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Phil Cohen talks up God of War: Betrayal
We never thought we'd have a canonical God of War game on the cell phone but that's exactly what happened. We asked Phil Cohen, producer and designer of God of War: Betrayal, what it was like to squeeze such a huge franchise into such a limited platform.How hard is it to get a high-paced action game onto a mobile device like a phone with limited memory and processing power?"Hard" is a relative term. Every project is hard in its own way. For God of War, that had to do with getting all of Kratos' look, animations, combat and abilities that everyone expects to see, the variety of enemies and their deaths, and the isometric look to the environment. It really comes down to the tools, and our developer, Javaground, has the best mobile toolset that we've ever used. Of course, with every project you try to push certain perceived limits of the handsets and try to figure a way around them ... be it God of War or a casual game like Spider-Man 3 Puzzle. That's always a hard, but fun part of the development process.What struggles did you and your development team encounter upon creating the visual aspect of this title?With just a few hundred kb and much less on most handsets, we spent a lot of time coming up with a single tileset and palette swapping scheme that was diverse enough to portray multiple environments and lived up to the SCEA God of War team's high standards. That was probably the hardest part. Our Art Director, Nathan Leland, did a fantastic job.How long was the development process for God of War: Betrayal?I wrote the initial design document between September and October 2005 when I first got hired on, then it sat and stewed for a year before revisiting it in August 2006, the same month development started. The versions for high-end handsets were completed 9 months later in April. We wrapped up the final versions for low-end handset over the next 2 months, completing the 1st 6 handsets in June 2007. After that, the porting team took the game to over 200 handsets in a matter of weeks.
