![]() It's always good to analyze a reaction you have to a game or section of a game to figure out what it was that gave you a particular reaction. We played a ton of God of War! We studied the pacing and tricks that were put into the console game. How did you keep the look and feel true to the God of War franchise on a platform that is much more limited than the PS2? We remapped it to down on the D-pad, and all was well. Though it made sense (press up, Kratos lifts things up), the input on a mobile phone isn't very precise so that sometimes you would jump, maybe into a trap, instead of opening a chest. Initially, we mapped these functions to up on the D-pad. In the end, the biggest issue came up for one of the smallest details: opening chests, pulling levers, and activating the finishing moves. I already knew how context sensitive kills would work based on our implementation of a similar mechanic in our Casino Royale action game, so we had a good idea how the console controls could be translated to a mobile phone. At SOE-LA, we try to keep all gameplay functionality playable using only the phone's D-pad and soft keys. The basics of running and jumping are "gimme's" for a mobile platform game. What did you do to try to implement the touchpad with controls intuitive to the game? Their contribution and attention to detail was invaluable. We also worked closely with Eric Williams, the console game's Lead Combat Designer and had reviews with some of the console game's other key leads. Of course! They made sure we were on track with capturing the feel of the combat and visual style and were very helpful with their feedback and positive support. It was tough to scale back on some of the initial plans for the levels and find ways to keep them engaging over the entire game.ĭid David Jaffe or Cory Barlog have any say in the direction of God of War: Betrayal? If you get too ambitious with a level's design, filling it with lots of traps, locked doors, animated torches, waterfalls, enemies, etc., you may find yourself faced with a decision to reduce some of the core combat or to revise the level. With such extreme hardware limitations, there is a fine balance between character art, frames of animation, environment, interactive objects and the cost of the game code for each. You have very limited processing power and memory on most handsets, which makes devising puzzles, traps, environment interaction, and enemy behavior very difficult. The challenge wasn't so much in capturing the feel of the combat as it was in capturing the feel of God of War's visual look and gameplay design. What challenges did you face when developing Betrayal? What were some of the challenges that you and your team faced in converting the game play of a fast paced 3D platform action game into a side scrolling 2D game on a cell phone? After that, the porting team took the game to over 200 handsets in a matter of weeks. We wrapped up the final versions for low-end handset over the next 2 months, completing the 1st 6 handsets in June 2007. The versions for high-end handsets were completed 9 months later in April. I wrote the initial design document between September and October 2005 when I first got hired on, then it sat and stewed for a year before revisiting it in August 2006, the same month development started. How long was the development process for God of War: Betrayal? Our Art Director, Nathan Leland, did a fantastic job. ![]() With just a few hundred kb and much less on most handsets, we spent a lot of time coming up with a single tileset and palette swapping scheme that was diverse enough to portray multiple environments and lived up to the SCEA God of War team's high standards. What struggles did you and your development team encounter upon creating the visual aspect of this title? That's always a hard, but fun part of the development process. be it God of War or a casual game like Spider-Man 3 Puzzle. Of course, with every project you try to push certain perceived limits of the handsets and try to figure a way around them. It really comes down to the tools, and our developer, Javaground, has the best mobile toolset that we've ever used. For God of War, that had to do with getting all of Kratos' look, animations, combat and abilities that everyone expects to see, the variety of enemies and their deaths, and the isometric look to the environment. How hard is it to get a high-paced action game onto a mobile device like a phone with limited memory and processing power? We asked Phil Cohen, producer and designer of God of War: Betrayal, what it was like to squeeze such a huge franchise into such a limited platform. ![]() We never thought we'd have a canonical God of War game on the cell phone but that's exactly what happened. ![]()
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