“I normally don’t give guns to little girls, know what I’m saying, I usually give something else, but you know hey, don’t tell anyone I said that…”

This, the final talk I’ll post from GDC’08, centred on the development of the first company-wide technology platform (or engine) for Square Enix. Despite the heavy tech-focus, this was the largest lineup I attended at the conference due to the chance of gleaning any information from these Japanese RPG masters.

Square Enix: The Technology of FINAL FANTASY

Taku Murata – General Manager, Technical Research Division

Traditionally, a new platform was created for each title, with the game first made in Japanese and translations following much later. This looks set to change with the latest upcoming releases which will be very exciting to many western fans, and the target platforms (for the engine) are PS3, PC and XBOX360.

Murata’s history reads like something of a chronology of technological breakthroughs in Japanese game development, with much of his work driven by animation – in particular facial animation. Of interest most of all was the admission that several of the driving forces for this new engine centred on displaying characters’ faces to a very high fidelity in close-up.

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