Interviews// Richard Lemarchand, Lead Designer, Uncharted

SPOnG: As you were working on the game, did people's comments on previews they'd seen feed into what you were doing?

Richard Lemarchand: Absolutely. When we showed at E3 in the early part of 2007, we knew going into E3 that we didn't really have the aiming down.

After E3 a lot of the commentary of the aiming on the (bulletin) boards, and in the press was critical. We took that to heart, we welcomed it, because it let us know that we hadn't hit the right mark, so we had to have a quick re-think about the amount of time we were spending on that stuff and put some time towards making it just right.

So, definitely. I think people's remarks at E3 last year were really essential in making the game be as good as it was.


SPOnG: You mentioned in your presentation earlier that you rebuilt your game engine prior to Uncharted. Can you talk a bit about why that was?

Richard Lemarchand: The Jak and Daxter games had been written in a language called 'Goal', which is a variant of a weird programming language called 'List', which is mainly used by AI programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Andy Gavin, one of Naughty Dog's founders, did his PhD.

So, Andy chose to code the Jak and Daxter games in Goal because it meant that the code could be reloaded and recompiled on the fly. That meant that the coders could iterate on the game mechanics much more quickly than they could working in C or C++. We have since found some tricks and techniques for allowing our guys to do that, to iterate more quickly in C.

So, the reason that we changed from Goal to more usual language is that we knew with next-gen we wanted to share technology with other studios. The technological bar for the PS3 is so high, things are so complex, that in order to make the best games in 2008 and beyond, you really need to share tools and technology with other studios. And I think that Sony are really behind this idea as well.

In fact, there's now a set of tools called Edge – I don't know if you've heard of them? It's a set of very low-level tools for doing commonly needed things like animation compression and the basics of the rendering pipeline that run on the PS3's SPUs (which are these six Symbiotic Processing Units). They work in concert with the main GPU to do certain kinds of mathematical operations at lightening-fast speeds - so fast that we consider them almost to be free in terms of processing time.

So, this Edge group, who are actually on site at Naughty Dog and who are comprised of Naughty Dog programmers and programmers from other first-party Sony studios, have been working on these tools for a few years now.

The tools are distributed for free to all third-party developers so they can use them to get a lot of the basics of making a game out of the way and to concentrate on making their games innovative and play really well.

So, yeah, I think that shift for us was this philosophy of sharing information and technology that is only going to make PS3 games more amazing-looking and amazing-playing, more importantly.


SPOnG: So, who else is using your engine at the moment?

Richard Lemarchand: I don't want to get into naming studios, because to be honest I can't remember the list properly (Grins). Some of the games that already shipped last holiday system used the Edge tools and a bunch of studios are using them now.

I know that Evolution Studios, who make MotorStorm, use our technology and we have a really great relationship with them.


SPOnG: Looking at some of the environments in Pacific Rift, they look quite reminiscent of Uncharted.

Richard Lemarchand: But also, it's a piggy-back thing. We looked very closely at the first MotorStorm when we made Uncharted. We were looking at shaders and the way you can get certain types of rock textures.

A lot of their work influenced us on Uncharted, so it's not just a one-way street.

SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time.