GDC ‘08: Lost Odyssey Post-Mortem
- Scribbled on March 2nd, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in GDC, Interviews, Microsoft Xbox 360, RPG
GameSpy describes what they call “one of the best, most honest, post-mortems we’ve seen on any game“, as President of FeelPlus Inc Ray Nakazato gave an unexpected post-mortem during his “Looking Back at Lost Odyssey — The Challenge of Cross-Cultural Development” seminar at GDC ‘08:
Cut-scene Production: The hiring of a visual director from the movie industry was the good point of this production area. Nakazato credited him with, essentially, thinking outside the “box” that videogame visual directors think within. In addition, the hand-animated and English-matched facial expressions really paid off, and Nakazato emphasized that the quality there couldn’t have been reached with automation. Lastly, he praised the decision to include the “text-based events,” the 1000-Year Dreams. We agree.
He again pointed to prioritization as the primary error on cut-scene production. In contrast to the backgrounds, the game’s 300 or so cut-scenes were broken down into FMVs, A events, B events, and scripted (in-game puppet show) events. In retrospect, he thinks that the FMVs were unnecessary, and that the B events were a mistake. A events got manual facial expression animation and custom motion capture, where B events used off-the-shelf mo-cap. Nakazato pointed out that by trying to use the cheaper B events for less key scenes, they generated an inconsistent level of quality for the player. Next time, they might just use A and scripted events.
Check out the rest of the amazing article at GameSpy.
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