User:Tenbeat/Sandbox2

Script for the unused developer commentaries in Sly 1.

Episode 1

-The design for this actually originated at a local Chinese restaurant, uh over lunch one day when we were trying to decide what kind of minigames we wanted to do. And uh when I was growing up playing Coin Op.

I was a huge fan of Robotron, which clearly influenced this a little bit with the move and shoot.

But I was also a big fan of a really really old game called Rip Off where you and a friend would try and defend these little triangles of, I don't know, loot, from the marauding hordes.

And so this is kind of our combo of those two, where you've got elements; the control and the firepower of Robotron, and the sort of mechanic of protecting things from Rip Off.

-Yeah it's actually, I mean the big thing about it is it's really fast.

There's a lot of really fast action in it.

There's a lot of... it's a sort of nice combination of you having to be at the controls and shoot things as well as sort of decide where you need to go to-

-Position yourself.

-Where you need to position yourself because as it gets near the end there's a bunch of chests that are all being taken, so you have to like get the closest guy to the exit before you go and get somebody else.

So there's a little bit of thought involved, a little bit of player choice involved as well.

-Also I remember the very first version of this there was no rock in the middle, um and you know we all really enjoyed playing it but I think it was my Robotron background, and I was sweeping around.

And we had one of the developers who'd never played Robotron just sat in the middle and just shot in circles, just never-

-Yeah, that was a bit of a shock, he made it sort of more like you were playing-

-Playing a reverse Tempest game or something.

But yeah, once we realized that strategy then we came up with the brilliant rock strategy.

-Which forced you to have to move around a little bit.

-Yeah it forces you to at least circle the environment so that there's no shadow behind the rock that you can't protect.

-One of the big things we always had, similar to the tank levels, that we were a little bit worried about with this level was whether people would be able to deal with having two joysticks at once.

And as a matter of fact some people don't go full Robotron, they don't go full move-and-shoot independently.

They'll move to a place and then stop and shoot, or they'll- -Or they'll move and shoot always the same direction. -That's correct, they'll always press up on the stick or something like that. -Well they'll move the sticks together in concert. Both sticks always the same direction. But the game is beatable by a variety of players and I think most people when we've observed it, it may takes people a few times, few tries, but everyone seems to get through it which is also a really good thing about this minigame. Oh and it also uses projected, if you look at the texture on the floor, there's a projected texture down there to try and give some early, this was really actually fairly early on. But it's got some sort of caustics moving around in the environment.

Episode 2

-We actually worked hard to figure out how to get Murray into the game, how to make him part of the gameplay. -Because you like character? -Yeah he was fun, so we were trying hard to get Murray into the gameplay so you actually got to play as Murray. Our original idea was that we'd turn Murray into kind of a Rambo character and give him big guns and have him run around. And well, we did that and it really felt out of character for Murray to be running around with a big machine-gun. So all those levels we actually turned into the tank levels, so the hover tank that Sly drives around and shoots stuff up in, that was originally Murray. You did almost exactly the same levels, but you did them as Murray carrying a gun rather than as Sly driving around on a hover tank. Once we decided not to do that, then we said "well let's"... when we decided to do a racing game it was pretty obvious that- the original idea with the racing game was that we would have Sly driving something, a pick-up or an ATV or a motorcycle or something, but then we realized that people were probably going to wish they could drive the getaway van at some point in the game. This was an obvious place to do that. So once we decided to do that, then it became clear that that was where Murray was going to be playable. He was going to be the driver in the driving levels, you get to be Murray. -In any of the dialogues, you can move the left and right joystick to actually slightly change the angle of the characters' heads. So you can make them nod yes and shake their heads no, or make them swirl their heads in little drunken circles. -Did you ever figure out what speed this thing is actually going at? Actually translate it to real world land. -Everything inside the engine's in centimeters per second, and this one, the van tops out at about 3000 centimeters per second, which I think is about 45 miles an hour. -What's this hotdog sign you were talking about? -The backstory for this level is that Murray's doing something, who knows, and ends up getting hungry and goes off looking for food while Sly is risking his life trying to retrieve the Thievius Raccoonus. -And that's based on real life. That's what happened at your company. -We've had a running joke through the development of the Muggshot 300 level, of whose face is it on the giant hotdog stand? -Murray Sniper. This was actually the first, well of the levels that we did where Murray was active in it, this is the only one, I guess the driving levels made it too. This was an attempt to get Murray involved in the gameplay a little bit. Get him out of van, into a situation where he's not comfortable, and have Sly cover him. -Yeah, plus seeing his big belly moving all over was worth the price of admission. -So probably the biggest challenge I think on this level was just getting the controls right. We went through, how many? -We went through about three or four different control schemes. -We had fully manual. -We had fully manual which was kinda like the binocucom where you zoomed with the right analog stick, and people were having- -It wasn't good. -It was too hard. -Too hard. Then we did single click zoom? -You had single click zoom so you could be either fully out or fully in and this was better, but it wasn't great. -And then finally auto-zoom where sort of the guiding principle was Murray can never be off-screen. -Yep, and so what it is, is we want to try to keep Murray in focus all the time. So even if you move quite a bit away from him, you can still see him. He's pretty small on screen, but you can still see him, and this takes care of a lot of issues with you losing track of where he is. -And I think that's all a result of probably the most frustrating thing for players when they were learning the game was, if they didn't see Murray and Murray took damage, then all of the sudden you'd have to restart the level and you didn't even have any idea why. So that, I mean it sounds kind of obvious but it actually took us a reasonable amount of time to get there. -That's correct. -And then we had to fight all the sort of nausea issues with an auto-zooming camera, and all that stuff. But it seems like it worked out fairly well.

