Sometimes projects end smoothly, without any problems or drama. But sometimes… there’s a monkey wrench thrown into those plans.

Once Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters started to get good reviews, the big marketing push was only a matter of time. Not only was the game doing well, but now we’d get to see television ads and giant posters with our game on it. It was extra special for me because, since Ratchet & Clank has always been about the gadgets, clips of what I had contributed to game were going to end up on TV.

There was an imbalance in games.

A ton of games have ‘behind the scenes’ content locked away in them. In these games you can usually see concept art, assets cut from the game, beautiful backgrounds used as reference for the game’s environment, and much, much more.

What it was missing was programmer art.

During the development of a new game it’s not uncommon for a level or two to occasionally fail to load. Maybe there’s some outdated built data on someone’s machine or perhaps a change went in that hasn’t been tested in every level yet. There’s all kinds of problems, and if you are on debugging machine, you’ll see the callstack and be able to tell the right person that needs to fix it what’s up. But artists, they don’t have a debugger, they don’t use a callstack. They rely on the output of warning messages to help them know who to go to when a level fails to load.

And Ricardo, one of our programmers, was getting a lot of visits from the artists.

You see, it just so happened that the last message that was seen by the artists when a level …

Hey, it’s finally out! Disney created a nicely produced Behind the Scenes video for Phineas and Ferb Across the 2nd Dimension.

Today was Red Carpet premiere of the Phineas and Ferb movie. The “red” carpet was actually “Perry teal,” a pretty nice touch. It was great to see the final cut of the film. Because we were in charge of crafting the story and screenplay for the game we had limited access to the movie as it was being created.

Trailer 1

Trailer 2

Attract Reel