Feature: 'GDC: God of War: How the Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another'

In one of today's main Gamasutra features, and on the heels of the recently announced PS2 sequel to God of War, Tim Moss, lead programmer on both projects, gave a vital talk on the last day of last week's GDC. The discussion, given to a packed audience, and recounted in unprecedented detail here, was on finding the balance between the needs of programmers and those of the designers that led to a game that was both technically and artistically solid. In the following excerpt, he explains the goals of the programmers on the project: "On the programming side, their goals were to avoid special cases, have the game play at a constant 60 frames a second (something Jaffe didn't care about according to Tim), build a game/engine methodology that would avoid wasting time and reduce bugs and finally to prevent the programming team from turning into a bottleneck. The overall number one goal of the team was to "spend the last month of development on the beach while the design team finished the game. Every choice we made as a team was to make sure we could get to the beach." The best way to accomplish this, as Tim saw it, was to all design tools needed to be data driven." You can now read the detailed, in-depth Gamasutra coverage on the session, including how they achieved their departmental goals (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).