The latest issue of IdN magazine features an interview with motion graphics studio Logan’s Alexei Tylevich on his collaboration with Hideo Kojima to create the ten tv-spot-style intros for Metal Gear Solid 4, revealing a fair assessment of game development through the eyes of a design studio.
While what we’re doing is very segmented – the final look comes in the final moments, and you get impatient – in building a videogame, it’s more of a gradual thing. In games, you’re layering it consistently; so by the time you’ve got your engine running really well, even for the person who’s working on low-level stuff, everything looks great.
And on this side, we’re still trapped in this universe that requires such things as massive rendering times, which makes it impossible for us. The better it looks, the heavier it is; for us to change the movement of this character, we have to backtrack and change all these other elements. Whereas on the game, they could look at something on the screen – a door handle, say – and change that doorknob to make it look beautiful. For us, it gets heavier the better it looks. There was a moment I was watching what they were doing and I thought, “I want to do videogames!” Because they’re building this thing – and once it’s in working form, they’re working in real time on beautiful stuff, all within the engine.
