GDC: How Sucker Punch built inFamous' big city with a small team

by Griffin McElroy on Mar 11th 2010 6:20PM

Last year's shockingly awesome superhero title inFamous boasted a massive sandbox world known as Empire City -- a playground full of climbable, grindable, shootable objects. It was an impressive environment, made all the more impressive by a startling piece of information revealed by Sucker Punch's Nate Fox during a recent GDC panel: The whole city was created by a team of just 12 artists.

Fox explained that this feat was accomplished with the liberal reusing of the game's catalog of environmental assets. For example, there were only two types of cars in the game, differentiated by hue shifts and decals. The map was partitioned into a hexagonal grid -- the inspiration for which came from the popular board game Carcassonne, Fox explained. Edges of each hex were designed to effortlessly fit together, allowing designers to make minor changes to each compartment, and paste the location into another chunk of the city.

This might sound like a cheap tactic for a developer to employ, but Fox explained that a developer's time and resources are limited. By swiftly executing the creation of a game's setting, the developers are given more of an opportunity to focus on designing "evil lairs" and other memorable landmarks. Oh, and according to Fox, the industry term for these outstanding structures is "Weenies." Yes, for that reason. Yes, that is wonderful.

inFAMOUS

Tags: game-design, gdc-2010, infamous, nate-fox, panel, Sandbox, SCE, Sony-Computer-Entertainment, sucker-punch, sucker-punch-productions, Third-Person-Action

Reader Comments (39)

well I hope they expanded their team because even though I enjoyed inFAMOUS I wont buy inFAMOUS 2 if its just more of the same

So if the very same people who made Infamous 1 (Which you enjoyed) made part 2 you wouldn't buy it?.....

LOGIC FAIL.

inFamous was great but it the missions became repetitive. Hopefully inFamous 2 will be an improvement.

If inFamous 2 improves on inFamous like Assassin's Creed 2 improved on Assassin's Creed, I'll be pleased as punch.

"If inFamous 2 improves on inFamous like Assassin's Creed 2 improved on Assassin's Creed, I'll be pleased as punch."

Sick of hearing this we get it the sequel was better that the original no need to compare every new Ip+sequel to it. Plus the jumps in Uncharted 1 to 2, Mass Effect 1 to 2.. etc were more dramatic to me.

I know I'm stupid, but I don't get it. They are called weenies for *what* reason? Downvote me if you must. Mock me if you need to. Answer the question in between, please.

"outstanding structures"

penis

The term 'weenie' comes from (if I recall) Walt Disney and Disneyland...

Say you're at a theme park and you're hungry. The park is gigantic, where's the damn food court? There's this heavy tree line, or lots of other rides that are taking up your vision.

So Walt puts a giant plaster hot-dog sculpture on top of the food court building, which rises just above the trees. And from any one section of the park, you can look around the horizon and see one huge landmark rising up from each section of the park. You spot the big hot dog and you're on your way to lunch.

i.e. Splash Mountain, the Matterhorn, the Tomorrowland tower. You can navigate just by glancing around for landmarks. Evil lairs is just the next step :)

It's a pretty clever guideline that I hear just about every level artist talking about these days. Put a clear landmark on the horizon so the player knows where their goal is.

I'd love to hear more about this. I guess I should have gone to GDC.

Well it worked out...

Surprised I didn't notice the car thing.

Carcassonne uses squares, not hex tiles.

He said "Inspiration" not "we totally ripped them off lulz".

I think he meant Catan but fuxt it up.

I'm pretty sure you mean Settlers of Catan rather than Carcassonne. Did you even follow that link to wikipedia you included in the article?

The tower of trash... I remember actually getting a faint feeling of actual fear. I really hate heights, and that tower was amazingly tall in scope of the actual city.

The thing is, it always seemed kind of subtle in the backdrop when I saw it, which is odd when you consider its size.

I have a slight fear of heights and games where I'm climbing tall building like iNFAMOUS or Assassin's Creed and I suddenly get a view of the ground from way high up definitely cause a slight adrenaline surge.

