1. Set a vision.
In late 2005 most of Insomniac was working mightily to get Resistance: Fall of Man up and running on early PS3 hardware (read the postmortem in the February, 2007 issue of Game Developer). Meanwhile, about a dozen of us were trying to figure out where to begin on a new Ratchet & Clank game. We were lacking hardware, an engine, game code, and even assets. We were truly at ground zero.
To start, we decided to visualize the Ratchet & Clank universe PS3-style by recreating Metropolis, one of the iconic locations from our PS2 series. We did this by building a "diorama" of the city, adding vehicles, and sending a camera through it.
We built our test city using the Resistance engine, stitched together a frame by frame camera fly through, and added audio effects to simulate the experience of being in Metropolis.
We were pleased with the outcome, but we knew that this was a guess at best and revealed more about our hopes for the game without the memory, frame rate, and game design constraints of a real level.
The reaction from our producers at Sony and later from people who saw the Metropolis video at 2006 GDC was astonishing. We were being compared to feature film CGI, and there was great enthusiasm for the game.
When Sony told us that future gameplay deliveries needed to "drop jaws" as Metropolis did we wondered if we could ever match the results in-game (see Figures 1 and 2). At this point we still did not know what lay ahead for RCF, but we knew one thing -- we had a vision.