High Moon's Andrea Cordella takes TVG through The Bourne Conspiracy's in-game environments...

The Bourne Identity saw Jason Bourne travel through a large wedge of Europe. Starting out in Northern Italy, the story quickly moves to Zurich and culminates in Paris. Clearly a large amount of research needed to be done by the developers of the upcoming Bourne Conspiracy game in order to get the feel of the films right. So, what did High Moon Studios do? They spent a week on location in Europe of course. Nice work if you can get it.

Once again we've managed to get our hands on an exclusive screen of the game in action around the streets of Paris, so make sure to fix your eyeballs on it now.

Environments blog Andrea Cordella, Lead Artist

When we started development of "Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy", the team was presented with the challenge of creating environments that would fit the Bourne universe as described in the movies and the Ludlum books. We found a lot of inspiration in the movies to set the tone of the game visuals, and along the way we found out that what works for film doesn't necessarily translate well in a game.

One of the first influences on art direction that progressed naturally during the course of development was to move away from depicting the exact look of the films. From a visual standpoint, the Bourne films take place in a very de-saturated and flatly lit world. We wanted to avoid having the game environments look that way. We also had to take some environments briefly seen on screen in the films and imagine how to extend their look into entire game levels, all while keeping everything authentic to the source material. One example is the American Embassy from "The Bourne Identity" where, in the film, Bourne enters and escapes the building in a matter of minutes in screen time. In our game, we've created an entire level based on that one explosive sequence.

From a general visual direction standpoint, we knew right from the start that the game was going to look as realistic as the movies as we set out to take advantage of the graphic capabilities offered by next-gen consoles. With the game storyline revolving roughly around "The Bourne Identity" we knew we would feature mainly European locations. After some experimentation and prototyping small environments for Paris, it became clear that if we wanted to capture the spirit of the cities we wanted to present in the game, photo references and movies weren't going to be sufficient. We would have to be there in person to do our own in-depth research. An "unlucky" group of us ended up having to spend a week in Europe to research our locations while "suffering" with the local cuisine and wines. In reality it was hard work, and at the end of seven grueling days of location scouting and gathering photo references we came back exhausted but satisfied with tons of pictures for everyone to use. We also now had our very own library of architectural textures, along with first-hand experience of the locales we were showing in the game. One side effect for some of us was that our bellies were mysteriously enlarged and our clothes weren't fitting that well anymore, thanks to that local cuisine and wine.

The material we gathered ultimately proved invaluable in creating our believable game settings. As the Bourne team moved into production the game mechanics began to take shape and, as a result of design direction, we needed more of the environments to be interactive. The game was becoming centered on the concept of Jason Bourne as a perfect weapon who uses the world around him to gain the upper hand in combat. He is not the kind of character that is always armed to the teeth and has a lot of gadgets. Instead Bourne relies on hand to hand fighting skills and heightened instinct that helps him recognize everyday objects that could become weapons.

The world we were creating for the game now had to support this aspect of Bourne's personality, something that had become central to the game mechanics that we were developing. After several attempts, the team finally came up with a system that would allow us to have a huge number of interactive objects so that we could smash enemies against the world, and destructible objects that we could "weaponize" in hand-to-hand combat or destroy with gunfire. At the same time, we wanted things to look believable and have the system be optimised so that it wouldn't affect overall game performance.

Ultimately as the world interactivity ended up playing a big part in the game, it affected how we approached game environments. In the end, it was a pleasure to see all the ideas that artists and designers had for the environments come together. As the "weaponized" world full of destructible objects began shaping up, the game became more and more exciting, and we got better at creating the right environments to support the style of game play.

Stay tuned for more Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy Developer Diaries, every Friday here on TVG.