Because a game is greater than the sum of its parts, it's important to put a lot of effort into creating the best assembly and ordering of parts possible. A lot of elements are going to be a part of the recipe for Tomb Raider: Underworld -- exciting story developments, new game mechanics, incredible discoveries, epic reveals, dangerous new enemies, amazing and varied locales, and more. We needed a way to organize all this into a well-paced experience.
So from the first day, I wanted to storyboard the game. Not just the cut scenes, not just concept art for key rooms, but the entire game experience in rough sketch form. For a movie, especially animated films, you storyboard the whole movie front to back, and you can even play an animated movie in storyboard form early on before you've started coloring in between the lines. You can't do that with interactive experiences, but all games have linear progressions, be they cut scenes, mechanics ramps, abilities scaling, etc., so experience storyboards can be a very important tool for interactive as well.
Once we had worked out the basic parts list -- which took a lot of juggling to get the mix right -- I worked with an artist, David Reyes, to storyboard the entire game. These storyboards are all up on a wall (we saved our creativity for the game and called this the "Game Wall") and form the road map for Tomb Raider: Underworld. Posted alongside are a few frames for the Mediterranean Sea section we've been talking about most recently.
Some weeks ago we had the pleasure of showing the game to some of our European colleagues -- these weren't executives, but development people like us -- and after a lot of ooohs and ahhhs, one of them asked me, "Wow, how much more is there?" I laughed and told him we weren't halfway through yet, and he was blown away. He wasn't talking about minutes of gameplay, which he had no means of judging by the way we were flying through the game (here in the building, Lara can fly, but before anyone gets too excited by that, it's a cheat we can't ship because unless used correctly it crashes the system). He was talking about the sheer number and variety of amazing moments he'd seen. By the time we reached the final fade out, he told us what we already know, that we truly have something amazing here.
So I'm adding all the Game Wall storyboards to the unlockables list for Tomb Raider: Underworld. It's pretty cool as a glimpse into how we can make an epic experience from beginning to end -- not just putting all the goodness in the first half, like some game developers do -- so I think I'll make players beat the game on the hardest settings to unlock them.
That, or you can wait a week or two after the game ships and find them somewhere on the internet.
Cheers,
Eric
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