[The Art/Style]
Our second stop on the tour was a little presentation by Art Director Chad Dezern, who walked us through a bit of the genesis of the game, flipping through a number of absolutely gorgeous concept art pieces. The idea, he said, was to take the tech from Resistance and upgrade it to meet with the Ratchet universe's aesthetic. To that end, all of the enemies in the game were first designed by silhouette to make it obvious even from a distance that they were a threat, and then they were sketched, then given intricate detail and finally modeled to preserve as much of the detail as possible.

"Compressed detail," they called it, and what it meant was that stylistically, the game had sort of broad, basic forms that scaled from the characters all the way out into the architecture that had what Dezern called a "chunky aesthetic." By keeping the look cartoony, but filling in pockets of visual interest, the characters could be both simplistic and detailed at the same time.

Perhaps more than almost any game on the PlayStation 3 right now, Ratchet Future is extremely artist-driven. The concept art for the weapons was so detailed that the modelers actually had to go and change the physical design of some of the parts to make them move properly, and that's a perfect example of the art team helping to lead some of the initial designs of the world. When weapons explode, they don't just have a cloud of volumetric smoke or fire, little wisps and arcs of energy lance out, curling around the usual smoke plumes -- and these stylized effects are different for every weapon, at once giving them variety but a familiar link from one punchy explosion to the next.

Though the weapons and characters are at the fore, Dezern was quick to call attention to the amount of work that went into the backgrounds too. The lighting model in the game is undoubtedly cartoony, but it isn't without a basis in actual filmmaking; attention to things like bounced light and color bleed help give the game its visual style, and then artists can go in and literally hand-paint on up to 12 layers of effects on the level architecture.

The core philosophy was to think of the actual surfaces -- now rife with cube, normal, parallax and bump maps to give the illusion of ruts and ridges and pockmarks -- almost as contrasting colors. The textures could become the things that guided the eye as much as color, and though the objects in front of the player are going to undoubtedly be the most detailed just because they're closer, all the objects in the distance will get love too. Sure, it's probably overkill for what most gamers will notice, but on a subconscious level, it helps tie the visuals together in a way most games will never have.