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http://ps2.ign.com/articles/738/738618p1.html Q and A and new pics

Building a Better Bully
Rockstar tells us just how much work went into its last big PS2 game.
by Jeremy Dunham
October 12, 2006 - As Bully's release inches closer and closer (it comes out next week), it's as good a time as any to sit down with the creative team responsible for Rockstar's latest giant to see how it all came about. In this internal Q&A, Rockstar Vancouver Producer Steve Martin, Lead Mission Designer Sergei Kuprejanov, and Lead Gameplay Designer Mike Skupa reveal their secrets on everything from Bully's outside influences to its art style. Here's what the guys had to say...

Trailer (youtube)- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLrekzUB7hE

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What kind of research and conceptual work did you do to nail the look?

Steve Martin: The appearance of the world was based heavily on the fantastic concept art created by Steven Olds

Mike Skupa: His stuff was incredible. As a designer, it was great to be able to work with such great visuals, especially during the initial design stage. I could really see the game coming to life inside my head before we even had anything on a computer.

Sergei Kuprejanov: Considering the amount of gameplay content in Bully, the detail of the art filling the world did not suffer as you might expect. The artists did a great job of translating Steven's concepts into the final product.

Martin: Producing images that conveyed the New England environment with the timeless feel we desired was essential to guide the development team during production.

How did Steven Olds' conceptual artwork influence the final level and character design of the game?

Martin: His work allowed us to inject so much character and vibe into the game as well as push the visual theme to new heights. As for the character design, the concept work really pushed a "kids-eye" view of the world without making everything look cartoon-like.

Skupa: It completely set the tone of the game. The concept art was amazingly detailed and covered all aspects of content production. It invokes a lot of character and attitude that carries throughout all aspects of Bully.

Kuprejanov: I agree. It was very easy to set the tone for the missions based on the look and feel of the environment and the characters. A lot of the humor in Bully was inspired by the look of the characters.

Martin: Exactly. Using the concepts for, say, Algie was awesome. You've got this kid whose pants don't fit properly and kind of waddles around. It totally inspired us to make a mission where you have to escort him around the school. Add to that his weak bladder and you get some seriously funny s**t. No way can you add great touches and nuances to the gameplay if you don't have great character visuals to inspire you.

Kuprejanov: A lot of the time, if a mission didn't feel right, we would look at the character involved in the mission and ask ourselves, "What would this person do in this situation?" Many ideas came from this kind of back-and-forth organic way of thinking.

Skupa: Bully started with the initial concept art and design, then evolved into what it is now. It's changed a lot, but it's maintained its original identity. You have to allow the game you are working on to evolve. You can't hope to create an amazing interactive experience from a paper design. You have to try everything until it feels right and it works, without sacrificing your original goal. That's probably one of the hardest things to do.

Martin: This clarity of artistic vision made everything involved in making the game easier as the soul of the environment was strongly established.

Bully is a game that is seriously pushing the boundaries of the current generation. What were the crowning development techniques that you honed to enable you to create the depth of field and beauty of the environments?

Martin: Our greatest feat was the extent to which we pushed our streaming technology. We were working with current-gen technology, but we used a next gen approach.

Skupa: Getting all of the content in there was quite a marvel. The team was constantly coming up with clever ways to push the boundaries of the system.

Kuprejanov: You want to make your games look as good as possible without sacrificing gameplay. We wanted to really push the limits of the PS2 and the end result is tons of gameplay and a great looking world.

Martin: And the player is the one to benefit from all of this. That's the ultimate goal. The rewards are there for all to see.

Skupa: Once the foundation was laid down, we just kept finding ways of putting more and more content into the game. It was a pretty crazy juggling act, and we kept doing this until the absolute last minute.

It has been reported that thousands of lines of VO were recorded for Bully. Why did you feel it necessary to record so much dialogue? How many lines were actually recorded in total?

Martin: We recorded approximately 37,000 individual lines of dialogue for Bully.

Skupa: We pretty much had to. In order to create a realistic experience each character had to have its own voice, personality, and place in the world. The world of Bully is heavily based on unique personalities and believable social interactions, and in order to make it all believable, this was a major focus from the beginning. The speech actually made developing Bully much more enjoyable, since you encounter such a wide variety of humorous banter throughout the game.

Kuprejanov: We wanted every encounter to feel unique. Even if the player runs into the same character five minutes later, we wanted the conversation to be different.

Martin: As the player progresses through the story, the environment and the attitude of everyone in the world changes around him. We had to support this. This requires a lot of unique situation dialogue.

