Looking back at the whole process it's interesting to see how certain aspects of the game evolved. We decided that we were going to make Jak X about three fourths of the way through the development of Jak 3. We knew we wanted to expand on the vehicle aspects of Jak 3 and we knew that we wanted to make Naughty Dog's first online game. For the first several months while we were finishing up the last game, Jak X was basically a one man team.
We were fortunate enough to have just hired Ben Stragnell, a kick ass programmer with a lot of network programming experience. So by the time that we had wrapped up Jak 3, he had already had Jak driving vehicles around online and competing in some simple races and deathmatches set up in Jak 3 environments. This was a great head start and allowed us to have the team roll over and be in serious production from day one.
The vehicle design was something else that we came across very serendipitously. After a couple of months of struggling to find "the look" of the vehicles in Jak X, we had Hugo Martin, a concept design student from Pasadena Art Center knock on our door with the most amazing portfolio.
Ordinarily, we wouldn't have even looked, but it was a good thing that we did. After seeing some vehicles that we had designed for a few of his classes (he was a Transport Design major), we knew that we had to hire him. He then spent the next several months banging out design after design until we had over 12 amazingly original cars each with dozens and dozens of body parts that could be used to create a customized car that would be unique on the track. This degree of personalization has really made Jak X a lot of fun, and it's even cooler when you take your custom designed car online to show it off.
