Game Developement over the years

GOLDEN EYE 64

The development team visited the studios of the GoldenEye film to collect photographs and blueprints of the sets used in the movie. Silicon Graphic Onyx workstations and Nintendo's NINGEN development software were used to create the geometry for virtual environments based on this reference material. However, many of the missions were extended or modified to allow the player to participate in sequences which the film's James Bond did not. Hilton explained, "We tried to stick to [the reference material] for authenticity but we weren't afraid of adding to it to help the game design. It was very organic.Initially, the designers' priority was purely on the creation of interesting spaces; level design and balance considerations such as the placement of start and exit points, characters and objectives did not begin until this process was complete

BLACK (PS2)

Criterion intended to "do for shooting what Burnout did for racing - tear it apart with dual emphasis on destructible environments and the handling and behavior of real-world firearms. Bullets that hit buildings, terrain and objects leave visible damage; moreover, the guns are rendered with great detail and accuracy, though some weapons' features are stylized or exaggerated. The emphasis on the appearance, function, and sounds of the weapons led the developer to label the game as "Gun-Porn^" Another notable and original feature is the use of real-time blur while reloading, giving a depth of field and more perspective to the game. Similarly, when the player drops below two bars of health, the screen turns black and white, the sound of the character's heartbeat become the dominant noise and the game goes into slow motion, and the large and small motors in the control pads match the sound of systolic and distolic part of the heartbeat.
The game was not developed with an overarching plot structure in mind and this was implemented as something of an afterthought towards the end of development. The initial idea for relating the plot in-game came from Black's director, Alex Ward, who wanted to have a radio-play-style voice over spoken over a 'black' screen.

Emphasizing the game's action film heritage, sound effects for the weapons in the game were based on various sounds from movies. Whereas, traditionally in a shooter game, each weapon model would be assigned a different sound, Black assigns each enemy their own "voice", similar to the way in which each member of a choir would have their own distinct voice. For example, there are three enemies firing, one would be assigned a low voice, another a medium voice, and the third a high voice. This allows all the weapons being fired in any particular scene to harmonies and deliver a distinct sound for the game. Black '​s sound was nominated for Best Audio at 2006 BAFTA video game awards and won Best Art & Sound jointly with Burnout Revenge at the 2006 develop Industry Excellence Awards.

 THE LAST OF US (PS3)

The Infected, a core concept of the game, were inspired by a segment of the BBC nature documentary Planet Earth (2006), which featured the Cordyceps fungi. These fungi can grow from an ant's head, and take control of the ant's motor functions, forcing it to help cultivate the fungus. The Infected were developed to explore the question: What if a strain of Cordyceps could infect humans? Could the fungus grow from a human head? Could it animate human corpses to shamble about while lacking in intelligence or consciousness?

Naught Dog began work on The Last of Us after completing Uncharted 2: Among Thieves in 2009. For two years, Naughty Dog kept the new intellectual property secret; and for the first time, the company, led by co-presidents Evan Wells and Christophe Ballestra, split into two teams to work on both projects concurrently. This was a bold move for Naughty Dog, who had never before introduced two new intellectual properties within the same hardware generation. One team developed Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (2011) while the other began work on The Last of Us. The new project was headed by studio game director Bruce Stalley, who brought on Mark Richard Davies, lead designer for Enslaved: Odyssey To The West (2010).


The Last of Us did draw from the Uncharted series, according to creative director Neil Druckmann. In Uncharted 2, protagonist Nathan Drake bonds with the Tibetan guide Tenzin through collaborative gameplay. This proved to be an effective method for storytelling, so the The Last of Us team developed Joel and Ellie with this in mind, using gameplay to build a dynamic and complex bond between the two characters. Although Druckmann and Straley researched post-apocalyptic and dystopian films, books, and television shows, they found historical fiction to be an unparalleled study of humans in quasi-apocalyptic settings. Humanity has been threatened by global epidemics before: The 1918 Spanish Influenza illustrated the depths of self-protection and paranoia that humans are capable of under threat of extinction, whereas the polio epidemic of the 1880s demonstrated the influences of socioeconomic classes when assigning blame in a great disaster. Druckmann realized that The Last of Us would not need a stereotypical villain to provide karmic foil to his protagonists—not when humanity itself was eroding. Finally, Naughty Dog also took cues from video games like Ico and Resident Evil 4, in story development, character building, interaction, tension, and action. Designer Ricky Cambier stated that they wanted to create as realistic a survival game as possible, with clear character motivations and responses.
Druckmann endeavored to create a compelling and rich narrative in The Last of Us, and to raise the bar and the industry whose storytelling has grown lazy.
After learning that the research firm was planning on running focus tests exclusively with male gamers, Naughty Dog requested that focus groups be expanded to include women. Druckmann stated, "My big surprise during this process is that the research group wasn't planning on focus-testing female gamers—it's something we had to specifically request. I hope this is a relic of the past that will soon go away".
The game went gold on May 15, 2013.

 KILLZONE SHADOW FALL (PS4)

Killzone Shadow Fall was seen, by Guerrilla Games, as an opportunity to revitalize the franchise, since it was established early in development that they would be working on a new platform. The main point during development was to give players more options on how to proceed, particularly during the single-player mode. According to Guerrilla Games, the original size of Killzone Shadow Fall was 290GB because the game has no assets designed for lower spec systems.
The demo of Killzone Shadow Fall shown during the PlayStation 4's announcement only used 4GB of memory – not the full 8GB GDDR5 RAM available to developers in the final hardware, Guerrilla has revealed. According to the studio, 3072MB (3GB) of the PS4's 8GB were dedicated to video resources powering the demo, with 1,536MB used for system resources. A further 128MB were shared between the two. Of the 3GB reserved for video memory, 1,321 MB were used by non-streaming textures. According to Guerrilla, the demo featured 8200 physics objects, 500 particle systems and real-time reflections - which include "a lot of Guerrilla secret sauce" Guerrilla's decision to stick with 4GB suggest that the developer may not have been aware of Sony's decision to include 8GB in final retail hardware – something Just Add Water CEO Stewart Gilray told videogame.com had been kept secret from third-party developers until the console's announcement. "We were told [PS4] was 4GB originally and we first knew it had 8GBs when Mark said at the event's stage, 'And it has 8GB of memory.' We'd had kits at that point for a good while