[MUSIC PLAYING]
LIZ BALLANTYNE: At Gameloft Brisbane, the culture
is everything for our studio.
We've got a really relaxed team and a great group
of like-minded, super talented developers.
ROWAN RYDER: Gameloft made Oregon Trail games before.
Specifically, the Brisbane studio hasn't,
so this was our first experience with The Oregon Trail.
LIZ BALLANTYNE: How we captured the heart
and soul of the original Oregon Trail was really, just at the start,
going back and playing it and breaking
the game down screen by screen.
We took that and then dove into researching
what those actual locations were on the trail.
Really just understanding where the original developers--
what they were trying to get at.
ROWAN RYDER: Trying to keep as much real history in the game as we could
was really key.
So we really wanted to base everything in reality.
And it kind of naturally lines up because the original
did the same thing.
It was just simpler.
We basically tried to look at it as if we were making it
for the first time, following the same guidelines as the 1985 version.
LIZ BALLANTYNE: We noticed, in the original,
there wasn't a lot of Native American representation.
It's funny.
The original developer, in a Reddit, he actually called it out as well
and said that if there was one thing that he could add back into it,
it would be to tell more of those stories.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ROWAN RYDER: In early development, we broke out
four key pillars, which were authenticity, nostalgia,
replayability, and player choice.
We took those four elements and sort of based all of our decisions
around those and made sure that if we were including a mechanic
or making a design decision, it matched to one or more
of those pillars and didn't damage or go against any of them.
HANNAH CROSBY: We wanted to keep this very based in reality
and make it very convincing.
So I would look up what types of foliage
turned up in certain areas of the environment.
And I would go on Google Maps trips to make sure
that I was following the terrain very accurately.
LIZ BALLANTYNE: We're reading these traveler's journals,
and they would describe these massive landscapes
where you've got these huge prairies that just go for days.
And then when we added the sky system and the little bumblebees and things
like that, it really just brought it all to life.
HANNAH CROSBY: The 3D environments, while we
wanted to make them really beautiful and lush,
didn't look too realistic compared to the 2D characters
that we had moving around the environment.
So we chose a very flat graphical style
for the texturing to keep the background in the background
and let the characters kind of shine.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
LIZ BALLANTYNE: So when Unreal first came into Gameloft Australia,
it was just such a smooth process.
Quite quickly and easily, the team were
able to pick it up and get started.
And I think what's really amazing is that global community for Unreal.
There's just so many resources that the team could pull from and learn.
HANNAH CROSBY: Being able to work in engine like I could with Unreal
was really important.
And also, all of the natural environment
landscaping tools that Unreal has really
sped up the process because we had a very small op
team for creating the environments.
So speed was everything.
And Unreal's foliage tools, all of their mesh painting tools,
were really important for creating a very fast pipeline for creating
a lot of content quickly.
BRUNO GOHIER: Working with Blueprints makes everything much faster.
Development and iteration process, iteration time
between what you want to create and what you see, is much quicker.
So to create visuals, to create materials, to create post processes,
anything that needs a lot of iteration is much easier to do
through Blueprints than, let's say, in C++ or other languages.
ROWAN RYDER: Blueprints gave us the flexibility
to just create content very quickly and then iterate upon it
very quickly as well.
We have, I think, just shy of 400 events in The Oregon Trail.
We wouldn't have had even half that with any kind of lesser system.
LIZ BALLANTYNE: When we started using Unreal,
it just made such a huge difference for our team.
It just meant that they could finally be hands-on.
I'm not going to name names with the other engines,
but this one really just allowed the artist
to jump in and create without boundaries.