P.Y. : I've now been at Reflections for over 15 years, starting out as a programmer on Stuntman for the PS2. On Driver: San Francisco I had a more creative role, taking responsibility for the whole of the multiplayer experience. Since then I've moved into production, spending some time on The Crew before changing again to create the team that gave you Grow Home. My role is Producer, and I'm responsible for the strategy and business side of things, however, with a small team like this we each get to be involved in the project in all kinds of ways, it's not limited to what our job titles say.
Finally, amid these AAA titles, Grow Home is kind of breather for you, right? How did you manage to make time to develop a project which, if our informations are correct, was not intended for commercial release?
P.Y. : The idea for the team came from wanting to challenge how we make games at Reflections. We have a thirty year track record of developing massive AAA games and a strong technical heritage, but we're also a lot more than that. We created the opportunity to experiment on a smaller scale, with some very challenging constraints and the mindset of creating actual product, not just blue-sky research and development.
With this in mind, we started out with the intention of creating a game we could release, we just weren't sure what that game would be. We had previously been experimenting and playing with procedural animation. There was something about one of those early demos, one of the toys we created had a charm and personality, a real character coming from its movement that many people connected with. We developed this character into BUD, the robot in Grow Home. Players love that the little robot can climb and they are able to control his hands individually. It's a really fun, interesting and different experience.