Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Read online

  “It wasn’t really fun,” said Schatz. “A big goal of the level was try to make the player relate to these people, show their relationship. Not a whole lot of people dance in their living room like that.” Later, someone had the idea that Drake and Elena should instead play a video game, and after some quick license negotiations, Naughty Dog snuck in a copy of the original Crash Bandicoot, which made for a nice moment as the couple traded barbs over a PlayStation 1.

  Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann knew that many of those early gray-box prototypes didn’t mesh with their vision. Straley believed in designing around a set of “core mechanics,” or basic actions that a player would perform throughout the game, and limiting those mechanics to what was essential. “That was the thing that I needed to do more than anything, was pin down what the core mechanics were going to be,” Straley said. “Sifting through the prototypes and seeing what was going to work and what wasn’t. What scales. What works with something else.” For Straley, harmony was key. Prototypes that might have seemed cool in a vacuum—like ballroom dancing—wouldn’t always work nicely with the vibe of the game. “There was a bunch of what I call ‘theorycraft,’” Straley said. “There’s a bunch of ideas that work on paper or when you’re talking over lunch, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ moments, but when you try to test them in the game, they fall apart quickly.”

  In addition to the basics of Uncharted—jumping, climbing, shooting—Straley and his team picked out two main prototypes for their deck of core mechanics. One was the drivable truck, which had been cut and re-added to Uncharted 4 several times over the years. The second was the rope and grappling hook, which Drake could use to climb heights and swing across gaps. This rope went through dozens of iterations. At one point, the player would have to pull it out, wind it up, and aim it at a specific location on the map, which Straley found cumbersome, so he and the designers kept iterating until they’d transformed it into a single button press—one you could use only when you were within range of a hookable location.* “We made it more accessible, and faster, and more reliable,” said Straley. “The grappling hook that was there wasn’t going to be able to couple with combat, because it was so arduous in its implementation that you couldn’t do it quickly. It wasn’t responsive. When you’re getting shot at, you need things to be instant, otherwise you hate the game.”

  They also wanted to add more sneaking, which had worked in The Last of Us, and which the team thought might be a good fit for Uncharted 4. It made more sense for Nathan Drake to creep around environments, scoping out enemies and taking them out one by one, than it did for him to go on a rampage with his machine gun out. But there were a lot of questions to answer. What would a typical level layout look like? How open would each area be? Would Drake be able to sneak up behind enemies and take them down? What sort of tools would he have for distracting or eliminating guards without getting caught? Many of the levels that the Uncharted 4 team had already built were designed according to the early notion that Drake wouldn’t be able to use guns, which Straley and Druckmann had abandoned. As the team prepared for PlayStation Experience, where they’d show off Uncharted 4’s gameplay for the first time, they needed to make a lot of big changes.

  There was a more pressing question, though: Were Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley going to direct the whole game? Moving directly from the grueling development of The Last of Us to production on Uncharted 4 had felt, as Erick Pangilinan, one of the two art directors, described it, “like you just came from Afghanistan and then you’ve heard about Iraq.” Both Druckmann and Straley were feeling drained. “Our initial idea was that we were going to come on and mentor people into game director and creative director positions, and we were going to back off,” said Straley. “It wasn’t going to be our project at all.” Maybe then they’d take a long vacation, or spend their days on less stressful work, like the prototype experiments they’d wanted to make way back when The Last of Us shipped.

  That never happened. As PSX 2014 drew closer and closer, it began dawning on Straley that they couldn’t leave. The developers that he and Druckmann had eyed for leadership roles weren’t stepping up, for various reasons, and Straley felt like he and Druckmann were the only ones in a position to fine-tune many of the game’s core mechanics. Climbing, for example. Several designers had spent months developing an elaborate climbing system that involved a mixture of slippery and unstable handholds. On its own it was lifelike and fun to play with, but in the larger context of Uncharted 4, when you were trying to leap from cliff to cliff in the middle of an intense combat encounter, there was nothing more frustrating than slipping to your death because you pressed the wrong button. So Straley put it on hold, much to the dismay of the designers who had spent months scaling climbing walls and researching hard-core mountaineering techniques.

