Infamous (video Game) - Development

Development

Infamous was developed by Sucker Punch Productions, with a team of 60 people working for about three years. Though they could have opted to request the necessary funds from Sony to increase the team size and finish the game in two years, producer Brian Fleming noted that Sucker Punch's iteration-based development approach worked better with a smaller team size.

Infamous came during the end of the development for Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves as the team began to look towards their next game. After spending the last six years on the same stealth game genre with the Sly Cooper games, they wanted to make something that was more "brazen and loud." However, as fans of the "comic book" motif, they decided to develop it in the direction of a superhero game, working with the idea of an origin story that would allow the player to experience the growth of the character. Fleming stated that with the slower development time, they knew they needed to develop the game for the PlayStation 3 and that the work needed to complement their previous game, akin to how Shigeru Miyamoto's The Legend of Zelda series contrasted his earlier Mario series. They also sought a project that would allow them to become familiar with the new PlayStation 3 hardware but had enough commonalities to allow them to bring their previous work on the Sly Cooper series forward.

Director Nate Fox stated that much of the inspiration of the superhero story came from two DC Comics series, DMZ and No Man's Land. Both center on a city after a large disaster. The series also inspired the crafting of the game's grim take on the superhero genre. Fox further stated that the film Batman Begins was an inspiration for the game. However, any correlation to DC Comics' Static Shock was unintentional. Fox considered his own personal involvement in the Seattle WTO riots of 1999 as influencing the reflection of "spending time in a lawless place" within the game. Grand Theft Auto III was also stated as an influence, in that the team could easily see themselves as superheroes in the open world of Liberty City; similarly, Spider-Man 2 was used as a model to demonstrate what it would be like to move about the city and answer random requests for help alongside regular missions. The character of Cole was created to be a "kind of an everyman" so that players could then "get into the headspace of what it would be like to be a real human being who has been granted these exceptional abilities". They opted to make Cole a bike courier as such people in real life tend to be outside of the law, allowing them to develop Cole as in the counterculture. The team also avoided giving Cole an alter-ego or outfitting him with a costume as it would not have reasonably fit in with the character or the game's story.

The story and cut scene animations were created in-house. The plot was originally written by Fox, who had also written most of the Sly Cooper stories, and reviewed by Fleming. As they continued to develop the game, they rewrote pieces of the story around changes in the game, making sure that the story remained enjoyable. As the game became more complex, they brought in Bill Harms, a published comic book author, who had previously written for Supreme Commander and other video games. Harms assisted with the story and in-game dialog in addition to marketing materials. Fleming noted that the second half of the story underwent significant changes in the last nine months of development; for example, when voice actor Caleb Moody voiced the lines for Zeke, he ad libbed additional lines that the team found to be enjoyable, and they reworked the story to incorporate them. The cut scenes were created in a similar format to the comics that the game was influenced by, and used to further extend the atmosphere of the superhero motif. The cut scenes were created by taking 2D art created in Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop and placing them into artificial 3D stages built in Adobe After Effects to create a pseudo-3D effect that allowed them to play with camera placement and effects, and addition of organic elements such as dust clouds and ink spots.

Darren Bridges, a developer for Sucker Punch, noted that they wanted to make Infamous about "becoming a modern-day superhero", stressing the word "becoming" as the key motivator to show the growth of Cole from a simple bike messenger to someone with god-like powers. This led to instilling a "sense of progress" and growth of the character in all aspects of the game including the story, the progression of the player's powers, and the variation and difficulty in the enemies that the player faced. The team initially brainstormed on what powers that the lead character had, but selected electricity-based powers for two primary reasons. First, the power translated well to a video game context, as it would be easy to conceptualize the aspects of electrical-based powers in terms of video game concepts such as ranged combat. Secondly, electrical-based powers could then be tied to the city that the player would explore, requiring the player to use the city's electricity as fuel, and thus developing a "real relationship with the city".

Initially, the game was more free-form, allowing players to purchase new powers at any point during the game, but the developers found it difficult to create a challenging game around this, particularly as they could not design missions around specific powers as the player may not have those at that time. This evolved into the scheme of presenting new powers to the player over the course of the game, with the developers created guiding rules for which powers were ultimately included in the game and when: the power had to be useful and add something unique to the game, the player would need a chance to use that power immediately after they got it, and the power would need to be enjoyable to use. The team employed frequent reviews of when these powers were introduced to the player as other gameplay elements were added to the game. Not all powers were necessarily offensive; the "postcognition" power, allowing the player to see the psychic echo of a dead person of where they were before their death, was added as the team found there was an element of fun in tracking the echo through the crowded city. Some powers were cut from the game. One power, gained through the Evil karma path, was called "Minionize", and would have allowed Cole to control the minds of civilians and force them to join him in battle. Although the power was "decidedly evil and very fun to watch", the team felt it wasn't useful to the game, though they managed to retain a hint of it in one of the Evil side missions. Though the team had tested each of the core missions individually with the powers that the player would have based on the game's storyboard, they found that play-testers, who played the missions back-to-back, found the game lacked a variety of combat situations. The developers revisited all the combat scenarios from this feedback to alter the combat layouts as well as adding new enemies, a step that Bridges believes the game "benefited greatly" from. The ability to use Cole's electrical powers to ride along Empire City's elevated train rails was a last-minute addition during the last month of development based on a play-tester's suggestion.

Empire City was designed to marry with Cole's new-found superpowers. The city was built with a "crime ecosystem", where petty crimes or calls for help were always occurring outside of the main story, requiring the player to decide to stop to help or not to resolve them. A portion of the team was devoted to implementing the behavior of the citizens of the city and how that behavior would change as the state of the city altered due to the player's actions. Climbing buildings was considered to be an important aspect of the game, both as part of the superhero motif and because it was considered "fun to do", and Sucker Punch set out to make the whole city climbable. Many details of every building have been modeled to allow the player to climb the buildings, "down to the last window frame, lighting sconce and storefront", however, Fox noted that getting the climbing system "just right" was the most challenging aspect of development. One employee was dedicated to making sure the entire city was climbable. Fleming noted that during Infamous's development, both Crackdown and Assassin's Creed, two games with alternative takes on the climbing aspect, were released; the team felt that each of the games' climbing systems had their own strengths and weaknesses. To reflect the nature of change of the city as the player interacts with it—either restoring power or taking it away—the developers created a "deferred shading" rendering engine that would render the effects of moving and damaged light sources.

The Karma system in the game came about as a result of the team wanting to include the "judicious use of power" within the game. Fox commented that they wanted to lead the player along a path of doing the harder tasks believing that these actions were the right things to do. However, without the contrast of "evil" tasks that were simpler to complete, there would be no means of motivating the player to be a "selfless hero". The team wanted to encourage players to think about the results of not only large decisions—Karma moments in the game where Cole thinks of which option to select—but also every moment-to-moment action, such as considering the presence of civilians in the area around a battle. They arranged for the first major use of Cole's powers to turn the city's inhabitants against him, to encourage players to consider both sides. In this mission, Cole is given the option to keep a drop-supply of food for himself or to give it to the people; they found that most players would keep it for themselves, so very shortly after this event, the population turns against Cole, forcing the player to run or to attack them. Fox compared the Karma dichotomy to the differences in styles of Batman versus Venom; the former using precision attacks to avoid harming innocents while the latter would hurt anything in his path to complete his goal. To that end, they designed the powers in the game to reflect this nature; powers acquired with Good Karma would be more precise while Evil Karma powers were more destructive.