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INTERVIEW
PART - TWO / FIVE
Q:
Now that we've talked a bit about the game, tell us what you are personally
doing in this project.
T: I am the director, and I was also in charge of the game's script. Besides
that, I acted as mediator in staff arguments, which was actually the most
difficult job of the project.
Q: What sort of problems did you have?
T: Mostly it was the friction that developed whenever two directors had
different ideas about how something should go. Whenever this happened, I had
to listen carefully to both sides. We had arguments over character designs,
scene developments, and much larger things to boot. Where I worked before,
if things weren't working out I could just have people switch positions with
another department, but I can't afford to do that here. Whenever a problem
crops up, we have to talk it over until both sides are satisfied. If I can't
find fault with either side's opinion then we think of a solution that
involves both.
Q: Xenosaga is your first attempt at the PlayStation 2; what was the most
difficult part of development for you?
T: The biggest headache was gathering people and building up a development
team. The PlayStation 2 is a remarkably high spec machine, so the knowledge
programmers and graphic designers bring to the table can have major effects
on the quality of the game. Programming the machine well, getting the
enormous amounts of data involved through the CPU as quickly as possible,
requires a large amount of skill. Really, it wasn't until the beginning of
this year until I had a sizable team I was happy with.
Q: With such a large team, did you ever have any trouble keeping the
direction of the game focused?
T: Not especially. Before beginning actual development, I sat down with the
head of every section and worked out the game script with them. After that,
it was just a matter of creating a modular environment, allowing each
section to do what it does best.
Q: So the division of labor functioned well during the project.
T: Right. Usually the planner takes his script [here we're talking about the
script used to drive characters around the screen for events and such] and
assigns the animator the task of character movements... For example, let's
say there's a scene where a character turns around while walking. Using a
script to generate that will almost always result in a jerky transition, so
it's usually the job of the animator to fix things like that. The planner's
job is to direct the animation, timing, message displays, and camera
positioning.
Q: So the process of assigning these positions requires some groping around.
T: You can divide up the work only so much... (laughs) Namco's support in
this project, both in the development and office level, was extremely
helpful here. I was able to use their studios for motion capturing and other
things, which helped to create the film-like atmosphere of the game.
INTERVIEW
PART - THREE>>>
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