You have to hand it to the team at Ready at Dawn for doing a good job in creating all the blood, gore, and amazing visuals for the PlayStation Portable's God of War: Chains of Olympus.

In an interview conducted by DesignSessions, Lead 3D Artist Nathan Phail-Liff talked about the trials and tribulations he and his art team had to go through in creating the graphics for the game given the limitations of the handheld platform.

Phail-Liff, who recently came off as an environment artist for Daxter, had a huge job ahead of him trying to fulfill the fans' expectations of keeping into the look of the series.

However, working on the PSP wasn't an easy job for Phail-Liff. Difficulties like "a single crippled system bus, no hardware clipping, lower texture and poly resolution, and competing with particles/FX against the fill-rate monster that is the PS2" all became factors for the art team to try different creative workaround solutions in the development of the game.

They basically tried to squeeze every drop of performance out of the handheld while keeping into the artistic style of the series. Using a team of 15 artists, they sliced up the content into several compartmentalized sections to make the workflow smoother. This made sure that all the deadlines were met on time and that everything worked well in collaboration with the other teams.

When asked what his proudest achievement was in completing the handheld God of War title, this was what he had to say:

Everyone on the team is enormously proud of the fact that with the aggressive schedule and small team that we had we were able to pull off a full-fledged God of War game on the PSP, with virtually no concessions. Frankly there is no way we could have pulled off this game without the amount of dedication and sacrifice that everyone on the team put into it and, by all rights, it really was the game we shouldn’t have been able to make!

Seeing the results of how God of War: Chains of Olympus, there's no doubt that Phail-Liff and his team went above and beyond the call of duty to deliver to gamers a top-quality game for the PSP. You can read the full interview with the lead artist by clicking on the source link we've provided below.