Nice mate I remember reading some of this as it was happening back in the day and its still exciting lol

Dave

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From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?"

Been to a few of them, no matter how some one packages it, it still sucks..........dave

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Avatar Challenge Winner 2010

Year 5 (continued)

After the ultimate meeting of bad news, the group got a bit down in the dumps. Perfectly understandable. I especially wasn't very happy. This was my first game industry job and I love it and it was in danger of being taken away from me. The SoR group were tight-knit and good friends. The Outlaw Studio guys were still relatively new to the team and were working on their own project, so while they were sympathetic, and weren't necessarily immune from the repercussions of the cancellation, they weren't as close to the chopping block as many of us. It would still be a few days before we really knew who would be staying and who we would be saying good bye to.

Lucky for the new guy, he managed to get on the Johnny Whatever project that Outlaw were working on and was spared losing his brand new job! Not so lucky for the rest of the SoR team though. We lost a large chunk of the team. People who weren't laid off left on their own to go to new jobs they found.

At the end, though, I managed to hang on to my job and even got offered a permanent position with a salary increase! Once the dust cleared, I looked around and found that the original Shadow of the Ring art team had reduced to literally our concept artist, our art director.... and me. I was the only staff artist on whatever Fever Pitch was going to be going on to next!

Well, our boss knew what he wanted to do right away and we got started.

Conquest 2

Immediately, the now-much-smaller team began brainstorming on a sequel to Fever Pitch's original game, Conquest. We would add a new race, improve the graphics with new tech, it'd be awesome! And yes, I got excited again! And a bit nervous. I was the only staff artist on the project! So I would have a lot of work to do. The art director was pulling double duty helping with regular art assignments as well, so I wasn't working in a vacuum, but it was going to be a challenge. But I was up to it! I even started getting invited to Leads meetings. Afterall, I was pretty much the only non-lead on the project anyway, so what's one more person?

My second project had begun!

Next:
Johnny who?

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

that would have been pretty damn sad if they left you out of the meetings...

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D

Year 5 (continued)

At this point in the year, it was about April or so. That meant E3 was just a couple of months away and Warthog (our parent company) wanted us to spend the next weeks creating a demo for something that could be shown and, hopefully, picked up by a publisher to get us a new deal.

So, we did just that. Using the old Conquest engine, and not really having the time to do anything too drastic, we set about updating the engine with the newest tech on the block, ie. normal maps and cool pixel shaders. This technology was still pretty cutting edge for the time and we knew that if we were able to come out within the next year or so, we'd have the first RTS using the new tech and would get more eyes on us, which is always a good thing.

As the sole staff artist on the team, I got a lot of the work. My art director focused on helping with concept art and creating a cool cinematic to show off some eye candy. I was to do the majority of the actual in-game work.

So, Conquest 2 was a sci-fi Real-Time Strategy game... like Starcraft. The original Conquest was, admittedly, a bit of a Starcraft clone. It had three races: human (Terrans), energy based (Celareons), and insectoid (Mantis). Very similar to Starcraft's Terrans (yep, same name), Protoss, and Zerg.

With Conquest 2, we wanted to update and improve and really make the races distinct and different. We also wanted to add a 4th race, the Vyrium. This would be our opportunity to drastically get away from the Starcraft shadow and carve our own path. Because we had so little time, we made some quick and dirty units to represent the new Vyrium race for the demo. In truth, the actual Vyrium would be much different in the final product, but we needed something to show.

I went about creating new space backgrounds, new planets and asteroids, new ships and effects... lots of stuff!

E3 came and we had a good showing and got a little press. We then got back to work on the actual game! Most of the ship work was going to be completely redone. We started working on the technology that would become our real-time shader engine. It was very cool! I'll get back to that at some point, but it was developed by our graphics programmer named Ryan. He's pretty much a genius!

We started developing the story as well and I was really happy to get to be a part of the story meetings. I really enjoyed that part of it! We were reworking the races and what they were and it was pretty exciting stuff. The Celareon energy beings, for example, were being revamped quite a bit. They were originally just Protos-clones... ritualistic, kinda high-and-mighty, superior intellect and all that. This time we were revealing that the Celareons were actually composed of spirit energy... that when "born" a Celareon gets funneled into a containment suit to function, otherwise, their energy (or "soul") would dissipate.

The Vyrium race were revealed to be slaves of the Celareons that managed to break away and form their own society using captured tech. Their race's technology was a hodge podge of Mantis, Celareon, and Terran ships and structures and had a very unique look.

Anyway, I can get more into the story later if you guys want, as it turned out pretty neat, but I'm getting long. I'll talk about what happened next, and what was going on with those Johnny Whatever guys like I was planning to in the next post!

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

In the Meantime...

So, during this whole Shadow of the Ring getting canceled, working on Conquest 2 time, the team that was brought on from the now-defunct Outlaw Studios was working on Johnny Whatever for the Xbox and PS2. It was pretty cool. A music game that predated Guitar Hero and had you creating songs with the face buttons ala Ocarina of Time, except more in depth. They were working hard on getting a publisher and for a while there, it seemed like they were going to get published by Sega. But then it all suddenly went south.

At the time, this was all unknown to me, and I have to admit that it's still all info I got from other people so who knows how much truth there was to it. But apparently, the boss of the Outlaw team wasn't too pleased with Warthog and seemed to think all of us on the SoR team were a bunch of hacks and wanted to have nothing to do with us. I remember always thinking how strange it was that none of the Outlaw guys ever really wanted to mingle or anything with the rest of us. It was as if we were totally separate even though we shared office space. I know now that this is actually pretty common, but at that time, it seemed odd to me considering how close everyone on my team was.

