Previously in the series: The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 2, The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 1, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 2, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 3,The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 2,The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 2, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Hermen Hulst, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Hermen Hulst, Part 2
Last time, Hermen Hulst talked about how empowering Sony’s belief in Guerilla Games was as the studio was developing the Killzone franchise. In this final interview section, he discuss how the dev studio’s trying to return the favor by building the most ambitious of the PS3 first-party 3D projects. You want to know about the ins-and-outs of 3D game development? Hulst’s got you covered.
Now that the challenges of studio growth are out of the way, it sounds like Killzone 3 is going to be maybe the full flower of your maturation as a studio. Which is important, because a lot of studio entities don’t get this long a lifespan. They have a big spike and maybe they crash and burn after four years, whereas you guys are continuing a very steady growth as a game development studio. And what comes with that is more responsibility. I mean, you guy are kind of spearheading the 3D effort on the console. Talk to me about how those conversations started as far as 3D?
At Guerrilla, we’ve always been a bunch of people that have really embraced new technologies and innovations in general. The technology really gets the core team here very excited. So when there’s an opportunity like 3D, there’s a lot of us that really jump on that, and want to explore that, and get that up and running. So, from the very beginning of the conversation of 3D–and it happily coincided with us commencing on Killzone 3–we said “Yes, we’re going to do that.” That was an early call. That was kind of a perfect marriage with what people wanted to do here in the studio.
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It also works really well with a first-person game that’s known for very rich environments with a lot of detail in them. That combination–the interest in 3D technology and a first-person game with a lot of detail–made it kind of an easy decision for me to say yes from day one. Looking back at the end of Killzone 2, I think we kind of maxed out on what we could do. We pushed it to the maximum of our capabilities on the PS3. We fortunately found enough space to fully enable the full quality of the 3D experience with Killzone 3. There was a lot of optimization work that we had to do to make that possible between 2 and 3. And that’s kind of the beginning of these conversations.
Can you talk a little bit about the optimization work you have to make to get the full level of detail of Killzone 2, but still have that stuff render in 3D? I understand that might be too specific or technical, but I’m curious to what that might entail?
So, at the end of the day, you’ve got to render for two cameras instead of one. So, in doing that, it’s more costly. You’ve got to find performance in the system architecture for that to make that possible. And that’s what we did in the beginning, but that’s just the technical conversation. The part of it is the creative challenge. You do that. You open up.
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You find the extra performance cycles.
Yeah. You develop your 3D engine and then you switch it on. It’s not just technology. Then you switch it on and you realize that, in principle, it looks great. As I said, Killzone is the kind of game that’s ideally suited for a 3D experience. Pretty much everything is already in 3D. Some games, they do a rain effect, and it’s kind of like one sheet that’s right in front of the camera, and that’s the rain effect. Killzone 2 already had a lot of effects that were built up in 3D. So we had a great foundation.
But even then, with a great foundation, you switch it on and you realize that simple details need to be changed, because the crosshair basically feels like it’s glued on to your nose. And that’s not right. That crosshair’s what you’re looking at the whole time in a first-person-shooter experience. So, you got to open up a whole bag of tricks to make that work, and these are creative challenges. Now, we looked at 3D and we thought initially that the effect would apply itself dynamically and automatically. There’s more code work involved in making that actually happen. It’s got to be bounded by the next object that’s in your sight. It winds up being a big difference when you’re hiding behind a barrel or you have a wide-open view to some great vista out on the distance. So we toyed around with that. You really need some proper development time to give that the required tender loving care to get a great experience out of that. That’s why I was really happy that we made that decision on early on. Probably from a technological perspective, we would have been able to do it later, though.
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But tweaking it, it’s almost like molding a clay figure, you can always go back to it and make it better, and make it more intuitive. A lot of time went into that. Not necessarily that many resources. I don’t want to make it sound like half the teams were working on 3D, because that’s certainly not the case. But certainly iterating is hugely important in game development in general, but specifically on the 3D also.