The videogame world turned on its ear when Mario 64 released for the Nintendo 64. Never before had a platformer been playable in any other form than a side-scroller, inspiring developers worldwide to realize that games come alive when they’re presented in a full three dimensions.
This fall, Sony and developer Sucker Punch are taking concept of a 3D platformer one step further. Or is it one step back? Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves will feature versions of every level that, when viewed through the age-old red-and-blue glasses, will appear in complete 3D. As our Sly 3 preview implies, the inclusion of 3D in Honor Among Thieves immerses gamers in Sly Cooper’s world in a way the previous two games in the series couldn’t. Flames leap from the screen, metal spins off the monitor, particle effects seem to float in mid-air.
To explain how Sucker Punch achieved this feat, we sat down with the developer’s co-founder, Bruce Oberg, to learn more about bringing Sly, Bentley and Murray into the world of true 3D platforming. In just three answers, he made it all incredibly clear.
How did you come up with the concept to use 3D in Sly 3? Needless to say, not too many games even try to do that today.
Well, we have all the stuff for making 3D, I mean, all the 3D games around you have cameras, so it?s actually just a matter of using two different cameras and moving them for the two different eyes. I?ve been playing around with it, I?m a hobbyist, and I knew some people who had made Viewmaster reels, and we?d actually generated some Viewmaster reels with screenshots from Sly, and it looked really cool. So I was like ?I hope we can do it live,? and we finally go the technology in place just this last spring that let us do it live and in real-time. And when we got the multiplayer working, kind of as an option to that, we got the technology in place to let us do Sly in 3D. It looks really great, you can walk up a hallway and feel how far away things are, and the particle effects are in 3D too.
How many 3D levels are actually going to ship with the game?
You?ll be able to play almost any level in the game in 3D if you want. You?ll be able to replay them all. There are only a couple where we actually make you put on the glasses, but even in that case we?ll let you turn it off, because there are a number of people who don?t have binocular vision, who have trouble with the red/green, and we don?t want those people to be left out of it. It?s a fun thing, if you can do it. It?s really fun to see the 3D effects.
What we use is traditional red/cyan 3D; the buzzword for it is “anaglif.” It?s kind of a process that?s been around a long time. Basically, we?re drawing the image twice, once mostly in red, once mostly in cyan, and by wearing the red and cyan glasses, the two different eye pick up two different images. So you can see, for example, trees in the distance really look like they?re far away, and stuff that?s really close actually looks close. You get a really good sense of depth, scale…. One thing we?re doing is, actually the game is in full color a lot of times, but in anaglif 3D they turn the images black and white. But we?ve found a way to combine the colors so that Sly actually does look blue, the world looks green … it?s not the full, same colors as the rest of the game, but there?s enough that you can really get the separation and still get the notion of a full-color world.
How have you gone about designing levels and environments for a truly 3D world?
The vast majority of stuff we?ve designed has not been for 3D, but the fact that it?s just a 3D environment gives you a lot of freedom. If you?re doing a movie like Spy Kids 3D, you have all these special cameras, and it?s really expensive, but it?s actually not all that hard, because we already have the notion of a virtual camera in the world, so just having to render two of them, one in red and one in cyan, is really great.
Having played the game at E3 and seen the 3D effects in motion, we can say “really great” sums up Sly 3 in general. Thanks to Bruce Oberg for taking the time to chat with DailyGame about his studio’s next platforming masterpiece.
