Former Rockstar North technical director Obbe Vermeij continues to talk about the various challenges of developing Grand Theft Auto games. His latest publication is devoted to the peculiarities of the creation of the famous Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In the blog, the developer talked about how certain game decisions were made, which subsequently helped the project gain cult status.
GTA: San Andreas came out in 2004 and forever changed the way players thought about the open world and possibilities. This result was achieved after a difficult meeting of developers, which still haunts Vermeil and his colleagues in their worst nightmares. The team has been discussing the game map and location of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for a long time. Rockstar wanted to implement three cities, but the main question was how to implement this idea and add Los Santos, San Fierro and Las Venturas.
We had a meeting where three people wanted cities to be on different maps. This would save memory, since it would not be necessary to simultaneously keep city skyline models in memory. In GTA 1 there were 3 cities on different maps. The player moved between them by planes/buses/trains. I wanted the cities to be on the same map because it’s important to be able to move between cities. Even if it meant we had to look elsewhere for memory.
— shared Obbe Vermeij, former technical director of Rockstar North.
The development team could not come to a common solution for quite a long time. Vermeil’s proposal was accepted only the next morning, when several key studio programmers came over to his side. The next major problem was the RPG elements.
If the player ate too much, CJ would become too fat, preventing him from climbing walls and running fast. This mechanic was interesting, but made some missions technically impossible to complete. The developers had to correct such tasks during the testing of the game.
To help develop the game, Rockstar hired new developers and brought in the team from Manhunt after that game was completed. By the time GTA San Andreas was released, Rockstar had about 80 developers working on the game, which greatly simplified the entire development process.
