STUDIOS // ROCKSTAR NORTH | BETA
through a city, encapsulating neighbourhoods and switching territory atmospheres within the space of a few city blocks - things that in real- life “take place across a stretch of ten miles”. The design of the map dictates missions,
and Garbut and co-devise places that feel right for the gameplay - “and we encourage mission designers to take advantage of that – but we’ll move things around if the story or missions demand changes”. The environment is constantly being refined
up to deadline –when Develop visits in August, Garbut says ‘It’s still happening’, although most tweaks are more subtle at this point.
WORK OF ART That’s a short history of what is a vast, layered process in building GTA’s world. Garbut has also had to get a handle – like
Benzies, Semple, Hooker and Fowler have – on how the franchise has grown, and taken its workforce into the thousands, and demanded gigabytes of art assets. “The thing with a game like this, moreso
than GTA IV, is that the scale of the thing is so big that we have many layers of stuff to look through –missions, cut scene locations, random characters, the character switching transitions and so on and so on. We have made sure to get every area of the world up to a certain quality level. We’ve hit a higher plateau across everything than ever before with GTA V.” Garbut is keenly aware that this also has
the potential to demoralise artists, who might fear being trapped in a factory line. “You used to have so much control, and you got to own
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something – so we’ve tried to keep that in some way.” On GTA IV it seemed the solution was to
divvy city sections between artists. “We kept the same principle of giving someone an area of the map to have ownership over. There’s a lot of positives to that process – people are accountable and they have real input. But we also found that there is a lot of variety, because artists have strengths and weaknesses.
The game is a product of so many
people we don’t always feel comfortable being out front, saying words on each other’s behalf.
Aaron Garbut, Art Director “On GTA Vwe broke that process up a bit,
and moved artists around so they had a chance to contribute in different ways. It’s given us a real consistency of quality, rather than pockets of excellence.” This more finely spread collaboration also helps when the team is 150 strong, otherwise the management overhead is too much. The added layer of GTA Online is also, Garbut
jokes, a ‘cushion for your crushed dreams’ if you’re an artist: “Because if a section you built isn’t used in the main story, don’t worry.
Someone else, a player, will make that a location for an iconic GTA shoot out.” Ultimately, whether in a small team or a big
one, Garbut has tried to create an environment that empowered staff in some way: “Every part of the game is up for grabs - nothing is locked down. We don’t get too hung up on what we’ve decided – if something has to change, we change it.”
SEEING STARS Garbut hasn’t worked at another studio, so can’t comment on what he and his colleagues have cultivated might compare to elsewhere. But as our day at the studio wraps up, it’s
clear to us he’s a great example of the lasting connections amongst the staff, a collection of people who know how lucky they are, and don’t want to question the wonderful nature of their situation, they just want to work hard at maintaining it. What does he make of Rockstar’s ‘mystique’? “The thing we have talked about in the past is that the game is a product of so many people, we don’t always feel comfortable being out front, saying the words on each person’s behalf. “Even this conversation is strange because
even though I have worked on all the GTA games there are lots of people here at the studio that have done a lot of work on it too. So it’s difficult to put a figurehead on that,” he adds “Really, we just focus on the game. As soon
as we finish this, we start thinking about the next one –we just want to make games. “And the games say more about us than any of us could.”
OCTOBER 2013 | 21
Rockstar North’s wide open plan office is designed to encourage collaboration and communication amongst its staff
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