Uncharted 3 benefited from Naughty Dog’s version of Google Fridays

By Stephany Nunneley

Uncharted 3 designer Richard Lemarchand has said the PS3 series is as good as it is because the heads of Naughty Dog, Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra, encourage employees to set aside self-directed time each week to work on whatever they wish.

Speaking in an interview with Eurogamer, Lemarchand described it as something akin to Google Fridays.

“[Evan and Christophe ] are cool about giving us an interval of undirected time at work, which is really interesting,” he said during the GameCity6 festival in Nottingham last week.

“It’s a bit like the famous Google Fridays, where Google employees are allowed to do whatever they like one day a week. They’re smart in doing so because many of the coolest bits of the Uncharted games have grown out of those times of self-directed work we all do. In particular the programmers have a chance to do some R&D. It’s a cool time right now.”

The team is also getting ready to take some much needed time off, once the post-mortem meetings adjourn.

“We’ve already started having post-mortem meetings,” said Lemarchand. “We’ve started having meetings about what went right and what went wrong. We always do this at the end of every project. While the experience of making the game is still fresh in our minds we want to make as many notes as we can about the things we think we could do better.”

Uncharted 3 is out today in the US and tomorrow in the UK and Europe, and to get you pumped for it, Sony has set aside a devoted amount of time in this week’s issue of Pulse to chat about various aspects of the game.

It has also released a video of Nolan North and Emily Rose sitting in the desert chatting about the love/hate relationship between Nathan and Elena.

You can watch both videos below.

Comments