  “That was probably a turning point for me,” said Straley. “I had to make those kinds of decisions to craft a demo that would create hype and energy and create a section of the game that people [would] see the game for what it is. . . . That had to be that demo, and it had to be myself and Neil making those decisions. That was the turning point I think for me, which got me to say, ‘OK, I’ve just gotta see this through.’”

  By PSX, two things were clear. One was that Uncharted 4 was not going to come out in 2015. Naughty Dog’s bosses had hashed it out with Sony and agreed to a new ship date in March 2016. Even that date seemed dicey to some members of the team, but at least they’d have another full year to finish the game.

  The second thing that became clear at the end of 2014 was that Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley were stuck with Nathan Drake until the very end.

  Most game projects have a single lead. Whether they call themselves “creative director” (à la Josh Sawyer on Pillars of Eternity) or “executive producer” (like Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Mark Darrah, whom we’ll meet in chapter 6), the one thing they all have in common is that they always get the final call. In the case of creative conflicts and disagreements, the buck stops with that single guy or gal. (In the video game industry, sadly, the former has severely outnumbered the latter.)

  Druckmann and Straley were an exception. On both The Last of Us and Uncharted 4 they served as codirectors, which made for an unusual dynamic. They complemented each other well—Druckmann loved writing dialogue and working with actors, while Straley spent most of his days helping the team hone gameplay mechanics—but they still squabbled as much as you might expect from two ambitious, creative, alpha-type personalities. “It’s like a real relationship, like a marriage,” said Druckmann. “Like Drake and Elena. Who’s Drake and who’s Elena? I’m probably Elena.”

  Since their days swapping complaints over lunch during the first Uncharted, the directing pair had developed a unique rapport. “We try to work by just being as honest as we can with each other,” Druckmann said. “When we don’t like something, we let each other know right away. When a big decision is being made for the game, we make sure to loop each other in, so no one is surprised by something.”

  When they disagreed on something, they’d each rank how they felt about it, on a scale from one to ten. If Druckmann was at an eight but Straley said he was just a three, Druckmann would get his way. But if they were both in the nines or tens? “Then we have to go in one of the offices, close the door, and be like, ‘OK, why do you feel so strongly about this?’” said Druckmann. “Sometimes those can become hours-long conversations, until we finally both get on the same page and say, ‘OK, this is what it should be.’ Where we end up might be not even those two choices that we started out with.”

  It was an unorthodox management style, which was something of a tradition at the studio behind Uncharted. Naughty Dog’s staff liked to emphasize that, unlike other game studios, they didn’t have producers. Nobody’s job was simply to manage the schedule or coordinate people’s work, the role a producer would fill at other companies. Instead, everyone at Naughty Dog was expected to manage him- or herself. At another studio, a progra
mmer who had an idea for a feature might be expected to book a request with a producer before talking to his colleagues. At Naughty Dog, the programmer could just get up, walk across the room, and tell the designers what he thought.

  This freedom could lead to chaos, like the time Druckmann and Straley each designed different versions of the same scene, costing themselves weeks of work because they hadn’t talked for a few days. With dedicated producers, that might not have happened. But to Naughty Dog’s management, this approach was best. “The amount of time you lose to those rare occasions is far surpassed by the amount of efficiency you get,” said Evan Wells. “Rather than calling a meeting and discussing the validity of it and then getting approval and putting on a schedule. All that lost time is just not worth it.”*

  Perhaps because of this unusual structure, Naughty Dog took an abnormal approach to detail. If you look closely at any scene in Uncharted 4, you’ll spot something extraordinary—the creases on Drake’s shirt; the stitches on his buttons; the way he pulls the leather strap over his head when he equips a rifle. These details didn’t pop up out of the ether. They emerged from a studio full of people obsessive enough to add them to the game, even if it meant staying at the office until 3:00 a.m. “We’ll take it as far as we possibly can,” said Phil Kovats, the audio lead. “We all wanted to make sure that, because this was the last Nathan Drake game we were making, it was going to go out with as much stuff as we possibly could.”

