00:00Peggy 12
00:30Amos
00:30Wages?
00:31Yeah, it's a thrill for me to be on the Lara Croft franchise.
00:34As you mentioned, I was on Guardian of Light, and when this chance came up at Crystal, I was excited
00:37to jump back into it.
00:38There are a lot of things I learned from Guardian of Light and from my work on Tomb Raider in
00:422013 that I was eager to bring over to Lara Croft in the Temple of Osiris.
00:45I had a few new ideas for puzzles that we can only do now with our latest mechanics and our
00:49four-player design.
00:50Which is kind of Jeff's way of saying that when you get stuck or frustrated at some of these crazy
00:54things he's come up with, you can please address all of your hate mail to him.
00:58Nah, they'll be fine. It's never about punishing the player.
01:00He plays a huge emphasis on visual language to make sure the puzzles are communicating themselves to the player.
01:05After that, they can cooperate and experiment and work until they find their own aha moment that solves the puzzle.
01:11Which is, you know, honestly for us, that's the fun, to see people get through this game, to play it
01:14front to back, to see everything.
01:16And the game is fully playable in single-player.
01:18And co-op, people need to work together though, right?
01:20Since we have two different classes, we split up their skill sets, then we have these custom cooperative puzzles.
01:25And as we said from our last diary, we've got archaeologists and gods, I'll let Jeff talk a little bit
01:29about their skills.
01:30But certainly, having these characters that have different things, Jeff, give us a few examples of how these guys work
01:34together, the kind of things they can do.
01:36Sure, so the grapple line is a returning feature from Guardian of Light.
01:39It gains a powerful ability with four players in that each player's their own grapple point, so you can maneuver
01:45in a lot of new and exciting ways.
01:46The Egyptian gods bring the staff of Osiris to the table, which shoots a beam of light, which solves puzzles,
01:51and can manipulate anything in the world that has these glyphs of Osiris baked onto them.
01:55So even like, you know, when you had Tiltec and Lara, where you had kind of these two different classes
01:59that were split up in the last game, right?
02:01Now we're talking about having, you know, these kind of puzzles where people not only have to work together, but
02:05even on the timing side of it.
02:06We talked about it with the last playtest. We watched people playing, saying, okay, I'm going to hold the staff.
02:11One, two, three, and then they let go too early.
02:14Their friend jumps across, dies in the pit of spikes. Those seem like those great kind of cooperative puzzles that
02:18we're kind of striving for.
02:19Exactly. It's one of the fun challenges of designing puzzles that can scale from one players to four players.
02:24We try to add new interactive elements as more players enter the game.
02:28One of the simple examples that you'll see here is that in single player, Lara must manipulate the mirrors to
02:33destroy the rifts in Duat using the staff of Osiris.
02:35Whereas in co-op, one of the gods must use their staff to lower this platform while Lara manipulates the
02:40mirror, and then another one shoots the staff to destroy the rifts.
02:43And it's just one example without giving too much away.
02:49And I know we have one particular snake boss called Apep that you put together, so you want to tell
02:54us a little bit about that guy?
02:55So yeah, this is Apep. He had rather humble beginnings. It was me, the designer, who first modeled and animated
03:00him and threw him into the game.
03:02And the first prototypes had these weak spots on his back that only the staff of Osiris could affect.
03:07And then even after single player, I remember we had actually done it once where you had bunches of mirrors
03:11around the level, and then for multiplayer you started upgrading that a little differently.
03:14So we had this rough version that works with one players, and then we had to, how do we make
03:18it scale up for two players, three players, four players?
03:21How do we balance the puzzle elements with the combat?
03:22It's really taking these really bare-bone ideas, and iterating through them with the rest of the team, to bring
03:28it to its full fruition.
03:29It's important with these types of action puzzles and bosses, that the player should know immediately what they need to
03:34do, and the real challenge comes from executing, and working together to get that done.
03:38And that's where all the fun and polarity ensues.
03:43Having a hand and a voice in everything that we build, we can make pretty extensive changes in a short
03:47time, kind of like the Oracle's Chamber area.
03:50Sure. We do a bunch of internal and external playtesting.
03:53This is one area where we really felt the need to inject a new flavor, a new theme, into the
03:58game.
03:59So here's where we highlighted one of the elemental effects that hadn't gotten a lot of attention yet from us,
04:03which is Poison.
04:04And this gave our artists an excuse to go crazy with the green, and the designers re-authored the combat
04:10to focus on Poison.
04:12We took one of our highest-rated challenge teams from later in the game, and gave it a Poison flavor,
04:17and installed it here, as a puzzle gateway to the Oracle.
04:20Which, I mean, clearly from the playtest after we'd done the change, boosted up both the experience, the puzzle experience
04:25in that area, and introduced the unique combat that the Oracle area has.
04:29Just with all the flashier and dramatic touches and lighting effects, even that eerie, kind of creepy aura that we
04:34managed to put in there throughout.
04:37So everyone, we hope you enjoyed another sneak peek into some of the new puzzle elements coming in Lara Croft's
04:42Temple of Osiris.
04:42Thank you, Wages, for walking us through what it takes to build some of these crazy puzzles.
04:46We're super excited to put the finishing touches on Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris.
04:50You can all play it on December 9th, 2014 on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
04:54See you all online.
05:05We'll be right back.
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