Favorite links for "How they did ___ game"

News & General Discussion
1

This question got asked here by AaronC:

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=6892&start=15

I thought it’d be good to start a separate thread about it. :slight_smile:

I’ll start:

Shadow of the Colossus: http://edusworld.org/ew/ficheros/2006/paginasWeb/making_of_sotc.html

Cheers,
-Jon

2

i think its hard to find good “general” writeups, but you can find many specific things here there. some thing’s i’ve tried:

  • go to major SDK / mod sites - its usully alot to look through but you can find good info throughout.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SDK_Docs
http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/ArtReference

stuff isn’t always relevant or useful as obviously from one game to the next engines vary greatly.
(for example: http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/LevelEditor_Performance - hmm…)

  • find out who, for instance the level artist is in the game your interested in. find his website (or portfolio on a major forum like cgsociety). sometimes they will have tuts or blogs that can be helpful.

and gamasutra ; )

3

Thanks for the links guys, theyre great. Interesting about that quake engine how it has those built in warnings when your pushing the poly count or texture size too much.

This will keep me nicely entertained and off the streets…
AC

4

I second SOTC.

-Jeremy

5

I think this is the third or fourth time I’ve read the Colossus write-up and it’s still so interesting. I really dig their method of terrain degradation and would really like to read a more in-depth explanation of how it works. The deforming collision system is super-cool, too.

6

I just wish that they had remembered how to make something that is both a fantastic game and a great-looking piece of artwork.

Now Ico, that’s a game to learn from.

7

Found a couple of other nice reads:

COD4

HALO AI
http://aigamedev.com/reviews/halo-ai

Enjoy
AC

8

Resistance: Fall of Man lighting (mostly lightmapping): http://www.cybergooch.com/tutorials/pages/lighting_rfom1.htm

9

Yeah that Resistance one is cool. If you mouseover the images you can see other rendermodes.

What else you guys?
AC