After the main character's creation, the team went into three months of developing the game. The game first became functional in April 1995 and became playable in June 1995. The first 3 levels in the game were completed by August 1995. However, they were judged to be too difficult to appear so early in the game and were moved to the game's power plant area. Artist Charlotte Francis joined Naughty Dog at around this time.
[2] In September 1995, a videotape of
Crash Bandicoot was shown to Sony Computer Entertainment behind closed doors.
[1][2] While playing the game during development, Rubin realized that there were many empty areas in the game due to the PlayStation's inability to process numerous on-screen enemy characters at the same time. Additionally, players were solving the game's puzzles too fast. Rubin soon came up with the idea of a box and putting various symbols on the sides to create puzzles. Breaking these boxes would serve to fill in the boring parts of the levels and give the player additional puzzles.
[5] The first "crate" was placed in the game in January 1996, and would become the primary gameplay element of the series.
[2] Willy the Wombat's destruction of the crates would eventually lead him to be renamed "Crash Bandicoot".
[2][5] In March 1996, Sony agreed to publish
Crash Bandicoot, which went into the alpha stage in April 1996.
Crash Bandicoot was first shown at the
Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 1996.
Development of
Cortex Strikes Back began in October 1996. For the game, Andy Gavin created a new engine and scripting language named "Game Oriented Object
LISP 2" (GOOL 2) that was three times faster than the previous game's engine, could handle ten times the animation frames and twice the polygon count.
[1][2] The jungle levels were originally to have featured ground fog, but this was abandoned when magazines and the public began to heavily criticize other developers for using fog to hide polygon count. Sunlight and depth accentuation was experimented with for these levels. Wanting to have some "dirty" locations in the game, Naughty Dog worked in the sewer levels and added color contrast to the levels to show depth and break up the repetitive monotony of the endless sewer pipes.
[6] A flat plane
z-buffer was created for the game; because the water surfaces and mud in the jungle had to be a flat plane and be exactly flat on the Y-axis, there could be no waves and the subdividing plane could not be at an odd angle. The effect only worked on objects in the foreground and was only used on Crash, some enemies and a few boxes at the same time.
[1] The soundtrack of
Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back was provided by
Mutato Muzika (consisting of
Mark Mothersbaugh and
Josh Mancell), while the sound effects were created by Universal Sound Studios (consisting of Mike Gollom, Ron Horwitz and Kevin Spears). The characters were designed by Charles Zembillas of American Exitus, Incorporated.
Clancy Brown provided the voice of Doctor Neo Cortex, while
Brendan O'Brien voiced the dual role of Doctor N. Gin and Doctor Nitrus Brio and Vicki Winters voiced Coco Bandicoot.
[7] The game was unveiled at the
Electronic Entertainment Expo in
Atlanta, Georgia in June 1997 to a positive response from the game industry. The game went into the alpha stage in August 1997. Around that time, Dan Arey, the lead designer of
Gex: Enter the Gecko, joined Naughty Dog and streamlined the level design.
[2]
Like the first, the second game was a commercial success, green-lighting a third game. Production of
Crash Bandicoot: Warped began in January 1998, with Naughty Dog given only 10½ months to complete the game.
[1][2] Programmers Andy Gavin, Stephen White and Greg Omi created three new gameplay engines for the game. Two of the three new engines were three-dimensional in nature and were created for the airplane and jet-ski levels; the third new engine was created for the motorcycle levels in the style of a
driving simulator. The new engines combined make up a third of the game, while the other two-thirds of the game consist of the tweaked engine used in the previous games. Jason Rubin explained that the "classic" engine and game style was preserved due to the success of the previous two games and went on to say that "were we to abandon that style of gameplay, that would mean that we would be abandoning a significant proportion of gamers out there". An arbitrary plane
z-buffer was created for the jet-ski and flooded Egyptian hallway levels of the game.
[1] To create a completely fluid feel for the water on these levels, an
environment map that reflects the sky was fitted onto the surface of the water. A real
shadow was given to the Crash character at the request of the
Sony Computer Entertainment America producers, who were "sick of that little discus that's following him around." To create an "arcade" experience in the airplane levels and to differentiate them from flight simulators, the enemy planes were programmed to come out in front of the player and give the player ample time to shoot them before they turn around and shoot the player rather than come up behind the player and hit them from behind. The Relic system was introduced to give players a reason to return to the game after it has been completed.
[8]
While initially Naughty Dog was only signed on to make three games,
Crash Team Racing was a possible
Crash 3 as it started out in production after
Crash 2 and the game which was finished first in production would be released first. However, Naughty Dog had already gotten far into the project and decided to finish it and release it. David Baggett produced the game's soundtrack, with
Mark Mothersbaugh and
Josh Mancell of
Mutato Muzika composing the music. Sound effects were created by Mike Gollum, Ron Horwitz and Kevin Spears of Universal Sound Studios.
[11] This marked the end of Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot games.
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