Making video games is very difficult. It can take years of work to ship even a small game. One aspect that can consume a great deal of time and resources is building a custom engine, which is why many developers use Unreal, Unity, or another legacy engine to help speed up development. That’s all too common, but a really wild example from the PlayStation 2 days came to light recently in an interview with Glen Schofield, director of the new The Callisto Protocol.
Recently, the Callisto Protocol it was released to… mixed reviews, shall we say (our own Ashley Bardhan liked how ambitious it was, despite some annoying difficulty spikes). Anyway, to help get publicity for the new horror game, the director glen schofield he’s been going around doing interviews and all that. And two weeks ago she made a video with cabling in which he responded to random tweets about the game’s development. That’s where he revealed some fun trivia about a popular Lord of the Rings game he worked on at EA.
In the cabling videoSchofield (who previously worked at Dead space Y Obligations) answers the question why developers no longer build their own engines and instead use pre-existing technology. The director explains that it’s too expensive and time consuming to do this today, and that it’s almost always better to take an old engine and reuse it, like he did at EA.
You see, when I was a producer in 2003 licensed beat ’em up The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, his team spent a year working on a new engine for the game. But things were moving slowly, and the game had a tough deadline to meet. So he looked around at the other engines that EA was using for their games at the time to find some technology that they could reuse. And oddly enough, he came to the conclusion that the latter tiger forest golf game had the perfect engine.
“Lord of the Rings it’s about big areas and then some kind of castle at the end or something like that, a fortress. What’s that? tiger forest!” Schofield explained, “Long areas, and at the end is where you go foraging, where you end up. And so we take the tiger forest engine and turned it into a Lord of the Rings engine.”
Now this is fun and interesting enough on its own. But one last part came to light earlier today on Twitter. Result, according to a former EA developerthat some modified Lord of the Rings the visual effects code was later reused on a PSP tiger forest game to create puffs of smoke during the impact of the ball.
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Apparently the code of the PSP tiger forest the game also contains references to Gandalf and others LotR characters, too. As always, game development is complicated and endlessly fascinating.