I just jumped off the side of the tall tower once for the hell of it knowing that I would still have reclimb the massive tower (yes, I know... stupid... but I *loved* that game that much) and I have a fear of heights. I honestly got sick to my stomach as Cole was falling from the sky. It was kind of like those dreams where you are falling and falling and falling and then finally wake up. It was pretty horribly awesome.

Cool. Why is everything ever hex-based? There are so many other basic-shape-based tesselations available (octagons and squares being an example of a slightly higher level of diversity).

You can't tile a 2D surface (i.e. lay out a city) with octagons.

Want inFAMOUSthe2ND with the quickness!

I think this is a very wise use of resources. So many games have bloated budgets and bloated disc size all when the average gamer won't be able to tell how or why. I mean, when your game has hours of uncompressed, unlooped STATIC sound files, you know you're wasting resources.

In this age of ballooning budget game development, the industry needs to work smarter, not harder. I thought MS was brilliant back when they introduced the 360 and the concept of procedural synthesis- though I'm not how fully realized that ever became.

Game design should be unique enough to not look cookie-cutter, but cookie-cutter enough to be cost effective for even smaller studios.

You, sir, have hit the nail on the head. That's good advice for 'most anyone -- work smarter, not harder.

Well, I thought infamous' city wasn't very memorable. Compared to the huge level of detail in the GTA series (4 just had so much completely believable and unique city), it felt a bit short when I was playing. Obviously that's not a good way to compare the two games as a whole, but I like environments with real personality.

Procedural texturing was RoboBlitz, another developer, and they called it "procedural compression", which is bogus. You cannot compress arbitrarily data procedurally.

Using procedural textures increases dev costs a lot because it costs more to write code to generate textures on the fly than it does to scan them in and photoshop them a bit. Procedural textures were used in RoboBlitz to make their datasets smaller.

Making the dataset smaller takes more time, including engineer time and thus makes the costs of development higher.

That may be so, but according to early articles on procedural synthesis, it seemed to be the cheaper and better route to go:

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/05/xbox360-1.ars/2

I played the hell out of infamous, was actually the main game I got a PS3 for, and it has one of the least repetitive worlds of any sandbox game I can recall personally playing. Pulling that off with a tiny art team takes an impressive achievement in game design and implementation and elevates in to a whole other level. Can't wait for the sequel. I appreciate they had a good plot based excuse for not having vehicles and weapons and such, but if they could find the resources to make it happen and a loop hole in the plot I would enjoy it (not all the time, don't try to copy Crackdown, but just to spice things up I would like to steal a car every now and then)

I bought this game full price based on the reviews. The gameplay was ok, but man, the graphics were so bad. Graphics don't make a game, but when you pay 70$ for a game(here in canada) you expect a little effort. This article explains why the graphics were so bland and unimpressive.

I hate how we get charged $10 - $20 more than US for games. NHL 10 cost me $60 for a used copy. Luckily I was able to get InFamous for $30, it was on sale about a month after it came out at Best Buy.

Actually, "weenies" was coined by Walt when designing the layout of Disney Land. These are distinct landmarks that can be seen from afar.

Seems like I've heard that before.

iNfamous... best game of last year. Honestly best game since i'd played God Of War 2

Well, I enjoyed inFamous. It cleary exceeded my expectations. I can't wait to see what Sucker Punch has coming next.

Square enix might want to take note of this lol

Pretty impressive for such a small team to make not only towns, but entire cities in HD. Word on the street is that a few larger projects couldn't manage to pull that off without the help of Robocop and Jesus combined.

IMHO the limitation of assets do show up.during my playthrough.

I didn't really notice how much of the city was reused. There was a tendency to feel it was all similar, but nothing jumped out at me that really broke the experience. Of course, hauling ass around the city probably helps keep the player from noticing.

Only slightly off-topic, but since we're talking about Sucker Punch, please-please-please make Sly Cooper 4. I absolutely loved Sly 2 and 3.

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GDC: How Sucker Punch built inFamous' big city with a small team

inFAMOUS

Reader Comments (39)

Posted: Mar 11th 2010 6:24PM (Unverified) said

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