Making Crash Bandicoot, by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin

Making Crash Bandicoot, by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin(naughtydog.com)

136 points by slackito 15 years ago | 25 comments

agavin 15 years ago |

NDI didn't ditch GOAL because I left. In fact they used it for JakX and they also ported it to the PSP (successfully). However, the PS3 development didn't get started on porting it early, so they went with a different tact. Christophe (co-president and lead tech honcho there now) lamented to me on several occasions that they should have ported it to the PS3.

Not that the process hasn't gone well for them -- Uncharted and UC2 are totally awesome, and watching the UC3 trailer gives me goosebumps. Dan (head gameplay programmer) did miss it so bad that he went with Scheme for their scripting :-) There are many ways to skin a cat, and the truth is that as long as you have good people (which they do in spades) and make decent decisions decisively, things tend to work out. Forward progress is one of the most important things.

aw3c2 15 years ago |

Direct links, submitted page is just linking to them:

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/03/making-crash-ban...

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-ban...

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/05/making-crash-ban...

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/06/making-crash-ban...

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/07/making-crash-ban...

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/08/making-crash-ban...

krallja 15 years ago | |

Part 7: http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/10/crash-bandicoot-...

tgriesser 15 years ago |

Quote from part 3:

Our motto was “bite off more than we could chew, then figure out some crazy complicated way to make it work.”

What a great motto to have for anything you're working on, clearly it paid off.

sshumaker 15 years ago | |

And what's even more wonderful is that you might expect that this trait would been tempered with so-called "experience" - but they continued being "overly-ambitious" throughout their next decade at Naughty Dog and into their ventures beyond.

rm445 15 years ago |

This is fascinating. Naughty Dog has developed for Sony consoles since Crash, so they might have low visibility if you're not in touch with the Playstation ecosystem, but they're renowned for their total mastery of successive generations of the Playstation hardware.

HNers might be sad to learn that they gave up writing games in their home-grown Lisp with the advent of the PS3 era. It was called GOOL, and later, GOAL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

kazuya 15 years ago | |

Don't worry. They used PLT Scheme in their latest. http://www.gameenginebook.com/gdc09-statescripting-uncharted... [PDF]

jcw 15 years ago | | |

I read an article a while back that said after the engineer that wrote GOAL left the company, they stopped using it and went back to pure C++ or something.

Hearing that they use Racket now, that just makes me all happy inside.

sshumaker 15 years ago | | |

This isn't quite the same thing. The Jak games were built entirely using GOAL (other than a tiny microkernel in C) - gameplay, collision detection, rendering, AI, you name it.

Uncharted is using a LISP-like scripting language for gameplay scripting. Most large games use scripting these days (LUA is pretty common), this just happens to be a lisp-flavored variant of that. There's a huge difference between writing your gameplay scripting in a lisp and building your entire game in it.

rbxbx 15 years ago |

I had the pleasure of going through a fairly extensive (and certainly my most intimidating) phone interview with Andy once for one of his more recent ventures. The amount of smarts and insight this fellow has really can't be overstated.

oz 15 years ago |

Ah, Crash Bandicoot. My younger brother hogged our Playstation with it all day, when I wanted to play Metal Gear Solid.

Well, at least until I told my Fundamentalist mother that there were Satanic symbols in the game. That put an end to that...

eru 15 years ago | |

How did your brother retaliate?

oz 15 years ago | | |

I got away scot-free. Good times.

jcromartie 15 years ago |

Part 3 contains the most interesting technical details. They really milked the absolute max out of the Playstation through a combination of pre-calculating visual occlusion and a custom (Lisp, of course!) programming language that was designed to make use of the hardware directly.

dmbaggett 15 years ago | |

An early inspiration for our precomputation approach was Seth Teller's 1992 Ph.D. thesis (bio at http://www.csail.mit.edu/user/1544).

Seth worked out the (5D) math to trace the propagation of light through portals and precompute the set of visible polygons from any point in a so-called "architectural walkthrough" -- i.e., traversal of a space with lots of walls.

We knew that would never work for something as low-power as the PS1, but we were intrigued enough by Teller's work to try a very watered-down brute force variant.

As Andy describes in the article, this is what led to our precomputing the visible set of polygons (and their relative sort order) for every frame of the game. This was actually hard for three reasons:

- we had to distribute the precomputation work across all the artists' SGI workstations to get it done in under an hour per level - we had to store a sorted list of polygons per frame in a compact enough way that it would fit - we had to weave the foreground elements, which were not precomputed, into the background, which was

It was a really fun, but very challenging, project to get this all to work.

spacemanaki 15 years ago |

Here's a link to the brief mention of the Lisp they used for some kind of scripting inside the game. I've often heard of this so it's too bad there isn't a little more info on it:

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-ban...

agavin 15 years ago |

There is now a part 7 and part 8.

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/10/crash-bandicoot-...

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/16/crash-bandicoot-...

malkia 15 years ago |

I've started learning Common Lisp because of them :) and I don't regret it. I can now program better in languages with closures, macroses, tagged data, interfacing with FFI, etc.

I learned a lot by making that step, and there is way more to be learned.

bitwize 15 years ago | |

We hates your nasty, cruftsy, tricksy hard-to-read macroses! We hates them!

catshirt 15 years ago |

this is awesome, especially from the perspective of a programmer who was 9 when he first played crash. how full circle.