When At First You Don't Succeed
In the next section of his presentation, Phail-Liff inadvertently revealed just why most of the CoO game coverage focused on one level. "At one point, we almost considered changing the title of the game to God of War: Battle of Attica," he joked. The game's introductory level took up 40% of the game's production time, but it was used to hammer out all of the problems regarding art style and inefficiencies in the pipeline process. When given the choice between a glossy high-tech solution and something low-tech but easy to implement, the team opted for lower-tech ideas in order to allocate resources through the most efficient means, in part, because it was easier to reiterate if something fell apart. Attica was the section in which the design team learned how to iterate art sections on tiny slices of prototype content without recycling assets from other sections of the game. Using micro-prototypes also allowed for faster re-dos, just in case an idea didn't work out.
In the realm of cinematics, Phail-Liff pointed out how both solutions and reiterations solved many early mistakes. Because CoO uses in-game cut-scenes, all of the art polish done in other sections of the game transfers over to movies with little or no loss of production time.
It was in the final section of Phail-Liff's lecture that he broke down the ways that the Chains of Olympus team was able to recover the time lost reiterating mistakes. In order to streamline the process, the team created tools focused on maximizing team effectiveness, such as a markup language. Through this program, the team could edit the user interface for any assets in the game, from lighting to gameplay to scripting, and easily connect objects and elements. As a result, programmers could focus on important tasks at hand, rather than trying to make heads and tails of some artist's sloppy programming. Also, as a result of this markup language, there was a standardization of UI as well as edits to it. Because of the universality of the programming, all features and fixes could be globally understood.
Thanks to the standardized markup language, it also enabled the team to focus on editing in real time, which circumvented the process of making builds of the game. For team members who loathed excessive iterations, the process provided immediate visual feedback. Phail-Liff showed off a video of how the team could go into the PSP's debug menu, tweak a shadow on a level, and continue playing. Because of the innovations in streamlining the user interface for programmers and artists, last-minute changes were easier to test and implement without much cost or risk.
Ultimately, Phail-Liff closed the session by pointing out that in spite of Ready At Dawn's initial mistakes in the process of creating God of War: Chains of Olympus, the team was able to rebound quickly thanks to innovations in scheduling processes and the use of streamlining tools. These techniques helped the team complete the highly polished game that'll be in your PSP in just a few short weeks.
