Valve have posted the slides of Mike Booth’s recent Stanford AIIDE-09 conference presentation. While only the first section on path-finding will likely be of most interest to animators, he also goes some way to breaking down the famed AI Director used to dynamically tailor the game experience for each new playthrough. They certainly give the [...]

In a period where the Australian government appears to be going on a rampage censoring games left, right and centre, it’s worth taking stock of the type of thing they do deem appropriate for consumption, namely the ways horror hero Jason Voorhees has killed his many victims over the years in all 12 of the [...]

Here’s a fantastic game-influenced pixel animation from director Jérémie Périn. Hilarious, and about as NSFW as a bunch of moving pixels can be. [via Motionographer]

This week Epic released their Unreal3 SDK for free download for non-commercial use, which is the same development software we use here to create Mass Effect 2 (minus custom bells and whistles). I’d recommend this over any other engine for those wanting to break into the industry right now as it’s fast becoming a standard [...]

With two weeks to go from today, I thought I should plug that I’ll be speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit, with the talk entitled Cinematics Sans Cutscenes. Here is the abstract: Cutscenes are a divisive subject amongst videogame developers. We rely on them as a relatively production-safe solution for imparting exposition and story [...]

I’m currently playing through this one on my new PS3 slim and must say that of all the unique features Little Big Planet has, the puppet-like emoting is the most fun I’ve had in ages. Here’s a little bit of info on the animation in (I believe the incoming PSP version of) the game. Looks [...]

Even this long after my 4-year tenure at art college, the word “installation” still makes me want to vomit. However, these fantastic images by Esther Stocker caught my eye because of their resemblence to the many test maps we’ll create in the course of trying out various gameplay features in game development.

Another work-related post – three in a row! In a break from the norm, I’m not involved at all in the in-game animations for the sequel – so it’s cool to see several shots from one of my romance scenes ahead of the game’s realease.  Not long to go now until this project is done [...]

Today marks my first year back at BioWare, and therefore (in my head anyway) the 1st anniversary of BioWare Montreal. No longer the youngest kid on the block, we had our very first ever studio photo earlier this month to commemorate the occasion, courtesy of Bartek. Note the cool Mass Effect 2 N7 shirts I [...]

The other week an old highschool friend of mine now residing in NY contacted me for a typical “day in the life” scenario from the games industry. While it’s not representative of my current situation, (which is virtually meeting-free), I gave him an example of the height of the end of Mass Effect 1 that [...]

Your videogame developer association is at a crossroads. The senior board staff are leaving left, right and centre and member apathy is at an all-time high. You’re looking for something, anything, to drum up passion once more in 13,000+ strong community where the vast majority of members are signed up automatically by employers often without [...]

I loved the setting and scenario in their previous effort, Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, but felt the narrative methods used were a step backward 20 years, being more something akin to Dragon’s Lair. Nevertheless, some pretty impressive numbers here: Your partner at Quantic Dream, Guillaume de Fondaumière, has said that this is the biggest motion-capture project attempted [...]

Still with Capcom’s fighter, the more I play it the more I realise the actual animation is merely “functional”, but I imagine that’s what is required to ship a reboot of a franchise where every animation is subject to timing changes for game balancing throughout the project. What appeals most about this visuals are the [...]

An enterprising player has figured out how to swap out animation sets on the PC version of Streetfighter IV, to great comic effect. What’s most interesting about this is that it’s all handled very gracefully (doesn’t break the system, which could have happened so easily) revealing a little about how their animation is stored. That [...]

Those around me will no doubt by now be sick of talk about the diet I’ve been on for the last few months. For the record, I’ve always had a distaste for what I call the “Game Developer Physique” sported by so many of our contemporaries, so any slip towards that abyss I consider a [...]

By some strange paradox, E3′s lack of announcements regarding the next “next generation” of hardware has prompted many news sites (and publishers) so speculate as to when the next cycle will begin. When I first began animating games at home in my highschool years and was invited up to the local game studio, DMA Design, [...]

“I normally don’t give guns to little girls, know what I’m saying, I usually give something else, but you know hey, don’t tell anyone I said that…”

The other day the fancy laptop turned out to be not so fancy after all and crapped out on me after just a few months, so in the interim I’ve been using the iPhone for surfing duties and comandeering MJ’s computer while she busies herself ranking up on Call of Duty 4, (it sounds great [...]

In a recent japanese videogame tech magazine, (why don’t we have these?), Namco discusses the optimisation of Soul Calibur’s female skeletons from the PS3 to the PSP: In both Soul Calibur IV and Soul Calibur Broken Destiny, everything, including fabrics, is animated by “bones”. On the PS3, there are two separate bones in each breast, [...]

This week is all about E3, and this time it’s going back to the way it should be – all loud noises, special announcements and awesome presentations on a world stage. We released a preview video some weeks ago which will forever be known internally as “the one with Parrish’s moustache”, but I wanted to [...]

Still on my pixel art trip, I created this out of fridge magnets the other day. Coincidentally, one of the guys at work forwarded this page by SNK Playmore illustrating their methods for pixel art creation, (which they refer to as “Dot Art”.) While I’ve always been a fan of Capcom’s games, I do appreciate [...]

