A story: 

One day QA was handed a game. The handoff date was still weeks away so we put it at the bottom of our priority queue. Little did we know, the game's Producer had promised the Studio Director that it would be handed off early. By the time we found out, the early handoff was the next day and we hadn't started yet. 

It was going to be late. 

The Studio Director heard this and sent our department a blast email, demanding an explanation from our Manager. The problem is, our Manager was out of town and unreachable. Waiting wasn't an option - tempers were flaring and blame being cast - so as the senior team member I volunteered to respond. 

I wrote a detailed (and carefully worded) account of what had happened. In short: We'd followed the documentation we had, the promised early release had been verbal and the documentation had never been updated. We'd had no way to know. 

It worked. 

The situation was diffused and QA was out of the crosshairs. Both my Manager and the Studio Director thanked me for how I'd handled it. 

This was one of my first experiences dealing with the politics and tensions that can happen in production. It was a valuable learning experience, and definitely boosted my confidence in dealing with executives.

I'm also sure this contributed to my being promoted to Assistant Producer shortly thereafter.

PS: This post is courtesy of Kerri Twigg's ResuMAY workshop. I hadn't thought about it in years until I had to think about the professional moments that shaped me. This particular story doesn't belong on a resume, but now that I've remembered it I'll be sure to keep it in my back pocket during interviews.

#CareerStories, #ProfessionalGrowth

I'm going to try to keep up with blogging again. It may not be often, but sharing your thoughts and WIPs is a good practice. I've imported my old art blog here (which may or may not be a good idea), so at least I'm not staring at a blank screen.

Here's hoping!

I finally finished my Mjolnir model (took a while, since I’ve only had my lunch breaks free for a few weeks now). I’m pretty happy with the results, and played around getting a few renders of it to show off.

• Polygons: 662 (tris)
• Textures: Diffuse, Normal, Spec, and Emissive at 2048x2048
• Original design and textures (using one piece of royalty free clip art)
• Modeled in Modo
• Textured in Photoshop and nDo
• Real time renders from Marmoset Toolbag

This is a follow up to my previous post about Spec Ops: The Line.

I was doing some reading about the game and the reaction to it and I came across this three part interview with the head writers from both Spec Ops and Far Cry 3. It’s a fantastic insight into how each chose to take on shooter conventions, their reasons for doing it, and how they went about it.

Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

This passage from the first article, by Spec Ops writer Walt Williams about an experience he had during his short military career, really struck me:

There’s the level in Modern Warfare where you’re in the plane and everyone’s running from the bombs and machinegunning. [spoiler removed]. One of those pilots came and showed us a video – they came to the trainees and showed us what they were doing. There was a part in the video where they were leading a guy. They were using the machinegun to lead him. He was hiding under trucks. You could hear the pilots joking about it on the video. Everyone in the room was laughing. And that seemed very weird to me. I understood that this was someone we were technically at war with, and so the attack was something justified, but the tone and the actions in the attack seemed very off. That a room full of people would find this humorous, something to laugh at.

Admittedly, yes, it’s just a white dot on a black screen. But we were still watching footage of people being killed. This is actual footage of people dying. It’s not funny. That was the moment for me, when I was in the military, where I realized, “I don’t know that this is for me.” Not that I’m anti-military. I’m extremely pro-military. I believe it’s an institution that’s necessary and the people that choose to join it feel a calling. But obviously, it’s just not for me. That’s just always stuck with me.

Here’s another from a bit later that mirrors some of my own thoughts:

[…] we’ve moved beyond irony. The next obvious step for us is sincerity, being honest about the type of things that we make and being honest about how we’ve allowed ourselves to disconnect from our art and forcing ourselves to connect with it again. Once we start being honest and being critical internally of what we make, that’s how you grow up. You have to be able to look honestly at yourself as a person, see where you make mistakes, how you treat people and things like that, if you ever want to grow as a person. What we have to do now as an industry is look and see where we are strongest, where we are weakest, and what we’re lying to ourselves about.

There’s so much more in that interview that I could end up quoting the whole thing. It’s absolutely worth a read in you’re at all interested in game design, game writing, the future of games, interactive narrative, the relationship of games to society and morality, the increasing use of social commentary and satire in games, etc.

It’s also interesting to note how much this game has altered how I view other games. I was watching a trailer for another shooter today, and though it looked like a great shooter, I found it off-putting. I kept thinking that there was no sense of gravity to any of it. I’m sure that will fade quickly, but probably not completely. Check that, hopefully not completely.

I finally got the chance to play through “Spec Ops: The Line” the other day (I know I’m a year late, so sue me).

Like a powerful movie that you can’t stop mulling over even days after you saw it, I can’t get this game out of my head. I know there have been complaints about some control issues, and a few graphical problems, but I don’t care, this is an important game. It’s the modern war shooter for people who hate modern war shooters. It lets you live out every “heroic” moment you could ever ask for, then unflinchingly shows you the consequences of your actions. Never before have I felt bad about winning. Never before have I honestly wondered if maybe I was the bad guy after all.

I won’t spoil anything more, story-wise. The writing is superb, the voice acting is excellent, and despite a few glitches here and there the graphics, audio design, and enemy AI are fantastic. The real star for me though (aside from the story) is the level design. The environments are gorgeously conceived and executed. The action flows through them as well as any game I’ve played, and the chilling spectacle of a gleaming metropolis buried by sand storms and ravaged by war is yet another act of psychological warfare against the player. Hats off to the level designers and environmental artists.

I would recommend this to anyone who dislikes the mindless heroic fantasy of most modern war shooters (or most shooters of any kind for that matter). Like the most recent Deus Ex, Spec Ops: The Line refuses to talk down to its players. It isn’t subtle, but neither is it patronising as it foists upon the player questions of ethics and morality, of the nature of war and survival, and of what it really means to play and enjoy this sort of sadistic power fantasy.

As I said, this is an important game. Games are capable of so much more than most suspect. Just as they can be art, simply existing as beautiful experiences (Dear Esther, Journey), they can also tell compelling stories and pose challenging questions (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Spec Ops: The Line). I would go so far as to suggest that this is a step towards games as literature.

Even if it wasn’t entirely successful among its intended core audience, this is how entertainment mediums mature. This is how games finally, truely grow up.

Another look at a few of the hand painted assets I’ve put together for our mobile game project. Every new asset in this style involves new things I’ve never done before so it’s taking a while, but I’m having a lot of fun figuring it out.

Modeled and rendered in Modo, textured using Photoshop and nDo.

I’m working on some assets for a simple project I’m working on with some friends (one of two now). I’m trying a different texturing style with this one, going for a softer, hand painted look to complement the simplified geometry and game play.

I started with the simplest asset, a wooden crate, as a proof if concept. So far I really like it.

I’ll post more as I have it.

I finally finished the environment I’ve been working on off and on all quarter. I’ve grabbed some screen shots to share. These are all simple screen grabs taken in Unity with all of the image effects turned on. I’ll have this on my site to play soon, though I won’t be able to include the sun rays or depth of field effects in the web player for performance reasons.

For the record, everything here was modeled, textured, and assembled by me, with the exception of the trees, which are Unity’s built in terrain trees.

A quick detail render showing a few of the textures from the environment I’m still trying to finish in time to include for the Portfolio Show next Thursday.

Jeremiah Clark - Demo Reel, Winter 2013 v1.1 (by Jeremiah Clark)