LucasArts is ready to unleash its long-awaited Star Wars: The Force Unleashed game onto the universe. All images © LucasArts.

Making a next-gen game is a perennial goal for creators of interactive entertainment, even though the bar for what constitutes next-gen keeps rising. But with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (due Sept. 16), LucasArts stakes a claim on that achievement by following a unique strategy: a collaboration of animation and vfx with sister company Industrial Light & Magic.

Ever since George Lucas moved both his game company and ILM into the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio in 2005, the hope has been that technical and creative synergies would emerge. According to members of LucasArts' TFU (The Force Unleashed) team, collaboration with ILM enabled them to attempt game images that went beyond what they had tried before.

"We had access to anything that ILM has done," suggests Art Director Matt Omernick. That included digital models that ILM created for the Star Wars feature film prequels, though Omernick notes, "We didn't need the millions and millions of polygons in some of the things they built, like a giant star destroyer. A lot of times we leveraged what they've done as reference, to make sure that we get everything right. We've shared characters, but we did spend time cleaning them up to make them work for our game engine."

One major challenge was to adapt familiar elements into a game set in the time between the last Star Wars prequel film, The Revenge of the Sith, and the first Star Wars (Episode IV). "There's about an 18-20 year gap between those two," adds Omernick, "so we got to describe how the two trilogies linked together. Being able to bridge that gap was a gift from heaven for our artists." In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, players deal with the exploits of Darth Vader's apprentice, and push the boundaries of Lucas' iconic "Force."

Special attention was paid to capturing the worn look of the spaceships.

Omernick, who previously worked on the LucasArts game Star Wars Battlefront and DreamWorks Interactive's Medal of Honor games, believes that this mileu presented rich possibilities. "It's the time when the Empire is taking over the galaxy. So we get to show that devolution, and we're able to leverage existing planets but at the same time create many new locations and characters."

LucasArts spent two years developing the concept for The Force Unleashed, and during that time the LucasArts/ILM collaboration focused on advancing the technologies that would yield better simulation of sets and environments, including the dinged-up spacecraft that has been a Star Wars trademark since the beginning. "That's what made Star Wars stand out in the seventies," observes Omernick. "When we decided to build this game we decided to lean more heavily towards that classic trilogy for that reason, so we could leverage all the shaders and materials to provide that earthy, gritty realism."

Senior Visual Effects Artist Tim Nice, who was part of the LucasArts/ILM team that developed tools for The Force Unleashed, remarks, "Because the time period of this game had a lot of conflict, there was a direct effort to make sure that things didn't just look pristine or plastic. The specular highlights on the materials were broken up nicely with grit and grime. The artists did a really good job of using the technology to make things look like they belonged in that environment."

According to Lead Engineer Cedrick Collomb, "We tried to provide so many variations of materials to artists that we went to the other extremes -- like 16,000 variables at a time -- and we didn't have enough memory to handle all of those! We had to keep the same look, and at the same time reduce the number of variations on the technology side of things while still providing all those materials.