GDC08: God of War developer goes behind-the-scenes

Nathan Phail-Liff held a session at GDC entitled "God of War: Deconstructing an Epic." Through the session, he talked about the development of the game, and gave tips for interested developers on how to make the most out of limited resources.

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"An extra 10% of effort yields an addition 40% to the final perception of polish." These numbers are hard to verify, simply because these attributes aren't quantifiable in the first place. However, the slides on display show how significantly a product can change over a short period of time. What took 3 days to make can be enhanced with just two more days of work. It can be further enhanced with an additional day. And then a few more hours. See the huge strides made in the slide above.

The team admits that they underestimated the "tech revisions to grow from Daxter to God of War." As impressive as Daxter was, God of War required far more tech, due to its more realistic graphics. Lighting, for example, had to be completely changed in order to meet the demands of the game.

Here's one of the funnier notes of development. Apparently, the Battle of Attica level actually "took up almost 40% of [Ready at Dawn's] production time." This is the level that was included in the demo, and is the level that has been primarily on display. The team wanted to get everything right for the game's introduction before going on to the remainder of the game.

So what's next for Ready at Dawn? It's rather unhelpful and vague: "new original IPs, new platforms, new mistakes!" We'll certainly keep an eye on their next project.