Interview: Making Drake's Fortune

On a swanky press trip, we met with Naughty Dog game director Amy Henning, for a detailed behind-the-scenes interview feature on the epic new PS3 adventure.

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Kikizo: Can you tell us more about how you approached the emotional realism side of this game, to get this really great and involving cinematic feel, and make Nathan this 'everyman' protagonist?

Henning: We really just thought about looking at people, and characters and movies that we found engaging and endearing. We thought there's a subtlety there that videogames don't usually have, a subtlety in performance, in gesture and in facial animation. We've been through so many iterations with these characters, and their facial rigs and the detail - I mean, if you saw the first things we started with you'd be horrified; they were creepy! It just didn't look right. And we just continually refined them, and got to a point where they were actually very likable and engaging characters. But it meant a very complex facial rig, and being able to have the wrinkle maps in the face, and having great animators and performances from the actors, because that's all captured from mo-cap stage, so it's all acted out like a stage play.

Kikizo: This is an interesting point, because how do you really address the balance of fighting in a game versus a similar movie - there's not much of a game like this without continuous fighting!

Henning: The one thing that's difficult about making a comparison between videogames and movies is that in movies, you can get away with a lot less of the amount of violence, and ultimately a videogame has got to be about conflict and challenge, and crisis, right? So a movie's is two hours long and a game's ten, something like that, and how many more deaths for hours do you have to have?! This game is certainly a little bit more sanitised, violence-wise, that... some! And we're trying to take that adventure movie aspect, we did a whole lot of motion capture with stunt men, they flew all over the place, so you have these big and dramatic 'stunt deaths', to kind of take it out of the realm of realism and make it a little cartoony. And I think the problem though is if you look at a movie there's a lot of sequences of long dialogue, and that's OK, because it's a passive experience, and when it's an active experience, you want those things in a movie that were the most exciting - the fights, gunplay, explosions and changes, to be your gameplay. So it does have the risk, if you don't have the balance of cinematic moments and dialogue, to undercut the emotional qualities of the characters. It is something I struggle with a little bit, because I think there's potential for that to cut into the qualities that I'm after, but ultimately it still has to be fun and challenging - and be a game!

Kikizo: Did you do all the motion capture in-house?

Henning: No, we worked with a studio called House of Moves, it's just down the road thank goodness because we go there all the time! It's in Marina Del Ray, and we're in Santa Monica. They're a great group of people, and it's been a huge learning experience, because again, I think you see motion capture in some games, sometimes it's pretty stiff. Some people will record the voices ahead of time, like you normally would do for a videogame, and then they hire non-actors, or mo-cap performers, to then pantomime to that. So it looks like pantomime, and it's very gestural. So what we did is cast actors, the same actors that do the voices, they come in and we do a day of rehearsal, we change things around on that day, I work with a director who's got a lot of stage and on-camera experience, who's been doing this for years and years. And they have to be off-book, and have the whole thing memorised, to act out every scene like it's a stage play. And it's great, because you get all this organic life and realism; they sometimes step on each other's lines, they overlap and they stutter, and they change things and come up with ideas, none of which you would get if you didn't do it that way. And then what we do, because none of the audio is useable because we're not in a sound stage, and you hear all the Velcro suits and everything, we have to go and they watch the video of themselves and re-record all their voices, to the performance that was captured, that was so good and so natural. And some of the scenes in the game really show that. It's just very natural and organic human interaction.

Kikizo: Did this include the facial animations as well though?

Henning: Actually, they captured their facial animations, but we decided it wasn't worth it. It takes a lot of set-up time, it's expensive, it takes a lot of time to process the data, and it's sort of a lot for these actors to have forty or sixty markers on their face, so what we do is we videotape everything, and then the animators hand-animate the faces according to the video reference - it works out fine. And saves us a lot of time and money too!

Kikizo: Can I ask something about the history of what you're basing the game on? When you talked about it earlier, you said that when Sir Francis Drake got back to England, Queen Elizabeth took all the stuff he'd discovered. I was wondering, why did that confiscate all his treasures?

Henning: Well I would ruin our what-if, if I tell you! Well they don't really know for sure, but it's probably because he found a passage around the world, I mean he circumnavigated the world, and that's hugely valuable, and they didn't want that to fall into the hands of the Spanish; they were at war with them. So we tried to give it a veracity or a believability, but based on things that were true, like the Spanish war in the Pacific. They didn't have a colony that far out but they had the Magallanes that went back and forth because they were sick of taking their treasure east and having it taken by the English, so they would go west instead. But there were books from Francis Drake that he kept during his circumnavigation in the 1570s, and they were confiscated and hidden away, and I guess the story's supposed to be that they were burned in the Tower of London, but everyone wonders whether they really were. And it's fun, in a what-if sense, to say what if there was more to it? What if there were greater mysteries or things of greater value that were hidden away?

Kikizo: And finally, have you had any feedback from Jason Rubin [former president of Naughty Dog - interview] about what Naughty Dog is going with this title?

Henning: I haven't directly, but I think he is still in touch with people at the company, I think he's enthusiastic about it and thinks it's pretty cool!

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune for PS3 is out now in America and is released in Europe on December 7.

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