Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction [PS3 - Concept]

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by monokoma In: playstation 3|SONY

25 Feb 2009

On Gamasutra we can read an interesting article about the development of the first Ratchet & Clank for the Playstation 3: “One of the first features developed for Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction was the “Groovitron” — a bomb that was part boom box and part laser light show. Throw the bomb, force your foe into spontaneous dance, and then kill him to a disco soundtrack. [...]

To start, we decided to visualize the Ratchet & Clank universe PS3-style by recreating Metropolis, one of the iconic locations from our PS2 series. We did this by building a “diorama” of the city, adding vehicles, and sending a camera through it. We built our test city using the Resistance engine, stitched together a frame by frame camera fly through, and added audio effects to simulate the experience of being in Metropolis. [...]

Progress was slow, but we were still making some. By the end of preproduction we had one semi-complete level that was functional but not very stable. This would eventually become “Kerchu City” [...]

Establishing a design for Ratchet proved especially challenging as we considered redefining the character. He went through numerous iterations before we felt we got him right. [...]

We wanted the game experience to last about 15 hours — and we achieved this — but the final scope of our game was 16 planets, 3 space combat missions, 45 minutes of cinematic animation, and single player mode only. At the end of preproduction RCF‘s design called for 25 unique planets, 5 space combat missions, 1 hour of cinematic cut scenes, a hazily-defined co-op mode, and an even more ambiguous online component.

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