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Ideation: After Naughty Dog finished Uncharted 2, a second team began work on a new IP, they decided early on to make a post-‐apocalyptic game based around two characters, they contemplated what genre was best, third-‐person adventure, first-‐person shooter, etc. While many elements of the game changed throughout the concept of the game, the one main part that remained the same was the concept of the two characters; Joel and Ellie. Their names, age, gender, appearance, and so on, where not set in stone immediately, however. Naughty Dog had decided from the beginning that they wanted the player to empathise with the characters’ emotions and feelings. While they had decided from the beginning to have a game set in a post-‐apocalyptic world, the “infected” where not part of the game to begin with, Naughty Dog didn’t want to go for the cliché type zombie world, so after receiving inspiration from watching a documentary called Planet Earth, they came up with the concept of the fungus-‐like infection, it was also die to a documentary on what would happen if the Earth was not tended to for 20+ years they came up with the general over-‐grown look for the game world. Pre-‐production The pre-‐production stage for the last of us, was filled with the research behind the story as well as the concept art and the casting. The basic idea behind the last of us is to have an infection cause the collapse of civilisation and the game is played at this post apocalyptic point. When researching the infection the team watched the BBC documentary, planet earth. In one of the episodes of planet earth there was the a fungus which infects ants forces them to climb a tree and bite into it at which point the fungus sprouts out if the ants head and releases more spores, the idea was to transfer this fungus so it infects humans. They also researched into what the world would be like without us, using the factual “world without us” book that describes what would happen to cities without us and how nature eventually takes over. All of this research was used in the concept art of the infected and the locations. The infected had to show the fungus is an obvious way at some stage of infection; they tried many different versions but eventually went with placing fungus photos on a person and refining it to look as one piece. The fungus had to show some form of natural beauty in this case the vibrant luminous quality it has, as did
the cities designed, the destruction had to be matched with some beautiful aspects produced by nature. One of the most important parts for the pre-‐production of the last of us was casting. The cast had to be perfect, as the game has a powerful story line which needed the audience to connect to and feel emotional with, the way that is achieved is by have actors perform the voices, and the graphics show their face and body emanate emotion. The actress (Ashley Johnson) who is the voice behind Ellie was one of the first few who auditioned; her performance blew the creative directors away. Once they had Ellie they needed to find the voice for Joel (Troy Baker) the other main character, Ashley was heavily involved in finding Joel as both character’s needed to have a special bond which was felt and shared by the players. The casting auditions were done, by acting out scenes from the storyline by doing this Ashley and Troy were able to show the connection that they could bring between their characters. Production: Motion capture was used to create the movement of the characters in the gameplay. Naughty Dog used the “mo-‐cap” for body movement and the animators separately changed facial expressions using footage of the actors’ faces as a reference. Post-Production: Gustavo Santaolalla, a double Oscar winner, was brought in to compose the soundtrack for The Last of Us , Santaolalla said he like to start work on the music early on in projects, so he started work on
the game’s score whilst the game was being written. Naughty Dog stated they were going for “emotion over horror”. For the infected, voice actors were hired to make odd, human-‐like sounds and screeches for the infected, they decided not to use any animal sounds and didn’t wan the infected to sound “witch-‐like” or like normal zombies at all. Postmortem: During the “crunch” part of production just before the game was completely finished, it was described as “cleaning a room the day before a guest comes to stay”, and that they’re giving “150%” to finish the game. They’re adding, and changing stuff right up until the game ships.
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