The Godfather II developers took advantage of Maya and ZBrush this time around. All images © Electronic Arts Inc.

Creating a brand-new property is obviously a challenge in game development. You're basically at the birth of either a legacy or just another franchise that falls into mediocrity, and, whether it goes one way or the other, all the responsibility rests on the developers. Creating a new title where the property has already gained widespread fame is even harder. The reason why is because, as a developer, you are working on a title that fans already expect to be fantastic, so you can't afford to take the project lightly. A good example is The Godfather movies and the Godfather game that came years later.

The first Godfather game was released three years ago on the PS2 and the original Xbox and it turned out to be outstanding, even though not many people expected much from "just another movie game." It was so good, in fact, that Electronic Arts re-released it on PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. About a year ago, EA announced that it would be releasing The Godfather II on current-gen consoles and so, naturally, everyone wanted to know what we could expect to see in this new Godfather game title. VFXWorld had a chance to talk with some of the developers that put The Godfather II together over at EA Redwood Shores. Erik Holden, the technical art director, and Joel Wade, the senior producer, provide some under the hood insight.

Holden says, "The vast majority of the work was done with Maya, Photoshop, ZBrush and Crazy Bump. For the world, we used Maya to create all the terrain, buildings, objects, etc. These components were assembled and organized with Neo, a world-building tool developed in-house that connects to Maya and serves as the hub for most of our authoring, scripting, tuning and organizational work. Most textures either came from photo reference, ZBrush or were painted in Photoshop." This answer is surprising; 3ds Max used to be the industry standard for 3D modeling in videogame development, but now it seems like devs are leaning more toward using Maya instead. Game devs have also been taking advantage of ZBrush in game development. Character modeling was done using a combination of Maya and ZBrush.

The dev team made use of tools that connect directly to consoles, live-tune data and deferred rendering.

Holden continues, "A key aspect of our development effort has been to make tools which can connect directly to the PS3 or Xbox 360 and live-tune data. Live-tuning is absolutely critical for fast iteration. Fast iteration enables and encourages experimentation and eventually a quality result. For example, we can edit textures in Photoshop, save them and, with our material editing tool, live-update the shaders and see the result instantly in the game. We can also live-tune lighting and visual effects." This is a technique that was also used in the development of Killzone 2.

Holden says another key technique used in the development of GF2 was the use of deferred rendering as opposed to forward rendering. "The deferred renderer was also a fantastic addition to our toolset. The key strength of this system is that the lighting is extremely flexible and artist-friendly. Though you pay a high price of entry for deferred rendering, the freedom and flexibility the artists have to create interesting and dynamic lighting is unparalleled in our experience. One light, 10 lights, 100 lights? All moving, spawned from a particle system? No problem! The lighters had a great time on this project, and could make changes very quickly. I think deferred rendering is still a technique that is relatively uncommon, and people might be surprised that we have it in GF2."

Animations were created with a combination of MoCap and keyframe, using a technique also utilized in Prince of Persia and Resident Evil 5.

Using deferred rendering will put an extremely heavy load on your system memory, which is not a big deal if you have exorbitant amounts of RAM but will even so completely hog your memory.

GF2 took advantage of a combination of MoCap and keyframe animation. "MoCap is fantastic," Holden continues, "but usually requires heavy modifications and love from the animation team -- especially if it's a commonly used mechanic like locomotion or hand-to-hand fighting. We have a proprietary tool which handles the creation and tuning of the complex animation states." Facial animation was also created via in-house tools. "We have some in-house tools that can take the first pass at converting audio files into facial animation for character conversations. This significantly reduces the amount of time animators need to spend animating the thousands and thousands of lines of NPC conversations." This is a common animation technique also found in such games as Prince of Persia and Resident Evil 5.