The backbone of every video game is the development cycle. Being able to effectively manage the limited amount or resources given to a development team can make or break a game. Lack of either time or money in a development cycle can cause games with even great ideas to take a nose dive on the sales chart. Rockstar obviously didn’t want that to happen to their latest installment to the western genre, Red Dead Redemption.
According to Lazlow Jones, one of the developers for Rock Star’s San Diego studio, Red Dead Redemption has about five years of work put into it. Lazlow Jones, more commonly know as the radio DJ host Lazlow in Grand Theft Auto games, recently sat down with BBC News to talk about Red Dead Redemption. Here is what he had to say.
It is more work than I can actually describe. The studios work very hard for many years on the code and the graphics. On RDR they’ve done about five years’ work. It takes a long time to make a video game from the first idea to inception, to design the motion capture, to writing all the scripts. Each of our open world games has up to 1000 characters walking around and you need to make personalities, names and pages of dialogue for all those people.
Lazlow Jones works as a producer and a writer for different Rockstar games. He also still has his own radio show on XM radio, and has even written some articles for playboy magazine. He is obviously a man of many talents. Rockstar San Diego’s previous game, Red Dead Revolver, was released in early 2004 for North America and Europe and early 2005 for Japan. Development on Red Dead Revolver started in 2002, so Rockstar San Diego has had nearly eight straight years of designing coyotes, cowboys, and tumbleweeds. I don’t think anybody enjoys the wild west as must as Rockstar San Diego.
[Source]
