Interviews// Naughty Dog's Justin Richmond

Justin Richmond on co-opting Hollywood-style techniques:

We do a lot of our animations through motion-capture, and we upgraded our sound-studio to be soundproof, so all the voice-acting is done by the characters who were playing them in the mocap studio, so Nolan North will come in and play Drake, but all of his mocap and audio is captured at the same time, along with all the other characters.

So, if there’s a scene with Chloe, Drake and Elena all in a room together, then they really were all in a room together filming this thing at the same time. So we got much more believable interaction between the characters, because they were all actually acting on stage and it was more like a Hollywood shoot. The writer was there, our creative director was there and our editor was there, so they could sit down and discuss what was working and what wasn't.

The actors got much more invested in their characters, because they really were working on a stage. The actors got involved enough to say things like: “I don’t think my character would do that,” and were constantly iterating. Plus, all the actors were based in LA, so we were able to do shoots more or less constantly – doing stuff every week, pretty much, until the end of the project, so we were getting tons of stuff in there, and when something wasn’t working, it was very easy to fix it.

Justin Richmond on destructible environments:

It’s not destructibility in the sense of a Red Faction, where you can throw a grenade and blow a building up, but there’s definitely a lot more interaction between Drake and the environment in this game. Tanks will drive through walls, the train is a real thing driving through a real space, you can knock things off shelves – there are all kinds of physical moving objects all over the place.

Some of it is scripted, and some of it isn’t. Actually, at this point, I don’t even know any more what’s scripted and what isn’t. In the E3 demo, almost everything that was in there was reacting to the fact that you were tilting the environment – that was physics stuff. There is some stuff in there that is animated, but the vast majority of it is physical interactions, where things are bumping into each other and sliding around. We had to make sure that Drake, the AI and everything was able to interact with that stuff correctly – it took a lot of time getting that tech to work.

Justin Richmond on Uncharted becoming a big franchise, and the pressure not to mess it up:

Naughty Dog always has this sense of not wanting to f**k it up, I guess – we’re pretty hard on ourselves on top of everybody else. We knew we had something cool with Uncharted, and we were glad the fans and critics responded to it well, but coming into Uncharted 2, we knew we wanted to do it much bigger and much better – and we did. I think we did a really, really good job of getting as much stuff in there as we possibly could, and making it a really well controlled game that was very polished.

It almost didn’t matter what other people thought: Naughty Dog had to produce a really good game for ourselves, and everyone else came after that. That’s not to say we didn’t do tons of play-testing – we always have people coming in and playing it, making sure things are working and going forward in the right way. Everybody in the company sort of takes ownership of it. We as a company play it for hundreds of hours, and then we bring fresh eyes in to tell us where we screwed up.

Well, it just remains for us to say, "Thanks for your time, Justin... don't forget to read our Uncharted 2 review.