The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time An Interview with Yannis Mallat
Why did you choose to develop a completely new game rather than doing a sequel to the previous Prince of Persia, released in 1999?
We really felt that the ‘true’ Prince of Persia essence was best captured by the first two games, and that drawing inspiration from the original titles was the best way to bring the license successfully to Next Gen consoles. The question brings up an interesting point, though: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is in fact an original creation itself. Apart from the name, everything has been built from scratch – redesigned, rethought: the Prince, the environments, the game design, the story. It’s all bigger, stronger, better. Trust me; it was no piece of cake, but it was the only way to ensure that the game will live up to the legacy of the brand.
What elements of the brand did you have in mind, at the beginning of the
project?
We studied the first two games intensely, playing long hours to truly
understand the source of the magic. Three major elements struck us:
• The astonishing animations and character movements
• The intense fight sequences
• The clever and challenging level design and the gameplay built around that
design
The team considered these the main strengths of the license, and we focused on those from the beginning – both because they’re faithful to the essence of the brand and, if done well, the universal recipe for a stellar action/adventure game.
What were your main priorities when the development got started? Did these objectives imply a specific organization of work within your team?
As with any original creation, building a playable area around the main character’s behavior was the first priority. We knew very early that the whole concept would depend on the immediate appeal and intuitive controls of the Prince. No final level construction could start before we mastered that.
Of course, this implied a specific organization of the team as we wanted the core to focus on this crucial goal. But we also wanted to experience this playable on the real engine, on the real platform, with all the constraints that implies. So we sent the core engineer team to another Ubi Soft studio to learn the engine we chose for the game.
Once we were satisfied with the playable’s feel, movements, and basic
gameplay, we focused on character design for the Prince, and then on
environments and art. In a nutshell, we focused first on the gameplay basics –
the things that make the game fun to play; then we focused on the dressing of
the game – the things that make it beautiful to look at. And we also achieved a
technical breakthrough very early on, but you’ll have to wait to hear more about
that!