Things you may not know about Heavy Rain’s development

By Stephany Nunneley

UPSBlogIt has interviewed Quantic Dream’s former animator Alexandre Roche regarding the development of Heavy Rain, and some of the information he provided was rather interesting.

Don’t read below the break if you have not played the game and wish to remain unspoiled on a few things.

Some of these facts you may have already heard, but bear in mind some my not have.

Here’s the list:

• It contains more than 20,000 body animations resulting from the Mo-Cap acting, which has a team of 10 animators working on that portion.

• Sony asked the team to hide some of the nudity during the showers or the love scene to avoid and AO rating.

• Sony asked the team to hide the death of Jason Mars, because after the car accident, Jason started rolling on the road for a while, which was quite violent considering that he was a child.

• During the latest development period, Cage was thinking about publishing a Director’s Cut edition of Heavy Rain but, for now, nothing has evolved from this idea but the possibility of one in the future could happen.

• Originally, Madison’s was blonde with a pony tail at the beginning. Jayden is now a bit more “junky” than he was at the beginning.

• The introduction and the second floor of Ethan’s house didn’t exist two years ago.

• The Piano animation was one of the hardest things to render, according to Roche, due to Jayden’s fingers playing the instrument.

• Another hard bit for Roche was “Madison’s pee animation… I had to take off her panties, in a realistic way: with the level of detail we got in HR that was such a mess….and taking off some underwear from a gorgeous lady”.

Interesting stuff.

Apparently, it all worked out in the end because the game has already moved over 1M units and is on track to move over 1.5 by year’s end.