History
The development of Chrono Trigger: Resurrection started in April 2003, but it was not the first time Resurrection Games developed a remake of Chrono Trigger…
Nathan recalls, I started developing a version of Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo 64 during my senior year of High School. It was my first real game project, so it was quite a challenge. Art was mainly done by myself at the time and there was another 3D modeler who did a test Crono model. Mat Valente worked on the music and composed a full soundtrack of .XM’s that sounded much, much better than the original SNES songs. Due to my lack of experience at the time and the lack of quality on the art side, I quietly decided to postpone the project after the summer of 2000 until I felt more competent in my skills and until there were more reliable art resources available.
Technology
All of the technology was custom-written for Chrono Trigger: Resurrection. This includes: a cross-platform renderer, which runs on GameCube, Xbox, and PC; Converter and preview tools, such as the texture converter, 3ds max exporter, sound player, etc.; And, of course, the game core, which contains all of the logic to run the game.
Art
An average scene in Chrono Trigger: Resurrection ranges anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 triangles. Instead of opting for a low-polygon scene with lightmaps, we’ve decided to strategically tesselate the scene geometry so that static vertex ligthing could be used — with similar quality results. This allows the lighting to have a more artistic feel than a normal light-mapped scene because all lighting is hand done and nothing is mathematically calculated. It is also less expensive, performance-wise, and more compatible with other platforms, due to its more simplistic technical roots.
A typical main character mesh is composed of 10,000 – 12,000 triangles and has an average of 150 bones for animation. Each mesh has went through a rigorous approval process. For our lead 3D artist, David Ying, it is a testament to his patience and ability as multiple fixes were requested and then fixed.
When Luis Martins joined the Chrono Trigger: Resurrection team in August 2003, the artistic direction of the project changed significantly. All of the previous character concepts and meshes were replaced in favor of a more consistent style and look — more like Akira Toriyama’s style that was used in the original Chrono Trigger. Luis made sure to overlook all the aspects of the quality in the graphics department so that everything could be as consistent as possible. It is a fair assumption to say that, without him, Chrono Trigger: Resurrection would not look as good as it does now.
Audio
The soundtrack for Chrono Trigger: Resurrection has been re-mastered with higher quality instruments and a higher sampling rate by our musician, Mat Valente. He has been very dedicated and worked hundreds of hours to retain the original feelings of the songs while adding more feeling to them, in the process. We think his hard work would even make Mitsuda-san proud.
Chrono Resurrection
