Before good ol’ GDC comes around again, we jumped the gun and interviewed Naughty Dog’s Lead Gameplay Animator Jeremy Lai-Yates about the recently released PlayStation 3 hit Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. When I first played the game, I just stared in awe while I watched lead character Nathan Drake get wet. Yeah, that sounds bad. But seriously, the engine is sophisticated enough to know exactly where Drake’s clothes get wet, and even better than that, they gradually dry over time once you jump out of the water. Stunning details like this are bending real-time in-game environment response to player actions.

Jeremy is one of the artists responsible for the life-like movements of characters in real-time play found in Uncharted. Forget sitting back to watch pretty cut scenes—now’s the time to enact them. And if you leave this interview wanting more, check out Jeremy’s talk with Lead Character Technical Director Judd Simantov—“Uncharted Animation: An In-depth Look at the Character Animation Workflow and Pipeline”—Wednesday, February 20 at the Game Developers Conference.

Q: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune has been called “the reason to buy the PS3″ before the release of anticipated titles like Metal Gear. What new techniques in animation did you get to explore with the PS3 as your platform?

A: One of the hard lessons we learned early on production was to be careful about going too far down a rabbit hole of complicated new techniques. However some of our big wins were simply using techniques such as additive and partial animations and taking them further than anyone had done before. Now that we had the ceiling opened up to us with the power the PS3 offered, we were able to really take things to a level of detail we’d always dreamed of. Our only restriction now is production time available.

Q: How did your team decide on a direction for the art style? What forms of inspiration did you have—including new technology previously unavailable in PS2 game development?

A: We were really inspired by the “pulp adventure” genre (i.e. Indiana Jones, The Mummy, National Treasure, etc). This became the core of the feeling we wanted to convey in our game. My original inspiration for Drake’s movement was drawn from the emerging sport of free running. I loved the types of “platforming” that was physically possible. However when we discovered who Drake was, we knew what made us really connect to him would be his humanness: his imperfections. This made us take out his graceful abilities and made him look a bit more on the edge of his abilities. He stumbles, has hard hits, and isn’t graceful. This is one of the things that really sets him apart from most other “heroes” in a game. Thus the player will relate a bit more and feel a bit more invested.

Q: Since this was the first time making a PS3 animation pipeline for Naughty Dog, what were some challenges you faced?

A: We were challenged to create an animation pipeline that was as future proof as we could make it. It needed to sustain the rigors of next-gen development, and withstand a franchise. We weren’t so fortunate during Jak and Daxter’s development and were stuck with limitations built in early on that we had to live with for four games. Another new addition to our pipeline was the integration of motion capture. We are a very hands on team, and we needed motion capture to be a seamless addition in that process. We wanted to be able to hand key animations as well as work with motion capture in a very similar workflow.

Q: What software did you use, and how did you decide what was best for Uncharted?

A: We use Maya here as well as a lot of proprietary tools and programs. Maya is powerful on its own, and flexible enough to let us build in an around it to suit our studios unique needs and pipeline.

Q: How many team members did you have, and how was the teamwork managed?

A: During peak production we had 6 animators working on gameplay animation. Studio wide we have close to 90 people on staff. Naughty Dog is a fairly flat hierarchy by design. We have senior artists, leads, and directors. We don’t have in-studio producers. The designers and leads share those responsibilities and help make all scheduling decisions.

Q: What visual aspects of Uncharted did you find to be the most interesting?

A: Apart from our graphics engine being kick ass… I’ll give you a biased answer. We put a lot of effort trying to raise the bar of animation in this game to the same level of where the rendering is at. There has been an industry wide problem that things might look great in a still frame, but the moment you see movement, the reality begins to unravel. I feel that animation has been next big frontier in game development. We hope that we as a team can help inspire the industry to push the envelop of “character” in games.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Art Interviews, PEOPLE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.