Scott Fisher

Speaker: Richard Lemarchand, Game Designer, Naughty Dog
Time: Wednesday, March 5, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC)
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: "Audacious Feats of Daring: An Expanded Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune Post-Mortem"

Brace yourself for a rollicking ride as Naughty Dog game designer Richard Lemarchand leads a collaborative presentation deconstructing the successes and pitfalls of his studio’s first PlayStation 3 release, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. A contemporary reinvention of classic pulp adventure, the game was released at the end of 2007 to wide critical acclaim, public w00ts and the massive salez0rs.

In an Easter egg and bonus content-laden reprise of his GDC 2008 talk, Lemarchand covers the open, meritocratic, intensively collaborative way that Naughty Dog works, the iterative, play-test oriented development methodology that the studio subscribes to, and the technological, design and production challenges that the project faced.

Subjects ripe for discussion in this uniquely interjectional seminar format include interactivity design as exploration, managing large, talented teams through creative chaos, player attention as it relates to immersion, flow and variably scheduled activities, interactive storytelling techniques and emotion in games, wide-linear versus open-world gameplay, and gaming as mass entertainment, literature and fine art. The takeaway promises to be both practically applicable for game developers and stimulating for thinkers about interactive media.

Bio: Richard Lemarchand has made story-based character-action games the main focus of his design career, and has worked with some of the industry’s best and brightest in the field along the way. He spends his days building games with his metaphorical sleeves rolled up, advocating for the player and helping keep the development team on track. His credits include the Gex and Soul Reaver series of games, Jak 3 and Jak X: Combat Racing, and he was most recently the Lead Game Designer for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. He’s a contributor to Game Developer Magazine, and a frequent visitor to USC.