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September 26, 2007
Screenshot hell
Working in videogame development is a vastly entertaining process most of the time. Then you have weeks like this... good god.
Screenshots are something I have taken over this year on Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Now I learned quickly on Resistance: Fall of Man what a pain in the ass these are. I got some good ones back then, but getting used to our art team's criticism and pickyness is a challenge. I still took several key shots, including one of the Back of Box shots.
We had lots of disasters with Resistance shots, resolutions coming out wrong, lighting being off, no shadows, etc. There are all sorts of crazy things that happen with a game in live development. On top of that, there are a bunch of debug options you need to adjust to pull good screens.
With Ratchet, there have been no major issues... until this week. Electronic Gaming Monthly, Gamepro, and PSM are running reviews. They need screenshots. I started taking shots on Monday, and got 10 good ones.. plenty. It was a 12-hour day. First thing that morning, I find out that they aren't going to work due to a bug that is causing them to be blurry... I then go back and look at every build of the game we sill have. We don't keep all the builds, just to a certain date, and the previous build I was using for shots was no longer available...
I spent yesterday tracking this stuff down... finally around 6, our tech team, got a hack fix to me. I spent four hours trying (mostly successfully) to replicate my approved shots. I then spent all of today trying to get more and get action shots. I finally sent those off around 4:30... finished with 3 days of hellish screens... of course, an hour later we get a request for one more shot with a specific weapon.
an hour in the game, and I have an approved shot just getting its levels adjusted.
Looooooong three days.
-Will
"Long days, long nights, the feeling's just not right, I pick up my pen and pad and start to write."
Posted by badwillhunting at September 26, 2007 06:58 PM