EGO Trip
Codemasters CTO Bryan Marshall lifts the hood on his engine and talks next-gen tech
No, we're very much growing here and working with our partners in India. It's a good relationship at the moment, I think we'll see the fruits of that as we go forward.
I'll jump in here too. It's a mutually beneficial relationship. Reliance's skills are very much in the mobile market, they've got a huge footprint there. For example, collaboratively, we've delivered some of our cricket assets to them for them to create their Ashes cricket game which they released on iPhone and other mobile devices last winter.
All sorts of conversations occur all the time!
All on track! Stuart chose to move on at a perfectly acceptable time - he was creative director there, alongside Andy Wilson, who is game director. That creative director role paints the broad vision, the big brush strokes. The heart of the game which the entire team, which is largely unchanged, built the rest of the experience on.
It earned its tag, not that we promoted it as such, as a sort of spiritual successor to Black, but that wasn't just about one person, that was about how many of our Guildford team who'd worked on that project.
The creation of new IP is long and not entirely plottable.
We've just been out presenting it all around the EMEA territories as part of our relationship with Namco - they're our distributors outside the UK and US. It's all primed for a more media showing at E3.
It's felt like a long process, the creation of new IP is long and not entirely plottable. We've been very open from the start about what the vision is - we were literally doing media as the very first testbeds were coming together. Much earlier than we normally do, just to show the creation of this game.
So if it feels like it's been around much longer than some of our other games, then it's just because we've had a very open door policy from the outset.
I would say that the main thing for creativity on the technical side is, if you want to transpose that onto the technical side, is that you provide the creative people with the right tools.
That's something we're trying very hard with recently. You can see, with our front end on DiRT 3, what happens if you let front end artists and graphical artists loose with some really great tools - they come up with something really creative.
I guess the bigger unknown is what tool is there that we don't have that allows even greater creativity? It comes down to the tools, empowering our artists, audio guys, the game designers themselves, to innovate. That's the challenge. To get that right is tough.