Episode 3

-So Gary has never played this before. -Well first of all I'd like to say this is the best video game I've ever played. Initial reaction; why are there chickens? -OK, well the reason we have chickens is because somebody wants, there's a ghost who wants to eat some gumbo, and so you need to get 50 chickens within a certain amount of time so he can get his gumbo now. And if he gets his gumbo he'll give you the key. Now the original inspiration for that, well I was trying to come up with a random reason, and voodoo gives us this ability, but doing a little bit of research there was this guy called Papa Legba, and he always had chickens sacrificed to him and he liked gumbo, so that was our sort of initial inspiration. Then we ended up using the otter ghost because we had that resource already available to us. -Oh, right right. So it kind of fit in with the whole- -Well it was all about sacrificing chickens. I must say that Zelda was definitely a bit of an inspiration for this. In that game there were parts where you were able to sort of grab chickens and throw them around and abusing chickens is always fun. There's bomb-toting roosters, which helps explain a lot of the logic behind this particular level. So one of the things we were trying to do with it was, originally there wasn't an enemy, and it was just you going around and hitting things, and it was OK but there wasn't a sort of additional tension. And the other thing was, you'd quit early because you knew you didn't have a chance or you had a chance of getting them. So we decided to add this kamikaze guy coming after you and having one of them actually didn't work out that well. But having two of them actually made it easier because you could avoid them and they could blow each other up. It really fits into the Sly character- -Using your enemy against them. Like, making them run into each other and trip over himself. -That's correct, and so it's make it so that you're being really crafty, you're not necessarily using brute force to take them down, but you're being crafty about how you take them down. -One of the things that I was going for in making this level was the Heart of Darkness. Right, you're on a boat ride upriver, through this crazy spooky swamp-jungle and along the way you get attacked. But you can't get off the boat and the boat's not gonna stop, it keeps moving, so you're forced to deal with things as they come along. And you need to react quickly because the boat, it just keeps on moving upstream. Till eventually you get dumped off at this spooky spider temple, which of course has more danger. But the boat was really the thing that started it all going. What kind of things influenced you, Matthew, when you were working on the art for this level? -The bone theme. Everything's bones and tusks. And voodoo-oriented. So this seemed kinda basic theme but it had to be spooky. But those spooky trees are spendy, so we ended up using an awful lot of billboard trees in the background. A lot of those that are offscreen are really cheap. And everything that you're looking at, all those tusks and bones and spiky bits, all the masks, and it's a great deal of detail on all of this stuff. Which is very cool, it has a very fingers of the undead feel to everything, cause you had all these bones and creepy spiky bits, it just looks dangerous. -One of the problems we had in the design of all these tank levels was that the rate of fire off the vehicle was so high that you could mow your way through enemies really quickly. So we had to come up with this, this is the first and I think the only in the tanks levels, we have these barrier walls that take 12, 10 hits to break down so you have to ladle on the shots to get access to the next area. They're only there to slow down your progress so your forced to deal with the gameplay of like, in this case, the flaming turtle head thrower guy who keeps attacking you so you need stick and move. -That was our first occurrence of what we call our multi-stage breakables, right? -Yeah. They had to be invented to slow down the tank. Originally the idea was that Sly would get captured and Murray would have to go in as a rescue squad outfitted with large rocket launchers and dish out a lot of Rambo-style damage all over the enemies in an attempt to get you back. One of the problems that led to us switching from Murray to Sly on a hover tank was the rotation speed of Murray, in this case, he needed to be able to turn around really quick to shoot at all angles, and simultaneously walk in any direction the player was deflecting the left joystick. So you had a lot of strange situations where Murray needed to move in a way that was very un-Murray-like, cause Murray's kind of a big guy. -So he wasn't even gonna be on a tank, the whole movement scheme here was originally gonna be on a walking Murray, so he was gonna move very nimbly like Baryshnikov. -Yes, yes he was gonna be Baryshnikov with machine guns. -So one of the things we wanted to do with this level was we wanted to make it feel like it was a low water area. So one of the things that we did was we really spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the terrain look like it was a low water area. Kelly, can you describe sort of how you got that look? -Ian and I worked with the water level, so I could map it with a water edge line so I made sure that under the water had a darker look and I got to put some beautiful little lighted pools in it with the rocks in the bottom and the murky water on top. But the edge of the water going to be a challenge to map so figuring out a way to deal with that with the digital world was a fun challenge and by leaving a mineral scum around the edge helped describe the water area and also helped the water line be fine if it went up and down over the bank. -Yeah, one of the things we had originally was the camera was up quite a bit more, and it was more of a fixed camera, so it made the sense of speed feel pretty good but it didn't make the environment look as good as it could. So we spent a little bit time trying to figure out how to make it so that the camera could sort of follow behind the boat without having to make the boat have a slow turning radius so people wouldn't get sick. So, we needed to spend a little bit of time just making it so it slowly followed him. So you can actually bring the boat in to the screen a little bit, but in general it's a pretty smooth experience and it still feels like you're in the boat itself.

