Following on from yesterday, here’s the second part of the Evan Wells Q&A. Also, don’t forget the Drake’s Trail competition which is happening now. Those prizes are pretty amazing.

Will there be any DLC content for Uncharted and what about a multiplayer?

We left multiplayer out of Uncharted so that we could focus the entire team’s efforts on creating the most compelling and exciting single player experience possible. As for downloadable content, we took a different approach. Instead of adding features later and asking people to download them or buy them from the PSN, we included them on the disc and tied them into our Medal Point system. If you collect all of the treasure in the game and earn all 1000 Medal Points, you will get to unlock a ton of really great rewards like behind the scenes videos, tons of concept art, skins, rendering modes, and cheats. We thought it was cooler to include these things right on the Blu-Ray disc rather than force you to download them later.

On developing on the PS3 : If Sony decided to increase the number of Cell processors and SPUs in a future release of the hardware, would Uncharted automatically take advantage of these new capabilities or would it just run at the same pace.

Currently the Uncharted engine isn’t even taking complete advantage of all the processors on the Cell chip. We’re essentially using about 1/3 of the power that’s being offered at this time. So if the Cell processor was improved in future iterations of the hardware, it would have no effect on the overall performance of Uncharted.

In terms of percentages of time spent, how much was spent on:
a) pre-production/proto-typing
b) design
c) actual development with programmers, artists etc
d) game play tweaking

This is a very hard question to answer because several of those things overlap. For instance the design of the game was constantly evolving throughout production. We were also tweaking the gameplay from start to finish. What I can say is that we had a small team of designers and engineers working on pre-production for about one year before full production began. We then had the full team working on the game for the next two years.

Insomniac is supposedly going to release a ratchet game every 2 years as well as the resistance titles every 2 years. Do you plan on following a yearly release schedule like this, similar to what you did on ps2?

Actually we didn’t release a game every year on the PS2. Jak and Daxter was two years in development, as was Jak 2. We then did Jak 3 and Jak X each in one year. We might end up in a similar pattern on the PS3, but we’ll have see how rapidly we can develop our next projects now that we have our first game under our belts.

Designing the 3D polygonal medals & rewards for Uncharted, was this done so you could use the same resource for trophies in Home? As in, the patch that will eventually add Home trophies to Uncharted won’t need to come included with heavy graphic files for the trophies?

Rather than each individual treasure, the Medals in Uncharted are more likely going to turn into Home trophies. We modelled the detail into the treasures just to increase the satisfaction in finding them. We also went to great lengths to make sure that they were authentic items that were from the right time period and location. We will have to come up with new 3D models to represent the trophies when the time comes.

From a developer’s point of view, are the costs involved in developing for a console as advanced as the PS3 a problem? Do they put constraints on development period to such a degree that you really need to get a game out to recoup development costs, or do you just keep going until you feel there is nothing more to do, I say that because what happens if you get so far into a game like uncharted and you decide its a turkey( I know it wont be), but you’ve spent so much on development costs already. Games like Killzone 2 make it hard to believe there would be any profit in something costing that much to develop.

Of course the development budget is always an issue. Making video games is still a business after all. And I don’t think anybody who has shipped a game has ever felt like “there is nothing more to do”. These projects are so huge and complex you could literally work on them forever and still find ways to optimize or add more polish. But at Naughty Dog, we take our schedule very seriously and have always shipped on time (knock on wood). So we make sure that we are checking ourselves all along the way so that we don’t end up making a “turkey”, slipping the schedule, or going over budget.

One thing I dislike in a lot of next gen games are “screen tearing”, and it happens to be quite a lot in the retail version I have. What do you think about this problem, and do you think you’ll overcome this problem in the future to succeed in a perfectly smooth experience?

Screen tearing is something that occurs when your frame rate dips below 30Hz. When you drop frame rate you have a choice to either drop all the way to 20Hz, or allow the screen to tear and only have the frame rate drop to 28 or 29Hz. We felt that with the frequency that it occurs, that the latter choice had a smaller impact on most player’s experiences. In fact, the vast majority of people don’t even notice it. Now ideally, our frame rate would never drop below 30Hz, but with the amount of stuff we’re doing every frame in Uncharted, inevitably it will happen occasionally. However, it’s definitely something we will be able to improve on in future games as we make optimizations to our engine.

Uncharted is a lot more serious game than the likes of Jak and Daxter that we normally associate with Naughty Dog. Do you find making more serious games a bigger challenge than the more casual games for example Crash Bandicoot?

I don’t know if I would say it’s harder, but it definitely has a different set of problems to solve. In our past franchises we could use warp gates, or floating platforms to move the player around. Now we have to come up with believable mechanisms to accomplish the same thing. We always have to make sure that our environments and the objects that we place in them fit in the world and don’t break the immersion. But on the other hand, since we are working in the real world, there is a huge amount of reference material just a Google search away when we are looking for inspiration.

During the creation of the game from the scenery up to Drake himself, which parts did you enjoy doing the most & felt were the most rewarding looking back on the finished product now?

I think it was the way that it all came together in the end. Every single discipline involved in the game delivered work that exceeded expectation, and when you saw it all assembled it really was humbling to know that you worked with such a talented team.

What games do you guys play in your spare time (besides Uncharted of course)?

Well now that we’ve finally shipped, I’m going back and trying to catch up on all of the great games that came out this year. I just finished Portal and Call of Duty 4, I’m starting to play Mario Galaxy, I definitely want to check out Bioshock, and believe it or not, I still need to play God of War 2!