Destructoid: Tell me about the Hedgehog Engine. What prompted you to create a brand new engine for Sonic Unleashed, and what challenges did you face in crafting something specialized for Sonic games?
Hashimoto: Around the year 2005, I had been watching various high-end game movies and felt that something was missing. Of course they were all very well created, but I felt that they had all come from a move presentation that were within the bounds of common sense and I wasn’t surprised. That was right when I decided to start the development for Sonic Unleashed and I felt that with the already existing engines and libraries I will not be able to create the movie presentation we are looking for, so that is why we had decided to create from full-scratch.
If Sonic Unleashed is the answer to "What should Sonic be?", the answer for "What game movies should be?" will be the Hedgehog Engine. The Hedgehog Engine has all the necessary libraries and tools and the lighting calculating systems as well as systems that can stream various data. The Hedgehog Engine is a comprehensive development environment.
The challenges that I faced were:
- Challenges with data reading speed as Sonic’s running speed is very fast.
- The amount of renderer calculations for the global illumination lighting, so a system development was made using 100 PCs for the distributed calculation process.
- Since the data size became too big for the global illumination lighting, fitting all the data into the Xbox 360 DVD was a challenge.