Episode 4

-First I wanted to mention that having the camera follow the vehicles like this is very cool. When we were first working on this, we had the camera just set to consistently point in one axial direction. -Which made it more like Offroad, the arcade game. -But I find this a lot more immersive, because you really get a neat sense of going around the turns and there's a lot more use of the props and the sideshow elements that are in here, for making it feel like you're getting someplace and that you're having a good time driving through the environment. Getting this to look like it matched the rest of the snow levels was not difficult but what I wanted to do was also give it some more unique features and as opposed to the one in the Muggshot level, I wanted to try and make it feel like you were up high, more like the architecture in Aspero, having a lot of ravines that you're going over and that fact that you're on bridges and making use of some of the more dramatic architecture that we have in these levels; the mountains and the tall trees, and giving it a lot of vertical feel in the architecture of the landscape. -We also did a bunch of work on all the cars to have them have sort of working or at least visibly moving suspension parts, so if you look underneath the van, or if you're so skilled that you can flip the van, you can actually see the axles and the shock absorbers and the differentials, all moving as the car moves over the bumps. It actually uses the same technology that Sly's, and all the other characters' skins use. We just kind of in technical terms, we weight the skin of the suspension to the wheel, treating the wheels as if they were bones. As a result when the wheels move the suspension kind of bends and flexes to match. -Why don't you talk about the modeling first? -Well I was given this pretty crazy layout of all these pillars, because of that I had to try to come up with something. I was actually kinda thinking of... kinda those old Kung Fu films or actually like, some new Kung Fu films or whatever, like Zu Warriors. So because of that, kinda looked for large pillary, crazy land formations and came up with a couple of cool designed buildings and stuff with Dev. -One of the challenges in doing these sort of levels, doing the sniper levels, and this one really shows it off compared to the Muggshot one, is making it so that everything is visible from one vantage point. There's a lot of twist and turns in this particular level and a lot of height changes, to make it so that everything is very visible at all times, wherever Murray is going on his path. -I know that from a modeling standpoint, it makes it quite difficult because it's actually really deep, it goes pretty far back and you end up having to compensate for a lot of things, just to make it look a lot better, you know, these things are a lot farther away than they actually look like, so you gotta kinda make some things a little larger and stuff, but still Murray will end up looking a little too small so you gotta kinda tweak it to get it to look just right. -When I first got this level to map, first time I saw it, I noticed how beautiful it was; it was this big valley with all of these tall pillar islands in it and a lot of mist down below. What I tried to do is that I tried to be inspired by the old fairy-tales of the snowy villages with the fog down below and I tried to keep that magical feeling all the way through where the snow would be able to reflect the light from all the different angles. Touching everything with a layer of powdered sugar was kinda the goal to continuously remind myself that I had to paint something and then and add snow on top of it, that was fun. -Actually the, uh, the original conception for this sort of level wasn't that it was Sly in a tank, it was Murray sorta going Rambo, and we had a sort of test version that we had up, where you are running around as Murray and he could fire in the different directions, and, it got nixed, for some pretty good reasons, A) it didn't really fit inside Murray's character too much. -Yeah -He is supposed to be kinda this quiet guy, he's really not that competent and having him go through and sorta of, go full Rambo just didn't work out that well, in terms of the character. -So the initial design of this game, I think, was derived from the fact that we had a Super Smash TV arcade machine in the office, and so one of the big things that was really fun about it, it wasn't the deepest game necessarily, but, it was pure mayhem the entire time, it was lots of respawning enemies, just lots of really simple but fun enemies to basically go after and hit, and we were trying to hit that sort of frantic mark. It's a little bit harder in 3D and... do you have anything to say about, sort of the layout to make it so that it was- -Um, just the way, you know, the way the gun, you know, kinda the gun is designed for this, basically, it's not, you know, following the terrain or anything like that, it's shooting on a horizontal path so anything that had, kinda heavy gameplay where you're fighting off NPCs we, no matter how much Dev wanted to funk out the floor and make it curvy and hilly, I was like "Can't do it because the bullets don't follow it and the gameplay suffers because of it," so, that's why the sections are each kind of tiered and you're falling down into the next section, so you can have elevation changes, but each gameplay surface has to be flat while you are playing. I wish we had a monkey counter, to let you knew how many monkeys you got in this level, that would be good. -Yeah. -One of the big things for this level, which you know, Voodoo didn't have quite the same problems as "where are all these monkeys coming from?" You know with the Voodoo ghost generator, okay it's ghost, it's magic, whatever, but you know, these are monkeys, you can't just have monkeys come out of thin air, so that's why we had these kinda trapdoor setups that they're jumping out of, you know trapdoors from a different part of the building, to try and motivate the, the Army of Nunchuckers that are in here.

