Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader - Prisons Of The Maw [Developer Commentary]

(~8.5 minutes in length) Commentary features: Julian Eggebrecht - Director Holger Schmidt - Lead Software Engineer Albert Chen (I) - Mission Design Director (Designed the Prisons Of The Maw level) Mario Wagner - Art & Animation Holger and Julian discuss a little about development on the GameCube with Holger mentioning that it was easy to program for. Albert describes the level as the being the first in the game the feature the Y-Wing in addition to ion cannons. The level is designed in a way to use all the capabilities of the Y-Wing in a way that's intuitive and requires no tutorial/explanation. AT-PTs are also re-introduced in the 2nd half of the level. To better help guide the player a rail system is used The location of the tram itself is used to direct the player to specific bombing targets. The discussion later moves to the difference between console and PC games with Albert mentioning that PC games tend to be more 'Sim' focused compared to console games because of the difference in control schemes. More complex controls offer more complex gameplay compared to more simple controls. Julian states that this level was a labor of love for Mario. Mario's art direction was a more industrial look. (specifically offshore oil rigs) They mention using a form of Chroma Keying to make holes on the surface of the level. (Height Map?) In Mario's experience the GameCube provided way more flexibility with shader and texture quality compared to N64 and PlayStation, (128x128 on N64 vs 1024x1024 on GC) saying that the biggest problem is having enough memory to run the game well while still maintaining a sufficient level of detail.