Eurogamer: When Rockstar makes a new Grand Theft Auto game, what is the very first thing that happens, and how significant are those early decisions in terms of the game's overall artistic direction?
Aaron Garbut: Firstly we just start collecting ideas. Locations, technology, gameplay, missions, basically everything and anything we want to include or do. We think about what we are trying to achieve in basic terms, we spend a bit of time sorting and discarding some of the initial ideas. Then we just start...
In terms of the art department, the character artists will start playing about with concepts, trying various main characters in the game, playing about with pushing the style a little, basically experimenting. The vehicle department will begin a first pass of every vehicle, the environment artists will lay out a road network and once we've all driven around on it for a bit will block in each city block roughly so we can start to see the skyline. The intention is that as soon as possible we have a very, very rough version of the game and then we begin to refine it. Like every other aspect of the game the artistic direction grows organically, we try stuff and things that work pull us in their direction and things that don't are changed.
