I’ll miss the future I once saw at Red Fly, but am looking forward to the new one unfolding at Vigil.  It’s a strange sorta bittersweet moment for me.

I can still recall—clear as day—my first time walking into the studio space at Red Fly.  Brand new to Austin after driving a few days out from Wisconsin, I was scared out of my mind to be relocating to a brand new city like that and hoping I hadn’t ruined my kid’s lives by doing it.  I’d picked Austin above all other cities because of the pool of studios here for game development, something you really didn’t get anywhere else that was affordable (Los Angeles, pretty much).  Idea being I’d not have to relocate the family again if it was time to move to another studio or if layoffs happened.

Coming from fairly small studio into Red Fly was ridiculously intimidating…the building looked all fancy to me, walking in and seeing the big Red Fly Studio matte painting there with cool lighting splashing on it—my first thought was “oh shit, how the hell did I get a job here?”

We had the big huge Ghostbusters matte print up front there too, though some time later we moved that into the offices of the audio company, Gl33k, for interviews Atari was doing for Ghostbusters.  Those video interviews never ended up being released (general consensus was Atari ran out of marketing money for the project).  Walked around the corner to a big wide-open room with some leather couches in the middle of it, and then into the pit where a very helpful Kain Shin saw me and walked me on over to whom I was supposed to be talking to.

From there I started work on Ghostbusters, which was a lot of fun, working closely with Dustin Dobson, whom I came to see as a kind of mentor.  Learned the particle tools in the engine we were using and got to work, then hopping off of Ghostbusters for a while (as it traded hands from Vivendi to Atari) to help wrap up production on Mushroom Men.  Then back on Ghostbusters for the next several months.

After Ghostbusters we put together some demos for game pitches that were pretty damn fun, and somewhere in there the Cooking Game happened.  It was a fun game, but it was the kinda case for a lot of us where making a game about cooking a hamburger was painful in the creative sense—even though it was paying the bills.  The game for the Thor movie picked up around then, not long after coming my own dream project—Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (TFU2).

TFU2 was some of the greatest times I’ve ever had, despite the ridiculous amount of crunch I put myself through to get it done right (some of which was self-imposed).  As a big Star Wars fan at the time (not so much anymore, believe it or not), it was all pretty surreal and I was having a lot of fun answering horribly geeky questions like “what’s the flying thing in the background in Attack of the Clones?”  An “aiwha.”  Yep, I knew it.  I own my shame.

Heh, still makes me smile.

After TFU2 I was back on Thor helping wrap that up, adding a ton of new FX and optimizing a lot of other FX that had been put in while I’d been off on TFU2’s production.  Will Kier was the Art lead on the game (actually, might have had the title of Director on that, I forget), and he was really inspiring and challenged me to push FX.  Thor for the Wii, by far, pushed more FX on screen than anything else I’d done…combat FX, environment, magic, it was nuts and constantly just barely making it for framerate.  It made converting the game to the Sony PSP a fucking nightmare, mind you, and depressed the shit out of me…but the Wii version I adored when it was done.  Some of my favorite FX work was the last boss fight in the game, against Mangog on top a ruined Asgard building in the moonlight.

I don’t think I’m really allowed to talk much about what happened after that, though.  The studio landed a big project fall 2010, in June 2011 the studio lost said big project and we laid off half of the place.  I know I’m still really sore even bringing that up and have to bite my tongue with my opinions, so in the interest of being “professional” for now we’ll just say it sucked for all parties involved.

Then it was next-gen demo work up until I decided to move on to Vigil Games, pretty much.  Learning Unreal and how to abuse Cascade (the particle tool), enjoying the real range of creative freedom that engine allowed me for visuals.  Blood that glistens in the light?  UV distortion on materials?  Shaders??  Hell yes!  I got a lot more into creating complex shaders than I ever thought I would, I’ll definitely miss getting to do that as much as I did there.  Techno-babble, I know.

It was time for me to move on, though.  I guess eventually everyone has to come to making hard decisions as to what they want out of their career, and I have fairly high ambitions for what I want to do.  It seemed like I was making my way up that ladder at Red Fly for awhile, but in the end I came to the conclusion that the only way I was going to grow in every sense of the word was moving on.  I’d been holding out for things that weren’t going to happen for well over a year, and was only hurting myself.

I went in and cleaned out the last of my things on Sunday.  It was hard, sad, lonely.  No one was there, it was just silent and me left to my own thoughts looking around.  Stood there for a good long while just staring, wondering, imagining.  Wishing I guess.

Anyhow…that was the goodbye.