Skupa: The level of contextual speech in Bully is something that the player has never experienced before, it is going to pull the player inside the character of Jimmy Hopkins and deliver a level of personal experience unlike anything else out there.

The level of societal interaction ranges from the player-controlled social interaction system to the intricate level of AI both between Jimmy and other characters (and characters interacting with each other). Where did this direction come from and how did you go about developing the structure of the game to encapsulate it so well?

Kuprejanov: The level of physical and social interaction that exists in Bully came from the simple fact that we were never satisfied with what we had until the very end. We would change something, add something else, play it for a while, and everyone would agree that we needed more. Not to try to be a realism simulator, but to make every minute of Bully feel unique. There is a lot of content and gameplay in Bully and we didn't want it to ever get stale. It could never feel boring or dull. We worked very hard on this. I think we accomplished it.

Skupa: In terms of the social interaction, having access to film-like resources encouraged us to take the social interaction to another level -- it had to be part of the gameplay experience. We spent a lot of time reworking the social system to be as seamless as possible with the rest of the action based gameplay.

Martin: We never wanted it to feel like a chore to interact with someone and the interaction between the AI was very important to us. You'll turn a corner and see students playing catch, talking about their day, playing pranks on each other or running to their next class. This stuff is happening all over the place in Bully. Nothing in the game is set up and waiting for the player to get close before it triggers. It's happening whether you're there or not.

Kuprejanov: There is so much to do in Bully that it's important for the AI to be able to do everything the player can do. This interaction between multiple AI characters, and AI interacting with the surrounding environment also serves as a dynamic learning tool for the player. Steve mentioned the AI playing catch. Well, the player can pick up a Frisbee, target an AI friend and play catch with them. Awesome!

Martin: Like the first time the AI throws a snowball at you. You'll be like, "Hey. I can throw snowballs?" Yes, you can.

Skupa: Our concept was always to create an independent and dynamic world that Jimmy lives in. The "living, breathing world" is an overused tag in open world games, but with Bully, the user will truly see highly complex interactions happening on the fly. The vibe of having the world remain constantly dynamic and alive is essential to portraying the world of a teenager at school.

Bully sees 100+ characters in the game. Tell us about the experience of working on this scale.

Skupa: It was a totally new experience. The variety and detail of characters gave us a lot to play with. As you play through the game, you end up feeling for these characters. You watch them grow alongside Jimmy.

Martin: It also helps keep the game fresh. Every new area that the player discovers in Bully is unique and so are the characters that the player encounters in those areas. Having so many characters also allows for tons of varying gameplay.

Kuprejanov: Definitely. It never gets stale because you're always dealing with new situations in new areas with new characters.

Martin: And having so many different characters allowed us to make each area and relationship feel very memorable and unique.

As well as the social interaction, Bully sees a supreme level of environmental interaction. How did you go about designing this facet of the game?

Martin: Anything that looks usable should be usable. It should be an industry rule. I hate it when you see something in a game and think, "Oh cool, I want to use that thing." But you can't.

Kuprejanov: It also adds to being a kid in school; the curiosity, the mischief and the rewards of exploration. We want the player to be able to screw around in the world for hours and hours constantly discovering new things to do.

Martin: Most players will explore. If there is nothing to do, they'll lose interest. Our goal was to make sure the player always had something to do off the main storyline, and was always discovering new things about the world.

Kuprejanov: It's a different way of thinking. Most games today have you go from point A to point B. In Bully, you can go from point A to point B by traveling through any combination of point C to Z.

Martin: But, you don't have to.

Skupa: That's what's so great about it. And since we are trying to capture a period in life that most people have gone through, we had to nail user expectations. These interactions not only offer a lot of exciting gameplay options to the player, it's also amazing to see the other characters in the world interacting in the same fashion.

Martin: So many times I'd play Bully to see or test a particular thing and an hour later I'd realize that I had gotten completely sidetracked by all the stuff in the game.

Bully is set in a deliberately non-specific era; we see 1950's greasers, late 1800's architecture and the jeans, and the sneakers and skateboards of today sitting side-by-side to provide a completely unique and timeless environment. How did you finesse this melding of different periods?

Martin: Bully does a great job of making anyone that plays the game feel like they were back in high school, whether it's the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s.

Kuprejanov: It's all about the 80s for me. Man, I'm old. We have some younger guys in the studio that relate to the high school experience in Bully and they graduated high school six or seven years ago.

