STUDIO RECORDING

Sourcing assets from studios of different sizes brought up many nuanced challenges: you might think, for instance, that an eager indie dev might be far easier to work with than a secretive development giant such as Nintendo. But the opposite was also true. “Some of these larger studios do sometimes do a little bit of a better job of archiving or accessing their work, because of the nature of the infrastructure,” Marie Foulston says. “Equally, you’ve got a solo developer and they’re like, ‘Look, I’m a one-woman band, so it’s going to take a bit of time for me to get back to you about this’.” But the team note that there were plenty of similarities between studios, fundamental principles that appeared to unite all the work from indie up to triple-A: “Spreadsheets, and Post-It notes!” Kristian Volsing laughs. Playtesting was another constant, with Tale Of Tales designer Auera Harvey sketching her testers in pen by way of notes, while Naughty Dog’s facilities have banks of computers analysing player facial expressions. “But it’s fundamental – this is the exact same practice, just done in very different ways. I love that distinction,” Foulston says.