Days Gone Developer Talks Benefits of Creating E3 Demos and How It Helped the Studio

Among the many games showcased during Sony’s E3 press conference, Days Gone was one of the few games that had a more substantial presence at the show as it showed more than just a short trailer and a vague release date.

And in an interview with Kotaku, Days Gone Creative Director John Garvin talked about how creating their 7-minute E3 demo, which they worked on for three months, helped them with several aspects of the game’s overall development.

One of our goals was to not do stuff specifically for the demo—we wanted to make it real. So everything we were doing was going to be part of the actual game. We were polishing stuff that hadn’t been polished, and that’s what took most of the time.

According to Garvin, making their E3 demo helped the development team pinpoint certain systems that work and don’t work before developing and polishing them further, finding out which parts are genuinely fun to play and either keeping or tossing them before they’re polished.

You don’t want to put too much polish into an ambush event if it turns out to not be fun. So we go through this whole set of focus testing both internally and externally and then say, ‘OK, this is working really well; this is the kind of thing we need to do more of.’ And once we get to that stage, then we polish it. Because otherwise you’re tossing work that’s expensive. So we don’t wanna do that.

Days Gone is scheduled for release exclusively on the PlayStation 4 sometime in early 2018.

[Source: Kotaku]

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