepoint to work on next?
[Source: Eurogamer]
