A brief history of the GO series and how the development of Hitman GO and Lara Croft GO went the other day, Venture Beat was told by one of the authors of the games.
Game development within the walls of the Montreal office of the Japanese Square Enix is most like working in an indie team. At least, this was hinted at in an interview with Venture Beat by the leading programmer of the division Anton Routon (Antoine Routon). According to him, the series of Go games, which now includes two titles – Hitman GO and Lara Croft GO, began with two people (now 10 people are engaged in development in it). That’s how many employees remained in the studio after Square Enix decided that it didn’t have a single Western team dealing with mobile games. The rest of the employees simply left the office when they knew that they would not make console games, but projects “for mobile phones”.
As a result, the management asked the game director and programmer to pitch ideas. This is what they did for a month, until they came to the concept of a turn-based game in the Hitman universe. It’s funny, but despite the fact that they managed to “sell” the idea to the authorities, initially there was no specific vision. The project went through many iterations and ideas in the first months. But from the very beginning there was an understanding that the next project, like the whole franchise, should be elegant, strict. Routen compared it to classic Bond films, in which things are made of beautiful expensive materials, and the handles of revolvers are made of real wood, processed manually.
Through this understanding, they came to the project as an elegant and expensive board game.
Hitman GO
It is curious that the idea to make a similar game about Lara Croft arose at the stage of the Hitman GO concept.
But with the transfer of mechanics to the new setting, there were many problems that the team did not initially see.
The fact is that the developers did not want to do a reskin in the world of Tomb Raider, which is exactly what happened in the early stages of the development of Lara Croft GO. The authors saw their task, as in the case of Hitman GO, to give players the emotions and sensations that they experience, remembering how they played the original console projects. To make, in the words of Rowton, a symbolic representation of the title.
So they got rid of human characters in the game, murders, the style of the board game, the ability to rotate the camera, but added bosses, animation, low-poly, reminiscent of what the graphics were in the first games of the original series..
Lara Croft GO
The question that is not disclosed in the interview itself is only how warmly the new project is perceived by Tomb Raider fans.
At the moment, the critical rating of the game on Metacritic is 84 points out of 100, but the user did not even get to six points out of ten.
A source: http://venturebeat.com