it's hard to design something from scratch that has all those elements," he admits. "Trying to come up with a unique location that's never been seen before, but also feels like it fits within our world and has a believable history.
To create Shambala, for example, Ruppel's team pored over the annals of Mesopotamian history and architecture to conjure a completely imagined place that nevertheless looked just as much a work of reality as one of fantasy. He had this great phrase, 'keep everything core', meaning he didn't want it to be too concept heavy or imaginary, so whatever we did we had to research heavily." That's something that Bruce was really emphatic about. "All the locations had to have a certain reality to them. "I had been playing a lot of games with my daughter before I joined the studio," Ruppel tells me, "and coincidentally a bunch of those games had been Naughty Dog titles, so to be part of that team for their next big endeavour was a hugely exciting prospect." As lead art director, Ruppel was responsible for taking Hennig and Straley's new, cineliterate vision, and turning it into a consistent visual language. Hollywood was just up the road from its sunny Santa Monica HQ, after all, and Robh Ruppel was thus brought on as the game's lead art director, having previously worked in visual development on a number of big screen Disney animations. In light of this newfound epiphany, Naughty Dog looked to the film industry for Uncharted 2's pre-production recruitment drive, in the hopes of furnishing that cinematic flair it was aiming for. "That's storytelling 101, but we also realised then and there, that's game design too." Bruce Straley, director