Episode 5

-This level is the first level to feature the new battering ram on the van!
-It is, it is the battering ram level. Because what kind of van does't have a battering ram?
-A weak, lame van is without a battering ram.
-Actually I did the first version of this after playing Super Monkey Ball.
-Really?
-Yeah, not the normal parts of Super Monkey Ball, but there's a minigame in Super Monkey Ball called Monkey Boxing, which is kinda fun. It was a king of the hill game where you run around and knock the other monkeys off of the floating platform high in the sky, so the genesis of this level was trying to do the same kinda of experience of playing king of the hill with some other bad guys. And actually originally when we started this, the bad guys weren't these lava slugs, which I love, they were other vehicles, like in the other races, so there were other cars driving around. And then we changed them to be the lava slugs and made the game more asymmetric. At the beginning you were doing battle with a bunch of other cars and they were about as fast as you were, and they had about the same abilities as you did, except for the punching bar, they didn't have that. And then when we had the lava slugs we made it much more asymmetric, the lava slugs are much different in terms of what they can do than the van is, and that makes a little bit more interesting.
-How are these slugs different from the van?
-They go a lot slower.
-Oh.
-They go a lot slower, so they can't get to as many, cause then it's a little bit more fair. You have to get - I mean there are lots of the lava slugs and there's only one of you so you need to make sure the van is more powerful.
-That's true.
-So, the player is definitely smarter than the lava slugs, they're not very bright.
-Yeah.
-But, having the van be more powerful is a big win as well. That lava slug actually uses the same code as Sly's tail.
-Really?
-Yeah.
-For what part?
-The whole slug is a tail, basically, that's how-
-That's grotesque!
-Yeah, it's kinda gross. So when they turn, it's actually kinda the "tail code" that's making the back of the lava slug not reacting immediately, that's not animated, that's actually our "tail code" running. Same's true for the raccoon tail on the van, that actually is a miniature version of Sly's tail.
-When you whack these lava monsters back into the lava, they've got this little trough that they just start to walking back up, you never kill any of them.
-Right.
-It's the same squad of four lava monsters, they just keep coming back for more.
-Right.
-And if you really wanna-
-They're pure evil!
-Yeah, you cannot destroy them.
-This is the control room to Clockwerk's Death Ray, and it's no secret: we moved on this one pretty fast. It bookends the Bentley's little hacker situation, in that it motivates why you actually need to be saved by Bentley when you get captured in Clockwerk's gas chamber; and the goal with this level was to feature a lot of Sly's moves, and also to bring back the barrel mechanism, where you snuck around in that with the deadly darts, that would shoot you if you step on the pressure tiles. What were you thinking about when you were making this stuff?
-Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, that sort of an antique, industrial Frankenstein's laboratory kinda feel. So, I was trying to make it look very, sort of antique deadly.
-This level features some serious, and the term we use is "pretzeling" where we try to make a gameplay path that loops back on itself and loops back on itself again so that you see a lot of the same art assets which take a while to make, so you'll see as you play through it that we do 180° camera shifts, hopefully which are not too obtrusive in the play experience, you don't notice them happening as you make your way back over the deadly tile floor and then up to the control area with the computers and the world domination screens, which seem totally necessary for the final boss of the game, every Bond villain has those enormous screen of the world with a pulsing image. Ooh, there's kinda hidden thing here, where you can break the computer monitors that have the sine waves going on them. I have to say, I've put that it because I really want to break my computer, every other day.
(haha)
-I don't know about whoever's listening to this, but sometimes you really just wanna smash that thing to bits, and this level gives you a chance to do it, in fact it's good for you to do it, it says "yes!" to your computer hating ways.
