THE MAKING OF Daxter
SIDEKICKS RESCUING THE MAIN CHARACTER OF A SERIES IN STANDALONE GAMES IS FAIRLY COMMON. IN DAXTER’S CASE, IT TOOK HIM TWO YEARS TO FREE HIS FRIEND JAK. VETERANS OF READY AT DAWN STUDIOS EXPLAIN HOW DAXTER’S QUEST BECAME ONE OF THE PSP’S MOST AMBITIOUS PLA
The Jak And Daxter series embodies one of the most popular Playstation 2 IP, telling in an imaginative way through action and platforming, the story of two alien characters. Jak, mute at his beginnings, is a humanoid with pointy ears, while his motormouth friend and sidekick Daxter has become an Ottsel – a fusion of an otter and a weasel – and isn’t too happy about it.
Following the videogame industry trend and the success of Grand Theft Auto III, Naughty Dog’s sequel added open-world features to its level design and featured a much darker, dystopian plot. Daxter was chosen as the main character of the eponymous videogame that takes place in between these first two games. Jak has been made prisoner in Haven City and Daxter promises to set him free. Two years later, Jak is still a prisoner when the Ottsel is given a job in a disinfestation company. The latter’s boss could not find anyone up to the task of getting rid of the metal bugs that are running around Haven City.
Considering Jak X, the latest instalment in the series, had relatively low sales in 2005 and the progressive general disinterest for cute characters in the videogame industry, it seemed quite bold to release a spin-off in 2006 on Sony’s portable console. Michael John, who joined the project as a freelance lead designer, disagrees, telling us, “I was involved in the Universal Interactive days with Spyro and Crash Bandicoot, years before, and the exact same questions were asked. Why make colourful and playful games when everything is about shooting, about being dark and scary? But there is always a market for things that are joyful, childish to some extent, and appealing way beyond childhood for a lot of people. There are periods in the videogame industry where this genre is less popular among developers, but our choice was wise for the PSP especially. Daxter was really well adapted to this hardware.”
Daxter is the first project of Ready At
Dawn Studios, a California-based company founded in January 2004 by former Naughty Dog developer Didier Malenfant and former Blizzard Entertainment members Andrea Pessino and Ru Weerasuriya. Counting around
20 developers by then, one can only wonder whether a garage mindset was preserved in the process, even though experienced developers worked on Daxter. “When I joined the team, there were already two other programmers, not including Didier, a tools programmer and Andrea, who worked on the engine,” recalls Rachid El Guerrab, Daxter’s lead programmer. “The rest of my teammates were artists.
There was a sense of working on something to really push quality. The Playstation Portable came after the Game Boys, and was presented as a device that could offer games as big as home-console games. It was a very specialised high-quality team working on a portable game, counting very disciplined experienced veterans, who knew what they were doing.” Michael agrees with Rachid’s assessment adding, “Ready At Dawn 1.0 gathered very experienced people but as a startup, there was necessarily a garage vibe, we were frankly on the brink. If something couldn’t get fixed, for example, the whole project wouldn’t survive, nor the studio. It was scrappy. The team identified with Daxter’s personality, in a way, Daxter being always portrayed as an underdog. And it worked!” Also, according to Rachid, the team crunched a lot. “There was a late-night shift and an early morning shift. After my child was born I was part of the early morning shift and we were always joking, meeting the late-night shift at 4am, about Ready At Dawn being the company that never sleeps.”
Daxter’s gameplay relies on classic platformer mechanics but also on the use of a close combat electric bug swatter and a spray gun that can be upgraded with additional fluids. “A lot of this was well underway by the time I joined the project,” Michael remembers, “and it just wasn’t right yet. The swatter uses a combo mechanic that wasn’t already implemented, there was just a spinning attack. This new combo feature we added is admittedly influenced by the early God Of War games. On the other hand, the spray gun game mechanic just needed to be fine-tuned – its range and duration, for instance.”
Character control is another essential aspect to consider when developing a platformer, and special care was taken by the team to get things just right. “On the last day of E3, Shigeru Miyamoto was going around to check out teams,” Rachid says. “People were preselecting games for him to check out, and we saw a group of people coming to our booth, bringing him in without further notice. He picked up the console. We completely froze at that moment, and the five minutes he played our game felt like an eternity. Watching him controlling Daxter, a character close to the type of work he does, games where controls are essential, was a proud moment, because I worked on those controls. It was the first big character I worked on the actual controls, trying to make them feel as smooth and fluid as the work that was made on the Jak And Daxter series.”
Michael’s previous works include Spyro
The Dragon, which had a lot of influence on Daxter’s development. “The bulk of the work that I did for Spyro was level design, because there was so much level design to be done, and that ended up being a lot of the work
I did on Daxter as well. Outside of Super
Mario 64, there wasn’t any reference point when I worked on Spyro, so I was discovering many principles then.” Fortunately, work on Daxter wasn’t as challenging. “These ideas had matured when I started working on Daxter: how to create elements to surprise the player, how to arouse his or her curiosity or generate some interest, excitement and mystery,” says Michael. “The level design evolution matured a lot from the first Spyro game to the third one, according to me, and became much more interesting. Looking at what happened then could be brought forward to Daxter, with the way the levels were structured, the creation of alternate paths and of things only opening up when you follow a specific route. Also, Daxter hovers, and it’s not unlike Spyro’s glide.”