So I started today at Vigil Games, and I’ve got to say that as far as first days go I’ve never been made to feel so welcome so quickly.  Very professional, left me very impressed and excited to see what the future brings there.  Working side by side with other VFX artists is extremely exciting and is going to push my work to the next level I think, I can’t wait to have them (hopefully) review my work and tear it apart and build it into something more.  I hope I can do the same for them, too.  Very inspiring!

Okay…that’s enough there now.  The drive’s a whole hell of a lot longer for me now (little over doubled) so I need to get my butt in bed.  G’night.

Share on Facebook

Finally transitioning from the land of “FX hell” at work…which for me is re-visiting FX in a game to optimize them for a lower-powered platform.  Sometimes this can actually be a little fun, kind of like a puzzle you’re putting together…but other times it’s frustrating as there really isn’t any one “clear cut” solution to optimizing these visual effects.  You can have a general budget of particles you can draw on screen, but where I can get away with 400 particles of snow flying past the camera in one scene, 20 screen-filling particles of smoke will murder the framerate.  It’s all give & take.  All in all, I freaking hate handheld systems.

Onto the new project today though, doing some fun test renders of FX studies in Max.  One of my goals is to approach some of the primary FX for the project in Max first, going for a CG-quality look, and then studying it and how we can mimic it in the game itself (rather than from scratch or using video reference that isn’t necessarily the style we’re aiming for).  I can’t really say a whole lot more than that and might be mean for even teasing that much, but…oh well.

That’s about it, just a quickie for tonight.  G’night all.

Share on Facebook

I had planned last year but ended up not submitting a proposal for a seminar; I’m very, very passionate about the visual effects field and see all sorts of problems and lackluster FX work in games that I often think is just a result of not thinking things through beforehand (though I’m sure some was just crappy artwork, it happens). 

I did, finally, submit one this year.  Wrapped it up and sent it off today, I hadn’t really realized how much I could do to upsell the submission though so I’m not especially optimistic about it making it through this year.  I knew the requirements…100 word self bio (I hate writing those), 200 word shipped titles history, 400 word description of your seminar and a 100 word “Attendee Takeaway” where I explain what people should walk out of the seminar knowing/how they are inspired.  I got all of that done, I hadn’t realized I could also do things like putting together a website showing off some of the topics I’d be discussing, or attaching a PowerPoint presentation (which is a requirement for Phase II, should you pass Phase I). 

The talk aims to, essentially, inspire people to work harder with creating their visual effects—paying more attention to detail in how they use them (or don’t) throughout their game—while teaching them some of the production hurdles and crunch-inducing problems that are bound to come up and how they can prepare for them or even work right around them.  The goal of the time saved comes full circle to the original point of the talk, meaning it gives the artist more time to work on FX wasting less time getting caught with their pants down when production slips.

The real bitch of it though was trying to pick a title for the talk.  I got everything entered, and then right there glaring at me was the “title” field.  I swear I must have stared at that thing for 10 minutes, then e-mailed a few people at work asking for suggestion.  Dustin Dobson, Producer extraordinaire (and a former FX artist himself) came up with a kick-ass title…

“Visual Effects: An Explosion of Practical Wisdom.”

Dustin along with Damon Waldrip gave me some great advice on reviewing my submission and offering some points to change, but many really great thanks goes to (and a bottle of some kind of alcohol if I get accepted) our studio’s Executive Producer, Mike “Mr. Mike” McShaffry.  From the moment I asked a question about submissions to submitting my final version he was making sure I was going to follow through, reviewing my early drafts and then suggesting I get some salty veteran reviews in on it to boot.  Thank you, sir!

Alright…bed time.  Before midnight, no less!  G’night!

Share on Facebook

A few of my friends have asked this recently though, folks I hadn’t talked to in a long time and while catching up they heard about it and were excited for me (I guess I’ve always been a Star Wars nut?).  It was a pretty cool moment and of course I thought “the circle is now complete…” 

The answer, though…is awesome.  It was great working on a Star Wars game, making The Force Unleashed II for the Nintendo Wii was a fantastic experience and one I certainly hope to repeat again in the near future.  I was skeptical going into it…maybe LucasArts (LEC) is horrible to work with, maybe working on something like this will kill Star Wars for me, maybe the project will suck, etc.  Not at all, I even put more hours/overtime/crunch in on this game than anything I’ve ever done (a lot of it self-imposed) and I still had a blast doing it.

It started at the end of last summer…one day I get called into our media room and find out we’re going to make a demo of what we would do for a Star Wars game on the Wii—everyone of course knows my affiliation with Star Wars as a fan from the lineup of Stormtroopers, Mandalorians & bounty hunters all lounging about on my desk—and after running a strike team on Ghostbusters and a big push on Mushroom Men for cinemas, they asked if I wanted to head up the demo team.  I wasn’t really sure if that meant actually lead it or just be the creative lead for the demo, but I was certainly excited.

