GDC 08: Ready at Dawn on an epicidal, polished God of War game

Every now and then, you come across a new word which someone has coined. Nathan Phail-Liff of Ready at Dawn recently came up with a new word, too: epicidal.

Find out what it means and how it relates to God of War: Chains of Olympus after the jump.

“Epicidal” – that’s what Nathan Phail-Liff, the lead 3D artist for Ready at Dawn, and the rest of the team set out to do with God of War: Chains of Olympus.  Phail-Liff broached the topic of the PSP God of War game during the “God of War: Deconstructing an Epic” panel held at the Game Developer’s Conference 2008 event.

What Phail-Liff meant was that the Ready at Dawn team wanted to make the kind of game that would fully immerse players in its visual world and overwhelm them with the sheer opposition that they would be facing. Case in point: Ready at Dawn scattered visual hints of upcoming levels throughout God of War: Chains of Olympus.

Phail-Liff also talked about going the extra mile in terms of the game’s artistic polish. Ready at Dawn reportedly had to balance game polishing with other important tasks, such as working with the game’s technology. Phail-Liff even admitted that he and his team underestimated the amount of technological adjustment they would have to make for God of War: Chains of Olympus.

In order to make up for their mistake, the Ready at Dawn team implemented what they called
“non-linear scheduling”:  working longer on a problem during pre-production phase in order to fix it and cutting time from later development to avoid unnecessary delays. One good example of this is the time that the team took to hammer out inefficiencies in the fairly short “Battle of Attica” level – nearly 40% of the production time of the game – in order to make production on other levels go much smoother.

With all the work that’s gone into God of War: Chains of Olympus, it won’t be surprising to see the same level of polish in Ready at Dawn’s as yet unnamed next venture, whatever that may be.