GoD Feature: Making A 3D Tomb Raider For Cellphones

Author: by Staff

With Lara Croft's 10th anniversary approaching, Eidos is ramping up its mobile efforts, creating a full 3D cellphone game based on Tomb Raider: Legend - and Gamasutra sister site GamesOnDeck has been quizzing producer Jim Blackhurst about the 'PS1 quality' version developed closely with Crystal Dynamics. Blackhurst explains of the title itself: "Tomb Raider: Legend for mobile is really pushing the boundaries of where we are at with mobile gaming right now. When you see the game running on one of the hardware accelerated handsets, it's not an exaggeration to say that we are up there in terms of quality with the PS1 versions, and in some respects that's an understatement. The game has been designed from the ground up to scale well across different handsets, and although we don't support older handsets without the power for 3D gaming, on those handsets that do, we've worked really hard to produce a game that is great fun to play regardless of the number of polys being thrown around or the FPS." He also reveals that a relatively large-sized team helped birth this 3D mobile incarnation of Lara's adventures: "We had a full team working on Tomb Raider: Legend for mobile, which at certain points during development, and across all the mobile platforms we were working on was in excess of 20 people. This doesn't include the QA team who spent months testing every aspect of the game or the folks at Crystal Dynamics who were there helping us along the way." You can now read the full GamesOnDeck feature on the subject, including further visuals and explanations of the process of bringing Tomb Raider to 3D life on cellphones.