Wipeout Pure was developed by Liverpudlian developer
Studio Liverpool. Pre-production of the game began in August 2003 and full production occurred in October of that year, with only two staff members working on the game at that time. The team received development kits for the
PlayStation Portable in August 2004; by this time the development team had grown to twenty people. Dave Burrows, one of the original two staff members who conceptualised the game, reflected in a retrospective "post-mortem" that the studio had to learn from their previous mistakes with their predecessor,
Wipeout Fusion. Burrows cited that one of the principal difficulties the development team faced was that the team's artists and designers were "fighting almost all of the time"; designers would first design a track for the game, then pass it over to the artists whilst the former were still making adjustments to it. Burrows also recalled that the developer's editing kits required many hours worth of "tweaking", which ultimately did not result in a smooth workflow. During development, the team set out to make the game playable for testing as soon as possible. Burrows explained that Studio Liverpool were forced to create a
user interface "entirely from scratch", along with dynamics,
artificial intelligence and core elements before testing could commence. Development of each of these aspects were split into six-week cycles; Burrows stated that instead of the team spending six weeks designing and perfecting all the weapons in-game, the team spent three days designing weapons individually rather than simultaneously. Burrows recalled that whilst developing
Wipeout Fusion, Studio Liverpool found that half of their time was being "soaked up" by building a user interface for their editor. As the team knew that
Wipeout Pure would have to be shipped out in time for the PlayStation Portable's release, the decision was made to create new plugins for their software,
Autodesk Maya, in order to save time during development. After creating custom plugins for the
3D computer graphics software, Burrows claimed that the team could create and test entire race tracks within five minutes. The custom plugin used for creating tracks consisted of a 450 kilobyte file, which contained polygon subdividing and data on artificial intelligence, effectively cutting down the time to create tracks from six hours to five minutes. In order to the play the game as soon as possible, the team developed the user interface in the
XML markup language, which allowed revisions to be made for the content at any time. However, Burrows recalled that the only downside to converting everything to XML was that the game was always in danger of becoming too large for the PlayStation Portable's
Universal Media Disc. The game's cover art was designed by Popgun, who also designed the logos for games released by
EA Sports. In order to showcase the PlayStation Portable's capabilities, the team had to develop a download system that could provide the game with future
downloadable content, which included new tracks, music and ships. In addition, Burrows realised that new downloadable content had the potential to bring in more revenue for Studio Liverpool. In order to achieve this, the team had to find a way to bypass the problems involved in getting the PlayStation Portable to recognise download files. The solution required the use of
piggybacking game data to a valid format recognised by the PlayStation Portable; in which a dummy file would be used on a web-based
Java application. ==Reception==