  Nowhere was this more evident than their E3 demo, which became the Uncharted 4 team’s biggest milestone as they entered 2015, following a successful showcase at PSX. This would be the “epic chase” from their index cards—a wild ride through the streets of a fictional city in Madagascar, showcasing the game’s complicated new vehicles and explosions.

  In the weeks leading up to E3, Uncharted 4’s artists and designers worked nonstop hours trying to make everything click. Once a week (and sometimes once a day) the whole E3 team would meet up in the theater to go over their progress. They’d review which mechanics weren’t working, which effects required more polish, and which nonplayer character needed to be moved slightly to the left. “Basically everyone working on the sequence was in there, so the communication was very direct,” said Anthony Newman, a lead designer. “Bruce and Neil would just play and [say], ‘This is a problem, this is a problem, this is a problem.’”

  The demo started off in a crowded marketplace, where Drake and Sully would get caught in a shoot-out, gun down a few mercenaries, and then flee from an armored tank. Climbing their way across buildings, they’d escape to a car they’d parked nearby. This would be an opportunity for Naughty Dog to dazzle fans with the new mechanics—Hey look, an Uncharted game with driving in it!—and as the demo progressed, Drake and Sully would skid frantically through a tangle of old streets, crashing through fences and fruit stands as they tried to shake off enemy vehicles. Then they’d find Sam, caught up in his own epic chase as the bad guys tried to run him off the road. Drake would tell Sully to take the wheel, then hurl up his rope and attach it to a passing truck, dangling next to the highway at sixty miles per hour.

  Waylon Brinck, a technical art director, recalled spending hours and hours fashioning the grain sacks in the marketplace so that when mercenaries shot them, it’d look like they were deflating. Then the grain would start spraying out and forming neatly organized piles on the floor. It was the type of detail that some studios might see as an unnecessary waste of resources, but to Naughty Dog’s artists, the extra hours were worth it. “That is a moment now that people remember, and it wasn’t an accident,” said Tate Mosesian, a lead environment artist. “From a gameplay standpoint, we try to hit these moments or these beats that help draw the player through, and oftentimes it’s something as big as a collapsing building or as small as a grain sack deflating.”

  The demo looked incredible, and it turned out to be one of the most exciting parts of Uncharted 4, so in retrospect, maybe Naughty Dog shouldn’t have shown so much of it at E3. But that’s a question all developers have to ask: How do you convince fans that your game will be awesome without spoiling the best parts? “We were worried that we might be showing the coolest set piece in the game,” said Druckmann. “But it felt like it was the one that was furthest along. . . . At the same time, you’re trying to balance that with getting people excited and making sure you’re going to sell this game.”

  That approach was effective, and Naughty Dog’s staff were again inspired by the positive E3 buzz, which they’d need to get through the coming months. By July 2015, everyone on Uncharted 4 was already feeling burned out. The weeks leading up to E3 had been a mess of late nights and weekends at the office, and everyone knew that the schedule wasn’t going to get easier. Many of them had gone from crunching on The Last of Us to crunching on Uncharted, with few breaks or vacations in between. “I think everybody off of that demo was just [thinking]: Do whatever you can do to just show up every day and just get the job done,” said Bruce Straley. “I know that there were feelings inside where I was [thinking], ‘How do you muster the courage and the will just to keep going?’ Because nobody else is. Everybody on the team, it felt like, was running on fumes.”

  Straley lived on the east side of Los Angeles, so it took him at least an hour to get to Naughty Dog’s Santa Monica office. During Uncharted 4’s crunch, when he wanted to arrive at work first thing in the morning and stay until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., he began worrying that the drive was excessively time consuming and maybe even kind of dangerous, so he rented a second apartment near the office. He’d stay there during the week, then go home on weekends. “It was close enough that I wasn’t really a danger to my life, and I could come in early without traffic,” he said.