-I don't know, I think that it adds something to the evilness of the computer, that it goads you into destroying the monitor, which ultimately has nothing to do with the computer at all.
-You're right, you're right, that is-
-You just destroy the screen.
-I know, it's fooled you...
-Right!
-....into thinking that it is the screen but it's not, it's the box and the bottom.
-It's a metaphor for how vile and sneaky Clockwerk really is.
-Well we thought after listening to Bentley's lovely voice...
-Thank you.
-...For the whole game...
-It's dulcet. That's the word I was looking for. Dulcet tones.
-We thought people in general would want to play as Bentley. Since Bentley's forte is his mental agility we thought that having him play in a level that was virtual would be kinda fun. So it's not really Bentley, it's virtual, cyber Bentley. We originally had a really really old-school look for this level, where everything was just line art so-
-Like Battlezone or something.
-Like Battlezone, yeah; and then we went, what we ended up with, was a little bit different, more a bit of a Tron look than a Battlezone look, sort of a combination of glowing lines and 3D so, so if I were, if this were 1980 this would have been a feature-length motion length picture.
(laughing)
-You know, after playing this game, or this level, I'm sure you are asking yourself "What exactly is Bentley doing there?" He's typing, so...
-This is of course a virtual manifestation of Clockwerk's security system.
-Right, he's hacked into-
-He's hacking in! So Clockwerk has hidden some secrets in those little yellow things which I think are supposed to be 5 and 1/4 inch floppy disks.
(laughing)
-Cubes.
-Cubes.
-They're awfully deep for...
-Yeah, well it's a virtual representation so, and he's hidden them in layers of security which Bentley is madly destroying by typing and shooting little bullets out, so.
-You know, I like that game Tempest.
-Yeah? That's a good game.
-You might consider making that one.
-Next time.
(laughing)
-It's a running joke Matt, did you know that?
-No.
-No, everyone on there it seems has been agitating for a game, in the spirit of Tempest without actually using any Tempest intellectual property.
-Really?
-Cause that would be illegal.
-Yeah, of course.
-They all wanna have Tempest.
-Whereas clearly I wanted to have Asteroids.
(laughing)
-I think our internal model for the entire game is that there are no parallel lines, but, that is not true in cyber-Bentley/cyber-Clockwerk world.
-It's an absolute necessity.
-Yeah.
-And, Bentley is finally happy to see these lines.
-'Cause I think Bentley would like the game better if there were more parallel lines.
-I think Bentley would like the game better if it was all math.
-Yeah.
-If it was, just like a math game where you did some addition and subtraction.
-Cool, yeah.
-And you know, worked out some square roots and some logarithms.
-Sure, sure, factor some primes.
-Yeah exactly! Why didn't you put any primes to factor in this game?
-I don't know, we wanted to save something for the sequel.
-So Chris, you wanna tell me why it's called "Reverse Sniper?"
-Uh, it's called Reverse Sniper because you're playing as Carmelita, you're not Sly trying to protect Murray, you're trying to protect Sly as Carmelita. One of the issues we had with this was that we were a little bit worried about people being confused that they're no longer Sly. We were hoping that people would understand "You're Carmelita, you're trying to protect Sly." One of the things that was really nice about this is it sort of turns the tables a little bit. It also give you a really good view of Sly. We needed to improve the camera controls quite a bit for sniper level. The sniper controls that we originally had worked pretty well for the Murray levels because Murray moves pretty slow. In this level because Sly moves so much faster than Murray and does so much more sort of vertical move than in the Murray levels we really needed to improve the camera controls quite a bit for this. So that was one sort of other thing that we needed to change for this level.
-And really, in the initial camera position, everything about it, it was composed by Chris, by the designer, by you. You know it was- We adjust things along the way which is one of the highlights of the level is that we really adjusted things to be actually better play, and to also compose it a bit better to make it like a big lava dam. A big industrial lava dam. But the initial shot, all of him was composing with the whole volcano and I just funkified.
