Today, Guillaume Provost and Cord Smith of Pseudo Interactive dissected their Xbox 360 game Full Auto in a Post-Mortem event at the Bahen Centre, University of Toronto.

Provost, who says that "I tend to fall asleep" when sitting through Power Point presentations, didn't bring one. Instead, he and Smith talked freely about the development of Full Auto, while video footage from the game played on the screen behind them.

To hear Provost tell it, it seems that some of the most fascinating stories about Full Auto's creation occurred in boardrooms, when Pseudo was pitching new game concepts. They wanted to make a game that played to the company's strengths, such as their ability to create engines with robust physics. But Provost says it wasn't until Microsoft's Advanced Technology Group asked them to create a technology demo that the project that would eventually become Full Auto truly picked up steam.

Even so, they had to do quite a lot of shopping for publishers. Namco was at one time interested, but couldn't decide if this was a game that should have weapons and combat, or just be about racing. Pseudo believed that Full Auto needed the combat, because otherwise one of the game's best features--the spectacular crashes--would not be seen "until you screwed up," as Provost put it. Eventually, Sega became the publisher, but it took a lot of convincing to get them to buy into Full Auto. And since Sega was being reorganized at the time with a lot of personnel shifts, the plan for Full Auto had to be reinforced in subsequent meetings.

Cord Smith came aboard because Pseudo needed experienced project managers, and he was just such a person. When the company opened nearly 10 years ago, they had 15 employees. Today, it's 50. "Companies grow, people get stretched thin," said Smith. Now, Pseudo has more management structure, including two external producers.

After Smith and Provost had finished their presentation, they opened the floor to questions. When asked how you go from managing small teams to large teams, Provost revealed that Pseudo had a "Capacity Plan." This kept track of who was working on what, for how long, their time off, etc. Smith mentioned that the Pseudo team did Post-Mortems of their work at every milestone, which was very helpful for learning throughout the design process. It also meant that making sure that everyone was on the same page was especially important.

Smith and Provost also noticed a shift in the types of employees as they worked on the game. There were more content producers as opposed to straight tech people as development went on, because much of the tech of Full Auto was procedural.

Another question about removed features had Provost reveal that occasionally Full Auto will "fudge" physics effects, because sometimes realism needs to be put aside for fun. For example, going over rooftops and other wild jumps are occasionally tweaked; otherwise players might fly right out of the playable area, and spoil the experience.

When asked what the company would do differently if they had to do it all again, Provost said, "Can't we go for beers and then we'll answer that question?" Apparently, it was a complicated answer. Shortly thereafter, the formal event ended, and we went down to a local pub for brews and more answers.

IGDA Toronto would like to thank Pseudo Interactive and the U of T Game Programming Club for making the Full Auto Post-Mortem event happen.

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