While my actual experience leading the demo team was too negative and personal to post on here—professional discretion—the demo itself ended up coming out great.  We had an intro showing a Theta-class shuttle flying towards Coruscant and then landing on a platform outside the Jedi temple…ramps lowers and out walks Asajj Ventress, sabers in hand.  Doors shut behind her and she looks up at the camera and her sabers come to life.  The whole idea was to convey our presentation abilities, didn’t really have anything more to do with the demo than that and then led into her running around with just gorgeous animation, her skirt flowing about her so amazingly that it was almost as fun to watch that as it was to watch her cutting down droid after droid.  Battle droids and then out came Droidekas and Super Battle droids, it was fairly simple but fun to play and looked amazing.

LEC ended up digging the demo (obviously), we started up production on the game and while everyone was certainly limited by the very fast paced schedule there was a lot of excitement in the studio.  There’s nothing more that I love at work than feeling useful, and the sudden flood of geek-filled question pouring upon me about Star Wars lore was awesome.  I admit sometimes I felt pretty damn guilty that I knew the answer (for example, I knew when someone asked “what are those flying things on Kamino?” that they were aiwhas), and one favorite conversation was when we had a long discussion about how TIE Fighters actually have no life support inside of them while trying to address a story point.  Our…creative lead?  Lead designer?  I’m not sure his actual title on the game…James Clarendon, he really stepped up and immersed himself in learning too and started shocking the hell out of me about how much he’d come to know about Star Wars.  It was pretty great to see someone  take that much pride in getting things right in the game!

Working with LEC, at least from my world of working on CGI for cutscenes and running the Visual Effects for the entire game, was wonderful.  I was truthfully very scared they’d be overbearing and controlling and just suck the life out of it, but they were actually very supportive and open to suggestions.  Just like anything there were some suggestions we had to really push and try to prove they’d work, but they were always open to this and more than happy to admit when we were right.  It was a great, positive experience.  As a company I think they’re a little too gung-ho about layoffs there for me to ever want to work for LEC’s in-house development—I need job security I can trust—but working as a developer for them as our publisher is awesome.

The Visual Effects work was insane…it being a combat game, I spent a vast majority of my time trying to introduce subtle (and not so subtle) differences in the impact FX that came from your sabers upon hitting an enemy.  To me they always feel very rewarding while staying authentic feeling, just pushing the hell out of the Wii hardware and then scaling it back some every time our code team came after me (the gatekeepers of making sure that silky 30 frames per second can be maintained). 

The game itself…I can’t wait for everyone to get to play it.  At Red Fly we don’t do ports—we got a few glimpses of the XBOX 360 build just to make sure we were staying on the same page creatively with LEC’s internal team, but that was it…we did our own level design work and concept art for the most part, we made our own versions of their look and really optimized the approach being taken artistically to look far better on the Wii.  There isn’t much I can say about it yet since it hasn’t actually been released (October 26th), but I can definitely say that I feel we did a great job staying as true as we could to Star Wars and the fans out there.  We even managed to get in some really great fan service moments, there’s one in particular I conjured up that I am dying to see if it gets the reaction I was imagining. 

And multiplayer…it’s only been mentioned that there’s multiplayer on a fact sheet so all I can say is multiplayer exists…it’s a ton of fun, we held a few tournaments in the office playing it and they were always a blast.

And now time for bed…I’m freaking tired!  If anyone reads this and has extra questions they want to ask, please feel free to post them and I’ll answer them!

G’night!

Share on Facebook

So, like I said, it’s been a rough week but in the best way possible. We’re all just so passionate and pumped about thus project that everyone is giving it everything they have. I myself have been pushing a level of detail and attention I have never been able to do before now! For example, today I went in to work and created visual effects for a wall breaker (hurt the walls of this area and they become damaged, dented, messed up). The effect is just one, but it can randomly call other “meta” effects (sort of like linking to another effect inside of it) so that you can blow three of these walls up and they will all look different. Small example, but it’s a lot of work and a first.

It certainly does wear down on ya though. I’m not very good at the kind of extended hours others do–which is to say the late shift–and I have an easier time putting my extra hours in during the morning. It’s always a good idea to mix it up though, fact of the matter is most stay late instead of in early and it doesn’t make ya look so good to never stay at night, regardless of how many hours you may have done.

Hehe, guess I’m starting to grasp this concept of politics in the civilian world, go figure. Only took me 6 years!

Anyway, I meant to sleep over an hour ago and so I must. G’night.

Share on Facebook