-Yeah, by the time I gave it to Suzanne it didn't look that great. By the time it got done it ends up looking like this great dam and there's all these moving parts that Suzanne put in, originally it was very static, which because you're not traveling through the world it's really necessary to have a lot of moving parts.
-From the very first shot all the elevation you're seeing is actually done by the designer, which is you know all of the elevation changes, the diagonals, the path is pretty much final. Like, we changed about ten percent toward the end to make more interesting. But that was really final, so it's kinda surprising, cause visually it's really interesting. You know you realize that the designer really thought about the big picture, about the path being interesting so I didn't have to do that much modification. As we originally designed we thought it would be cool if they came out of lava caves cause that was organic but it didn't work for play so, being a machinery thing we said "oh let's make them all pipes." The nice with the pipes is they have a little light source on top, that kinda tells you like, it should be blinking and things like that to tell you "hey the lava guy's coming" and every time you see that pipe you know by the model that "oh, a lava guy is gonna come out of that." It's like these consistent elements that you model that kinda leads the player to know what's gonna happen next.
-So this is one of the final, later designed worlds for the end of the game, for the Clockwerk levels. And pretty much it started with a piece of Peter Chan's artwork where he had this awesome tower of Clockwerk that looked like Clockwerk.
-Originally it was a lighthouse, it was originally supposed to be a lighthouse.
-Yeah, but it had all these pistons and gears and just all this crazy machinery in it.
-Actually it was around a bunch of windmills. Remember the whole theme was windmills and you were actually gonna be using all the different awnings to get you up through the level, eventually to the top of this Clockwerk tower.
-You guys just decided that volcanoes were much more dangerous than windmills?
-No, it was a windmill in a volcano.
-It was in a volcano, but this is all that's left! Naturally.
(laughing)
-When I was doing the gameplay for this I really wanted to keep that kinda silhouette of the shape of it pretty intact, where it's got the two legs and everything like that.
-This is almost right on to what the concept drawing was.
-Amazingly so.
-Yeah, like pretty darn close.
-Which is a first.
(laughing)
-Voodoo head.
-And so for some of the gameplay that's kind of in-between the legs that has like the cables and hooks, I needed to keep it something that at least from a distance we could fade out, it wasn't just some big architectural element, it was something that we could go "OK, that's either not there or it makes sense why it's kinda faded away," to keep the good silhouette, the good shape that it has.
-So Peter started with the initial silhouette of this thing and the idea, but Travis did a lot of the concept work on this like all the really neat stuff that you travel around on.
-Is there any elements on here that like already had some sort of I guess functionality that you had to do concept work for that was, you knew you had to keep it within this frame of...
-Um, the platforms of the thing, it's when the sequence where, well I guess the whole game is really the sequence, but the thing's malfunctioning and falling, the metal plates that fall down in front of you had to, well they had to fit into the Clockwerk structure, so it's like these big metallic wings.
-So that would really help sell the idea that this was falling apart as you were going, or as it was sinking and you were pretty much...
-Yeah, just absolute chaos.
-And at least from a game design perspective, definitely this is the end of the game, this is you know, you utilize all your moves to work your way up this structure so that there's spires, there's rails, there's pipes, there's hooks.
-And what evil thing Rob McDaniel could put in it.
-Yeah. Yep, the final challenge.
-Yep.
-Or the next to final challenge.
-It was totally a Rob McDaniel special. This whole last sequence.
-It's just (laughing) evil.
-Hidden demons.
(laughing)