The following is a sample of the games I have worked on during my career in the games industry.
Imperator was to be an MMO featuring a back story where Rome never fell and eventually became a spacefaring race. While the project was ultimately cancelled in the summer of 2005 it still represents a major milestone in game development for Mythic. Imperator featured pixel and vertex shader technology, normal maps, parallax maps, and entirely new animation and lighting systems.
I was hired at Mythic as the special effects artist for Imperator. I soon switched roles to become Mythic's Lead Technical Artist. Along with various special effects in Imperator I created systems to control the flow of ground based and flying traffic in Rome, flocking scripts to aid in the creation and animation of birds, and a level building tool that was to be used to design the interior spaces of buildings.
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Under contract to Sony Online Entertainment, Lodestone started work on this third person fantasy role playing game in the spring of 2003. Due to budgetary constraints SOE cancelled the project in the fall of 2003. In that short time, though, Lodestone managed to get a playable demo of Soul Forge running. The demo has two playable characters, a complete dungeon, and four different AI creatures.
My duties on the project included overseeing a team of four artists, working to define the look and feel of the game, creating all necessary technical documentation, helping to drive the process of creating our tile based dungeon technology and tools, and creating all required particle effects.
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Download the Soul Forge gameplay video.
Late in 2002 Lodestone Games, LLC. was asked by Sony Online Entertainment to create the real-time weather and environment system for Planetside.
The weather system features a moving display of storm activity that is visible from the world map view in the game. The storms on the map correlate exactly to weather activity within the game world. Players can watch cloud fronts roll in and out overhead and experience differing levels of rainfall and snowfall, depending on the severity of the storm. Visibility is also changed based on storm intensity.
Acting as art director on the project it was my job to work with the Planetside team in St. Louis to determine what weather related art assets we could integrate into the current game engine. From that information functional specifications were written and requests for engine enhancements, where necessary were made. I also oversaw the team of three artists that worked on the 2D and 3D artwork for the particle effects, cloud layers, and UI weather map. In addition to those duties I contributed artwork for the weather effects.
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Under contract from Sony Online Entertainment, Lodestone Games started production of Driving Force in the fall of 2001 and worked on the game for a little over a year. During that time a new 3D engine and was created, a third party physics system was integrated, a development team was built, and a very featured playable version of the game was made. The art requirements for the game were strict, ranging from assets and animations for exact simulations of car suspensions to game levels that measured over 10Km on a side and had ~20Km of roads, hundreds of buildings, and thousands of trees.
My duties on the project included hiring all of the artists, overseeing the creation of the look and feel and all functional prototypes, creating the art design specification, helping to create the specifications for the 3D engine, writing in house art tools, designing the game logo, and working on level design and the special effects. Creating all of the required art assets with only three other artists meant that the foundational work for the art specs had to be perfect, as there wasn't the time or manpower for mistakes.
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Download the Driving Force gameplay video.
Air Warrior was the first PC based graphical online game. It first appeared on the GEnie online service in the mid 1980s and ran, in various forms and on various services and the internet, until Electronic Arts shut it down in December of 2001.
Air Warrior IV was the working title for what was going to be the latest update to the Air Warrior franchise.
I worked on three box releases of Air Warrior (SVGA Air Warrior, Air Warrior II, and Air Warrior III), along with numerous online distributed versions. For those releases I worked on the manual, edited the opening videos, developed the pre-game interface and contributed to the 3D models and textures.
Air Warrior IV was going to be a complete rewrite of the game with a new 3D engine and physics system. As art director on the project I oversaw the gathering of historical source material, the creation of the 3D models and 2D textures, the creation of the environment, and the overall look of the game. I also contributed textures for some of the aircraft and did all of the particle effects.
The updated physics system used a virtual wind-tunnel to create aircraft performance data that was used at run time. In addition to my art director duties I oversaw, and contributed to, the production of the engineering models that were fed into the wind-tunnel application.
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Download the Air Warrior III opening video.
While finished and ready for publication and launch, BattleTech: 3025 was cancelled by Electronic Arts in the fall of 2001. BattleTech: 3025 was a new game based on FASA's MechWarrior property. It was a persistent world online game with a strong first-person-shooter element to it. As technical art director I helped develop the build, animation, texturing, and LOD specifications for the 20+ mech models that were in the game. I also contributed to the terrain technology. The game client built the terrains in real time based on a random number seed from the host and algorithms to controlled how a base set of textures and static objects would be placed depending on altitude, slope, and other criteria. I created all of the special effects and most of the LOD models for the game.
The most amazing thing about BattleTech: 3025 was that the entire game fit into a 16MB download package, but still had box game production values. Without strong art specifications and a close working relationship between the artists and the programmers it would've been impossible to fit that much content into such a small space.
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