Making video games is very hard. It can take years of work to charge even a small game. One aspect that can take an especially large amount of time and resources is building a custom engine, which is why many developers use the Unreal Engine, Unity, or another pre-existing engine to help speed up the development process. This is very common, but recently a really wild example from the PlayStation 2 days came up in an interview with Glen Schofield, the new site manager. Callisto protocol.
at recent days , Callisto protocol It was released to… mixed reviews, let’s say (our very own Ashley Bardhan loved how ambitious it was, despite some annoying difficulty spikes). Anyway, to help drum up publicity for the new horror game, director Glenn Scofield It was about doing interviews and such. And two weeks ago he made a video with Wired He responded to random tweets about the game’s development. This is where he revealed a fun bit of trivia about popularity Lord of the rings The game he worked on at EA.
in The Wired videoScofield (who previously worked at dead space And the Call of duty) answers the question of why developers don’t make their own engines anymore and use pre-existing technology instead. The director explains that doing this today is too expensive and time-consuming, and that it’s always better to take an old engine and repurpose it, as he did at EA.
You see, when he was a producer in 2003 licensed to beat ’em up The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, his team spent a year working on a new game engine. But things were going slowly and the game had a tough deadline. So he looked around at the various other engines EA was using for their games at the time to find some technology they could repurpose. Oddly enough, he came to the conclusion that the newest Tiger wood Golf has the perfect engine.
“Lord of the rings It goes around big areas and then some sort of castle at the end or something like that, castle. What is this? Tiger wood! Schofield explained, “Long areas, and at the end where you go to get food, is where you end up. And so we took Tiger wood engine and turn it into a Lord of the rings engine.”
Now, that’s funny and interesting enough by itself. But one last bit appeared earlier today on Twitter. it turns out, According to a former EA developerwhich have been modified Lord of the rings The visual effects code was later reused on the PSP Tiger wood A game to create puffs of smoke during a ball impact.
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Apparently a PSP icon Tiger wood The game also contains references to Gandalf and others LotR characters too. As always, game development is chaotic and endlessly fascinating.
