Lead Artist Nathan Phail-Liff talks about working on God of War

by Nick Doerr { Apr 2nd 2008 at 5:00PM }

We're sure a lot of you are snickering right now, because Ready At Dawn's lead artist's last name is an internet-savvy spelling of "fail"; we snicker at you though, since this man got to work on God of War: Chains of Olympus and thus earns the respect of millions. What did he do on the project? How does he feel about it now that it's out? We're glad you asked.

For the first eight months, Nathan was actually programming tools to bring what we see in the final product to life. After he programmed all the necessary components, then he went back and actually used them to help create what ended up in our hands. That's pretty impressive. Working on an existing IP, he said, is a blessing and a curse. Especially for God of War since there are so many expectations surrounding it. The stylistic guidelines they used to keep the game familiar to fans is pretty clever.

The challenges faced by the staff for making the PSP game were numerous -- insert all sort of technical mumbo-jumbo here. Cramming the game onto the PSP is one thing, but only having 15 artists to do it really puts the workload into perspective. If you want to hear more about his experience programming for the game, or his proudest accomplishment, read the full interview. It's really quite entertaining.

Tags: god-of-war, god-of-war-chains-of..., ready-at-dawn

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Dahk @ Apr 2nd 2008 7:25PM

"For example, we found it was actually far more efficient to subdivide geometry more, making individual polys smaller in relation to the PSP screen. This allowed us to avoid ever having to clip in software and render too large polygons and helped to workload more localized on the GPU as much as possible. It can be rather surreal as an artist to hear from an engine programmer, “That’s too expensive, use MORE polys!”, but we were hardly going to complain!"

Lol that's actually pretty interesting. YEWS MOAR PAWLEEGAWNS.

Alien @ Apr 3rd 2008 4:29AM

Wow ... the Morpheus fog was almost cut out from the game ... now that would have been a real loss :(

heneli627 @ Apr 3rd 2008 11:37AM

OMG HAHAHAHHAHA PHAIL XD

pixelator @ Apr 3rd 2008 4:12PM

I wonder if they added vertexes or just increased the number of triangulars. Texture maps are the memory hogs, anyway. CPU clock has been upped, so the PSP has some room to maneuver, I guess. PS2 games I worked on all had issues with clipping vs. poly count.

Although 15 artists doesn't sound like a microscopic team... I've done games with fewer. They weren't GoW, but then again you don't know how much geometry or maps they were able to port over with mild reworking, either.