Interviews// Heavenly Sword Maker: Tameem Antonaides

SPOnG: What are the advantages and pitfalls of working on the PlayStation 3, and what’s been the most memorable (good or bad) moment so far during development?

Tameem Antonaides: It is a complex and powerful console but so was the PS2 at the time, and all the other consoles before it. A good console developer will be more than capable of tapping into its power and getting some amazing performance out of it. PC developers may find it harder as was the case since the dawn of consoles. Some things never change. There’s no need to panic and it is getting easier to develop for all the time.

I remember the weeks leading up to our E3 demo last year. We had just ported the code over from a PC prototype and the game was running at about 4fps and looked more like a PS1 era game. We knew that E3 was coming and we needed to do some serious optimisation. Every day, we got faster and faster and it looked better and better.

It was really only a couple days before E3 that we got it running at full frame rate and looking spectacular. It was an amazing race against time and an incredible effort by all, especially the engine team.


SPOnG: The SIXAXIS controller can be used to change camera angles during certain moves in play. In what other ways are you bridging the gap between gameplay and cinematics, and how much of a challenge is it for you guys to achieve this?

Tameem Antonaides: We use camera cuts on cool moves a lot, but only on the ones that don’t interfere with gameplay. We use SIXAXIS as a look-around feature so you can peek left/right by tilting the controller while you fight.

When you throw any object, you can choose to go into Aftertouch where the camera follows the object from behind as you steer it by tilting the SIXAXIS controller. We have the hero sequences, which are great cinematic moments that are often branching so that they are not all-or-nothing scenes like in other games. We use picture-in-picture where appropriate so that we do not interrupt gameplay with cut scenes.

Even with the group combat AI, we designed them to look and move like in a typical kung fu movie. And then, of course, we create these huge scenes with thousands of enemies that you can blow up with explosives and fight through.

I believe we have some of the best digital performances in any medium, games or film, thanks to the amazing talent and effort that was put in this area by Andy, Weta and the character team at Ninja.

We really have gone whole-hog in trying to give you a great blockbuster feel to the whole game and it has been very, very challenging to achieve what we have.


SPOnG: Heavenly Sword draws a lot of influence from its martial arts style play. What inspired you to take this direction for the game’s action?

Tameem Antonaides: It’s just a genre that has pretty much been ignored by games. Even games based on Kung Fu licenses haven’t captured the feel of the genre. Japanese developers have their own style of anime-based action that they rarely move away from and Western developers mostly avoid combat altogether or reduce it to very basic hack-and-slash. It occurred to us that we could capture this style and make an in-depth and varied combat system that could make you feel like you were playing through an epic martial arts movie.