  And so Bruce Straley, who had once thought that he’d be on Uncharted 4 for only a few months, now found himself living at a strange new apartment just to finish the game.

  The word “crunch” calls to mind the gnashing of teeth, which is a fitting descriptor for the feeling of working endless hours on a big-budget video game. For decades, extended overtime has been a ubiquitous practice, seen as integral to game development as buttons or computers. It’s also been controversial. Some argue that crunch represents failure of leadership and project management—that for employees to spend months working fourteen-hour days, usually for no extra money, is unconscionable. Others wonder how games can be made without it.

  “We crunch on all of our games for sure,” said Naughty Dog’s copresident Evan Wells. “It’s never mandated. We never say, ‘OK, it’s six days a week, OK, it’s sixty hours a week.’ We never [change] our forty-hour expectation or our core hours, which are ten thirty a.m. to six thirty p.m. . . . People put in a lot more hours, but it’s based on their own fuel, how much they have in their tank.” Of course, there was always a cascading effect: when one designer stayed late to finish a level, others would feel pressured to stay late, too. Every Naughty Dog employee knew that the company had certain standards of quality, and that hitting those standards would always mean putting in overtime. Besides, what self-respecting artist wouldn’t want to milk every hour to make his or her work as good as possible?

  “It’s certainly a hot topic, and one that I don’t want to dismiss as unimportant, but I feel that it’s never going to go away,” said Wells. “You can mitigate it, you can try to make it less impactful in the long term, make sure people have the chance to recuperate and recover from it, but I think it’s the nature of an artistic endeavor, where there’s no blueprint for making a game. You’re constantly reinventing the product.”

  That was the biggest problem: reinventing the product. Even on the fourth entry in a series that Naughty Dog had been making for a decade, it was still impossible to plot out just how long everything would take. “The problem is, you couldn’t task creativity,” said Bruce Straley. “You can’t task fun.”

  How could the designers know, without weeks of playtesting and iterating, whether the new stealth mechanics were worth k
eeping? How could the artists know, without weeks of optimization, whether those snazzy, beautiful environments would run at a proper frame rate? And how could the programmers know, until everything was finished, just how many bugs they’d have to mop up by the end of the game? At Naughty Dog, as at all game studios, the answer was always to estimate. And then, when those estimates invariably turned out to be too conservative, the answer was to crunch.

  “To solve crunch, probably the best you could do is say: don’t try to make Game of the Year,” said Neil Druckmann. “Don’t do that and you’re good.” Druckmann, like many veteran designers, viewed crunch as a complex issue. Naughty Dog was a studio full of perfectionists, he argued. Even if their managers tried to tell their employees to go home by 7:00 p.m., everyone on the team would fight to stay late and polish their game until the very last second. “With Uncharted 4, we tried even earlier than we’d ever done [to say] ‘Here’s the entire story, beginning to end, here are all the beats,’” Druckmann said. “And what we find is that instead of shrinking crunch, we just make a more ambitious game, and people work just as hard as the previous game. So we’re still trying to figure out how to find that better work-life balance.”

  Erick Pangilinan’s solution was to put in long hours every night—“I usually go home at two in the morning,” he said—but never to work on weekends. “I’m very strict about that.” Others sacrificed their health and well being for the sake of the project. One Naughty Dog designer later tweeted that he’d gained fifteen pounds during Uncharted 4’s final crunch. And some worried, during those last few months of 2015, that the game might never be finished. “The crunch at the end was probably the worst we’ve ever had,” said Emilia Schatz. “It was honestly very unhealthy. We’ve done bad crunches before, but I never got the feeling we couldn’t finish this project. Toward the end of Uncharted 4, you’d see other people in the hall and there’d be that look: ‘I don’t know how we’re going to finish this. It just doesn’t seem possible.’”