First videogame to use the Naughty Dog Engine

First videogame to use the Naughty Dog Engine
Who
Naughty Dog Engine
What
First
Where
Unknown
When
19 November 2007
The start of the seventh generation marked a significant leap in terms of expectation for graphics output, and developers were as keen as gamers to produce the best-looking games they could. Many developed new games engines specifically for that generation, abandoning their old software suites. Naughty Dog was among those to develop a new software, dubbed the Naughty Dog Engine, which made its debut with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune in 2007. Although it has been modified and refined over the years, the Naughty Dog Engine has been used on all the games in the main Uncharted series as well as The Last of Us, and – according to Naughty Dog's Bruce Straley – it will continue to be used by the studio for future releases on the PS4 as well. A game engine is the suite of software tools designed to facilitate the creation of assets (levels, characters etc.) to facilitate building a game.

According to Straley: "We were creating a new IP, with a new engine, with a lot of weird expectations. Nobody had a dev kit soon enough, and as we all know, trying to figure out how to programme for a whole new piece of hardware was really difficult.

We learned our lesson in saying, as we move into development into next-gen, we want to take our current engine, port it immediately over as is and say, 'Okay, we have a great AI system, we have a good rendering system'.

We have all these things that already work. Only when we hit a wall will we say, 'When do we need to change something? When do we need to scale it? When does the gameplay, when does the story, when does the world that we need to create - when does this engine hit the wall? Right, now we need to change this part of the engine.'

Hindsight's 20-20, and it sounds obvious to say it, but it's one of those things that you learn in development. We've gained something from this experience, and now we want to apply it moving into next gen."