Anyway, so we're all being ignored, which was weird, but whatever. We were all excited for the JW guys when it seemed like Sega was picking up the project. However, suddenly Sega dropped out and I remember the boss of the studio (as in, over both teams) was seriously ticked off about something.

So, again, I heard this from a guy who heard it from a guy, but it would seem that as the studio head was negotiating with Sega, the director of the Johnny Whatever project contacted the Sega representative himself and said that it would be best to work with the Outlaw team directly so that they could be funded separately from Warthog... so that he could separate his team from Warthog completely. Well, Sega was obviously not impressed, and subsequently dropped the project altogether. So he pretty much sabotaged his own team so that he wouldn't have to work with the Warthog company... seems wacko, don't you think? I guess he thought Sega would agree with him and they'd form some new studio to work for Sega I guess? I don't know. Anyway, whatever really happened, Johnny Whatever was without a publisher.

This was around the time we were working on Conquest 2.

So this brings us to the end of 2004 and starting 2005... little did we know that things were going to be getting even crazier!

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

Year 6 - 2005

The beginning of the end!

Well, around this time, we had another really big studio meeting. Warthog (then composed of several studios around the world, including us the Texas/US branch) was in financial trouble. And they were selling. The good news was this would mean that we could keep our jobs! The bad news was who we were being sold to.

GIZMONDO.

Yeah, you might react the same way we did... "who?"

I remember thinking at the time that I had no idea who Gizmondo was, but whatever, we get to keep our jobs and keep making Conquest 2, so woo hoo right!?

Wrong.

Turns out Gizmondo was also the name of THE Gizmondo... a handheld gaming device that was in development. And they had zero interest in developing any game that wasn't going on the Gizmondo. Which meant... Conquest 2 was officially cancelled.

Ugh!

But what about Johnny Whatever? Oh, it's not canceled. They're going to PORT Johnny Whatever to the Gizmondo and make it a Giz game!

The Outlaw team were NOT pleased. To be honest, Johnny Whatever looked awesome on the Xbox and PS2 and the idea of taking this game and shrinking it down to some sub-PSP hardware was really heart breaking.

Over the next couple months, 90% of the people who were working on Johnny Whatever left the company. Several people who were working on Conquest 2 left the company as well. And to be honest, I was very tempted to leave too. I mean... Gizmondo? Really? I remember thinking AT THE MEETING, the very first meeting where they were telling us this that there was a 0% chance that this thing was going to be successful. There was no way. No doubt in my mind.

But I stayed for another year. Because the people I was working with, the core group that I'd been working with from the beginning were like a family. Soon after realizing that Conquest 2 was officially cancelled and Gizmondo wanted us to make something else, we started brainstorming. A few people from Outlaw stayed because they wanted the chance to make something simple and figured this would be a good chance for their ideas to actually get made.

After a couple months of brainstorming, designing, and prototyping, we came up with our next project:

Hit & Myth!

For the Gizmondo!

Yeah....

Next: Authorship?

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

i didn't actually know there were handheld consoles other than the nintendo and playstation ones and those ones with all the brick games on them...

in fact i didn't know anyone outside japan made handheld consoles...

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D

Here's what it looked like:

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

I remember gametrailers making fun of this

Year 6 (continued)

Hit & Myth became our next project, developed exclusively for the Gizmondo. Oh yeah, and I was the only artist left after a mass exodus from the studio by people jumping ship. Essentially, after the ashes cleared, we were back down to our original core team from when I started, plus a couple of others who managed to get into the beat of our office culture.

We took some time to develop some ideas, concepts, and so on. Our original idea would be a crazy, humor-filled game that took place over lots of different themed levels. We'd have 4 different characters you could choose from, all with different abilities and personalities. These 4 characters were a medieval knight, a blue-haired Sasquatch, a hot female pirate, and... a leprechaun.

The game would be a top-down twin-stick shooter. This was chosen because our super-talented graphics programmer had been spending his free time developing a twin-stick shooter game engine that would work on mobile devices all on his own. The company licensed it from him and had a great head start on getting the game into development.

The levels would be themed upon lots of royalty-free pop culture... Alice in Wonderland, Christmas, Halloween, Sci-Fi, Hell, etc.

Our great concept artist developed some starting concepts for me to work off of, and I got started! I first began work on Cadbury, the medieval knight, and his trusty steed that he rode into battle. He was armed with a crossbow and it could be upgraded with powerups.

Eventually, as time went on, we realized that we were not going to be able to have 4 main characters and get them all voiced with all of the lines that we had written. So we paired it down to just Cadbury and all of the other choices got thrown out. Cadbury lost his horse (since from above it didn't really read very well) and instead of a crossbow was given a sci-fi laser rifle. We thought the idea of a knight weilding a futuristic weapon would be pretty funny.

After a few months, I got pulled aside by my boss. We were going to be hiring some more artists and he wanted me to be the Art Lead on the project, overseeing the new hires. I was floored! I had only been in the game industry a couple years at this point, so to be made a Lead so soon really blew me away.

Hopefully I would do a good job!

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

More, must here more! Update man, update!

Sorry been busy. I actually just accepted a new job, so my career story seems to have been extended!

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-Mike
The Maya Toolbelt

Wow, congrats! Looking forward to updates

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-stwert

Website - Blog - YouTube - Vimeo - Facebook - Twitter

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congrats on the new job!
i wish i could accept a new job...

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D