2.5 years needed to realise Prince of Persia vision

Prince of Persia will feel like you're playing an illustration.

Speaking at Ubidays earlier this week, Prince of Persia producer Ben Mattes offered further insight into the artistic direction they've dubbed Illustrative.

"For us there is sort of a slider if you will," said Mattes. "On one end you've got really realistic games... very realistic visuals in a game: call of Duty... even Assassin's Creed to a certain extent is really going for that sense of realism. And on the other end of the scale you've got highly exaggerated cell-shaded games. You've got Okami, you've got Windwaker, you've got those games that are much more cartooney.

"We wanted to be somewhere in the middle. We wanted to have all of the detail and the granularity... of a very realistic game where you are looking at an object and it's not just a big blob of colour. You can see all of the little details on the pots and the pans that are littered around the world or the window on the wall.

"There's a lot of granular detail in this world, but at the same time it's stylised and unique enough to not just try and be a photo."

What Mattes, the artistic director and the creative director came up with was Illustrative, an artistic direction which didn't just take inspiration from illustrations, but used the illustrations to form the look of the game.

"In past games those illustrations had served as references for the 3D modelling team that would then draw inspiration from that and make something completely different," explained Mattes.

"This time it would be so great if we could make a game that feels like you're playing one of those illustrations. So the camera just zooms into the illustration and then you're playing the game," went the conversation between Mattes and his colleagues.

It certainly hasn't come easily, with Mattes revealing the team has "spent two and a half years trying to trying to figure out how to make that happen", but judging from the selection of screens that have been released it has been well worth the effort.

For more from Mattes on Prince of Persia head over to the VideoGamer.com video player.