A kid and a giant bird dog… sheer genius.

Here’s the product of a rainy Sunday afternoon – a twist on the original purchase here. I took bad when we first moved from pixels to the anti-aliased imagery of photoshop because of the loss of control, so it’s nice to see pixel art becoming a decorative retro-style all of its own.

Well done to Tony and the rest of the Dragon Age Cinematics team in Edmonton on the latest trailer for Dragon Age  – they’re really able to get a lot on screen at once! Warning: This isn’t for kids… On another note, if you’d like to see this or any other YouTube video in a [...]

On a recent road trip down to NYC for the long weekend, MJ and I were customarily delayed a little extra at the border control due to my non-Canadian status. The conversation with the patrol officer went a little like this: Officer: What is your status in Canada? Me: I’m on a work permit. Officer: [...]

A week on Wednesday two of Edmonton’s finest, Dusty and Corey, will be flying into town to give an updated version of their GDC talk on our production process, part of which uses one of the cutscenes we did here in Montreal last year to help illustrate the various stages of iteration in our levels’ [...]

Last summer, Sony announced the cancellation of internal projects The Getaway 3 and Eight Days, with the former garnering most of the press. Sometime later, a video demonstrating the basic navigation and cover system of Eight Days was uploaded to YouTube by near-legendary former BioWare/Ubisoft/Sony (& more) animator Jim Jagger, demonstrating a system far in [...]

Have I said before that I’m a sucker for isometric views? Here’s a cool short illustrating the failure of our modern financial system in a beautifully lit manner. [via No fat clips!!!]

This is awesome, and so close to home it hurts. I often say that the lowest and most indefensible point of working in games is that many of them consist of nothing more that shooting people in the face. [via lightspeedchick]

I loved the original Techno Viking, so I nearly fell out of my chair laughing upon stumbling across this hilarious parody done by Austin and his team over at my sister studio, Pandemic.

I’ve been criticised in the past for my practice of taking over-long bathroom visits, as well as the variety of entertainment I’ll take in there with me to make those extended stays more productive – ranging from books and magazines to my DS, ipod, laptop, and even the guitar. The truth is, I can’t think [...]

In a follow-up to the recent post on the AIAS Awards relating to animation, I must congratulate Dave (and his team) on winning the Outstanding Achievement in Animation category. If any of you out there would like to work with “The Academy Award Winning Animation Director”, sign up here as he recently rejoined our team, [...]

The keen-eyed among you may have noticed the description on the left has been somewhat cryptic for some time now, referring to my secret location… The fact is I’ve been working on a new and exciting project and team inception for the last 6 months, and with both being officially announced I can finally reveal [...]

Despite a clearly phoned-in voice over, Fox News’ Gamers Weekly has posted a video highlighting Resident Evil 5′s use of a Virtual Camera in the production of its cutscenes. This technique has intrigued me for some time, though equally interesting was the section showing the realtime feedback on the fully skinned and textured ingame characters. [...]

Had this sent to me at work today – class. I’m pretty sure this was how game mocap, (or at least game voice-over), used to get done. In all seriousness though, there is something to be said for directing actors to do something other than the actual action to recieve your desired results.

In December over on the Left 4 Dead blog, Valve’s Jason Mitchell posted an insightful look into the making of the Left 4 Dead intro movie, arguably some of the best acting and cinematics done to date in videogames. It appears to have been an incredibly iterative process, with the animatics rigourously playtested in the [...]

It’s Oscar season. More importantly for this space however, the nominations for the 2008 Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences awards are in. Why is this relevant? Because unlike most end-of-year videogame awards these are peer-based, not to mention having two awards devoted to animation and character performance. Additionally, after missing out on Console Game [...]

At the risk of coming across as a fanboy, here is a second dose of Metal Gear 4 details divulged on the net. It appears that the Kojima Productions team did the rounds quite a bit post-release as it includes yet more images and information on the making of Metal Gear 4. The image to [...]

…for not screwing it up. In the likely event that I’ll change this sometime, here’s my XBOX avatar as of January 20th 2009, for posterity.

The latest issue of IdN magazine features an interview with motion graphics studio Logan’s Alexei Tylevich on his collaboration with Hideo Kojima to create the ten tv-spot-style intros for Metal Gear Solid 4, revealing a fair assessment of game development through the eyes of a design studio. While what we’re doing is very segmented – [...]

It looks like the iPhone is now officially a gaming machine, with the release of Rolando – the first game to be neither an overly-sensitive console knock-off or one of the throngs of amateur offerings. As much as I appreciate their balls though, I’m still unsure as to whether or not the development team can [...]

Just watching the Golden Globes awards there, and the Best Animated Feature award was announced with the preface that the nominees’, (Wall-E, Bolt and Kung Fu Panda), collective box-office income amounted to the impressive half-billion dollars. That’s the same sum GTA4 took in just its first week – I guess kids just don’t have that [...]

Check out these initial pre-vis tests for the Dark Knight movie’s Batpod, done by my old college buddy (and fantastic animator), the equally fantastically named Brendan Body. One of my most enjoyable parts of game development is the pre-visualisation stage preceeding pre-production. It’s when your imagination can run wild before the harsh realities of real [...]