Daxter visits many varied environments on his quest, such as a hotel, a distillery, a valley, a fish cannery, all of which are reachable through a main, small open-world-like hub set in Haven City. These environments are undoubtedly among the most graphically impressive games the PSP can offer, especially only two years into the console’s release. Ready At Dawn’s first game was really showcasing the power of the PSP’S hardware in terms of technical achievements, which impressed a lot of people. “Many people came to our E3 booth to enjoy Daxter,” Rachid says. “When the game launches and displays the menu on the screen, Daxter moves around the menu, showing real-time fur. It was a lot of work to perform this really well, and someone at E3 could not believe it, insisting on telling me it was a video. Even after telling him I was sure because I worked on the game, he wouldn’t admit it.
That proved to us we achieved some great work. Daxter became an example and received many awards for design, sound, and graphics.”
These successes weren’t coming without a few challenges, with the team having to overcome various problems. According to Michael, “There were very slow and inconsistent loads from the UMD, so every time you had to stream content, which was necessary considering PSP’S low memory, things got really dicey. The development kit didn’t have that problem because it came with a hard drive.” The Playstation Portable was also new hardware and the game engine had to be made from scratch. Rachid confirms that, “On top of this, the team didn’t want to develop the game the way Sony recommended it, because we knew it wouldn’t be enough to fulfil our expectations. Also, the first six months we worked on emulators and tried things out, we didn’t even have the console. There were no existing methods on how to create certain things. Besides, the cinematics had to be rendered from the engine, in a traditional Naughty Dog way, meaning that we had to implement many technical elements in the graphic engine to achieve this.”
Daxter’s game design also requires a few
QTE skills from time to time, typically during
Daxter’s Dream Mode feature, an original idea that can be attributed to Jérôme de Menou, Ready At Dawn’s in-game animator, according to Michael. Collecting enough Precursor Orbs unlocks dreams the Ottsel can have while sleeping on his bed, reproducing famous scenes from Hollywood blockbusters starring himself, such as The Matrix, The Lord Of The Rings and Braveheart. It’s a nice addition that adds additional charm to an already charming game.
According to Vgchartz, Daxter went on to ship 2.3 million units worldwide and received good to excellent reviews, with scores ranging from 7 in Edge and gamestm to 8.6 in Game Informer and 9 in Gamesradar+. Despite a few flaws, such as sometimes inconvenient camera controls, due to the PSP’S lack of a second stick, Daxter managed to seduce many players thanks to ambitious technical achievements and its very enjoyable gameplay. “Daxter was the first game that I was really very proud of,“says Rachid, “and it showed me how to behave later on in life. It showed me that by targeting high quality and setting the challenge level very high you could achieve very good things. Also, at the time, gaining respect from other developers was the most important.”
When did you know that you wanted to make music for games, and what was it like to jump in at such a young age?
I had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer at age 11, and I started making music on it. I was learning basic programming, making the joystick play different arpeggios on the 8 axes and, at the same time, I was gaming. I used to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and do an hour before my parents were up, and that’s where my love for gaming came from. And then it was the arcade. When Out Run came out, I was 13, and I distinctly remember the music, because the quality was a massive jump. Out Run had a sophisticated sound chip and the compositions by Hiro [Hiroshi Kawaguchi] were great. That was the first time I thought, “Wow, game music is really cool.”
What happened next?
I went to university, and in those days we were given a small grant to help with buying food and stuff, and the first week I went and bought a Mega Drive. I was playing trombone, piano, percussion and I was studying composition and music technology as well. I was also working in a record store and reading this industry trade paper called Music Week, and in my final year I saw an advert for an in-house composer with Sega Europe in London.
I never thought that this job existed outside of Japan, because in those days the majority of software was coming out of Japan, and it was all cartridge-based. I was amazed that a job like this could exist, so I thought, well, I am still studying, but I am going to apply.
What did you do?
I sent my résumé and a demo cassette. Something for a driving game, something for a fighting game, an RPG, a platformer, based around Sega’s core IPS really, and some electronic music I’d been working on. This was April 1994, they called me back and wanted to hear some more music, so I sent more. One was a large composition for a brass ensemble, 24 players, and it was recorded live in the concert hall at my college. Three days later I got a call that I’d got the job. I was over the moon. I remember jumping up and down on the sofa. But literally, we had my final exam results on a Friday. Saturday I moved to London. Monday I started at Sega.
Do you still have that first recording that you sent Sega?
[Laughing] Yes, I do. And no you can’t hear them. [Richard leaves the room and comes back with a cassette tape. The spine shows hand-written letters.]
Oh, wow! It really says ‘Sega Demos’. [Laughing] Yeah, eight tracks. No one’s ever gonna hear it.
You said at age 13, Out Run was the first time game music really sparked something for you.
Definitely.
We’re jumping ahead, but in 2005 or so, you did the remixes for Outrun 2! That’s an amazing circle!
I knew that Sumo Digital were developing it, and I forget whose idea it was, possibly the producer at Sega Europe, Kats Sato, they came up with this idea of having ‘Euro’ remixes, but they’re not Euro-style, they’re more Brazilian samba and salsa. I think they just wanted to give it a badge of its own, that these were created by Sega Europe. But when they said I could remix them, I thought, this is just amazing. Out Run’s music is timeless, and credit to Hiro, the original composer. He
Richard Jacques is a composer of film, television and videogame soundtracks whose career in the games industry began when he was recruited by Sega Europe while still at university. Within days of graduating, he became the company’s in-house composer, and months later he was making music for Sega’s flagship franchise, Sonic The Hedgehog. In 1997 he created one of the series’ most enduring soundtracks with his work on Sonic R. In addition to being the first composer to record a videogame soundtrack at the famed Abbey Road Studios, Richard has worked on such musically exceptional games as Jet Set Radio, Metropolis Street Racer, Mass Effect, Littlebigplanet and Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy.
I was amazed that a job like this could exist, so I thought, well, I am still studying, but I am going to apply
Richard Jacques