Skupa: It couldn't have happened without the core vision and all of the concept art that was created. This timeless element was such an important part of the tone that we repeatedly tweaked all of the various components until it was fully realized.

Kuprejanov: The cars that drive around Bullworth are not ultra-modern, nor are they antique. We wanted Bully to exist in a modern setting while incorporating cool elements from different eras.

Martin: And not having anything too technologically specific was important. There are some old looking computers in the library that could be from the 70s or 80s. Jimmy doesn't have a PDA or MP3 player. It doesn't mean there aren't any in the rest of the world, he just doesn't use them.

Kuprejanov: I think they may have been banned by the mayor of Bullworth Town, because of the incident with him, an MP3 player and a goat.

Martin: What are you talking about?

Shawn Lee's score is interactive and informative. It reinforces the gameplay with varying cues for different missions, cliques and characters and the intensity of the sound varies depending on the level of action. How much planning was required before composition was done to ensure you had everything you required?

Kuprejanov: I love the music in Bully.

Skupa: The game really came alive once the music went in.

Martin: Oh yeah. Sean did an outstanding job of getting his head inside Bully and really understanding the world we were creating.

Kuprejanov: The music really plays on the emotion of what is happening in the game. You always know what is going on by the tempo and the theme of the music.

Skupa: If a group of trouble makers are coming after Jimmy, the music picks up. You really get the sense of what is going on in the world around you just by the music.

Martin: The initial planning work revolved around designing the flavors and emotions that we needed to convey to the player. As the gameplay evolved, this was refined and tweaked.

You had an outstanding script to work with in terms of the depth of the narrative, the humor etc. How did you go about designing the game around this?

Skupa: The two were developed quite closely together. The narrative is such an important part of Bully that it had to be fostered throughout the entire gameplay experience. We made sure to push each other really hard throughout development to ensure such a high level of consistency.

Martin: The great script gave the characters so much personality that the gameplay really thrives because of it. The humor and character given to us through the fantastic writing helped drive mission design and AI behaviors.

Kuprejanov: We could have the same gameplay, but if the characters and story were generic, it would be a completely different game than it is now.

Martin: As the script evolved, we refined the gameplay. Equally, the enhancements and refinement of gameplay fed back into the script process and helped direct elements there as well.

Skupa: It was a very organic process.

How important was the motion capture process in the development of Bully?

Skupa: The motion capture process was extremely important to get the realistic look and feel that we wanted. The quality of acting and direction brings the experience to a level not found in other games.

Martin: Thanks to the fine acting of the mo-cap performers we worked with, we were able to inject many subtle character nuances that really helped Bully push the boundaries of game narrative.

Kuprejanov: It was very important to give each character their own personality, not just in what they said, but in how they moved and what they did. The mo-cap allowed us to do this. In order for people to really get into the story and into the game, the characters needed to be believable. All the elements that we've talked about here: the voice acting, the great story, the behavior of the AI, even when the player isn't around, the uniqueness of people in Bully, the subtleties of movement that the mo-cap allowed us to have, it all adds to the amazing experience.

Martin: You can see throughout the game experience that often the non-dialogue background gives as much flavor to our story as the incredible script and voice acting does.

Martin: For the gameplay, the sheer scope of it seemed intimidating at first, but our animation tools allowed us to manage it all quite effectively. It was a great experience to see animators, programmers, and designers working so closely together to achieve the end result.

Bully appears to have taken and adapted some of the hottest features from released Rockstar titles, most notably the Warriors and Manhunt combat systems and the Grand Theft Auto series "open world." Did you work with the other studios in the Rockstar network?

Martin: We are fortunate enough to have a few dev team members at Vancouver who came from other Rockstar studios. Sergei worked in Toronto and we have a few others from Rockstar North. With the combination of their experience and the talent of the group in Vancouver, we were able to create something new and fresh and incredible in Bully.

Kuprejanov: It has been awesome working with the guys in Vancouver. They are a very talented group.

Skupa: In addition to the technology sharing, multiple Rockstar studios have been involved in the development of Bully. We had input from pretty much every studio, and it was great to have the guys from other Rockstar projects working at the Vancouver studio. It made an enormous difference.

Martin: All the Rockstar dev teams do communicate with one another. We are a passionate and close-knit family with expert leadership, and it's this passion and leadership that ensures that all the Rockstar titles are of the highest quality and that they all share the Rockstar vibe.

Skupa: Put all that together and the end result is a great interactive gaming experience.

Martin: Here, here.