Chrono Cross - GamePro.com Interview, Fan Questions Part 2 (Page 2)
What types of college courses or software application programs, languages, etc. would you suggest be taken or learned for a student wishing to pursue a job in the gaming industry - especially for a company like Squaresoft?
Blaze bjb3812@rit.edu
I don't believe it is necessary to select a specialized field. It doesn't matter if your major is science or literature. It's best that you go with what you are most interested in. Otherwise, you probably become bored, and you won't last long. It's more important to hone your sensitivity. Meet more people. See more things. I believe that experiencing many things matures your sense of balance. It's important to have a specialty, but you must learn how to take an impartial and objective view of things.
My question is this, has the traditional encounter/battle system of the Final Fantasy type been a necessity on the PlayStation hardware because of the use of a 3-D overworld map, (therefore making it hard/impossible to display roving enemies on the world map....), and did this affect your decision to go with the 2-D overworld and a more non-traditional encounter system? And if so, will these types of problems be a non-issue on the more powerful PS2 or even GameCube?
If there were no limit to the amount of memory in the hardware, then it would be possible to switch to battle without having to change to new battle scenes (i.e. a continuous battle system). However, this can only be possible depending on how you use the aforementioned limited memory capacity of the PlayStation. If the details could be left cheesy, then everything could be done in memory, but if we strive to achieve sophisticated and complex details, the necessary memory capacity will grow exponentially. There are a number of titles on the market that were compromised to work within this capacity. However, we went with an "if it's not available, then we'll increase it virtually" attitude (by using CD read swaps for memory) to achieve the high level of quality in FF and Chrono Cross. Of course, there will be tradeoffs for loading times, since CD reads will consume time, but I definitely didn't want to make a game (even if my life depended on it) that forced the player to watch "Now Loading" sequences over and over. The current load times (of CC) were designed to produce the best results while only needing a minimal amount of wait time to prevent boring the player. Since the memory map design concept will differ depending on what becomes the focal point, the need to use techniques like CD read swaps might happen even on newer hardware. If the goal is to achieve PlayStation quality on newer hardware, then everything can probably be done in memory, but on a PS2, the memory will probably be filled up to the limit easily, so it'll once again be a battle between time and disc reads. Although, there still might be plenty of methods to let the players not feel any of these waits.
So the idea is that, depending on what the game needs to express the most, a game will use an encounter system or a continuous battle sequence like Secret of Mana and Legend of Mana. Deciding how the limited amount of memory is going to be used is the most important part of game design.
Obviously, due to time constraints, budgets and other unforeseen difficulties, there were probably some things left out of Chrono Cross. Is there anything that you wished could have been included in the game that wasn't? Psychocatt psychocatt@ultrasw.com
Nothing in particular comes to mind.
