A few people at work have pointed me towards this audio interview I gave after the MIGS talk at the end of last year (a summary of which is still forthcoming, but you can see the slides here if you have a magnifying glass). If you can put up with the dodgy accent there may be something of use in there.

Montreal International Game Summit 09 – Blogcritics Interview

It covers a few points I missed out of the talk and some thoughts on ME2’s romance custscenes. Having a long enough break from the project I’m now playing through the game with fresh eyes, and seeing everything in context I’m most happy with the Thane romance but can only see the green guy on Youtube as I’m not playing female.

Today in North America – Friday in Europe. Go pick it up for Xbox or PC!

This is the launch trailer, and I count some 75% of the shots here were done by the Montreal Cinematics team. So far the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, but I still nervously await the ultimate litmus test – the ever-critical girlfriend…

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 and out the door!

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 and a few others are sporting – just a shame it looks like such a sausage party…

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 you can read here.

Choice example at 1:35pm -  still as true as ever.

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, back home in Scotland it was exacly at the time of the big shift from the 2D of the 16bit consoles (SNES and Genesis) to the impending 3D revolution of the as-yet unrealeased PlayStation and N64. I still clearly recall being informed by my tour guide (Art Director Oz, who by some strange twist of fate now works just up the road from me in Montreal at local studo A2M) that it would be “a long time before we’ll be seeing round edges in games again” with the move to hard-edged low-poly games like the original Tomb Raider and Tekken. As such, I promptly ditched my computer and all my 2D skills and instead decided to apply for art college to get drunk and meet girls.

On completing my studies and joining the industry proper it was 5 years later and the old-hands I learned from and I were wrapping our heads around the leap from the original PlayStation to the PlayStation 2, with its analogue input and superior power and memory specifications. During this period a lot of over-estimation of these specs on our part resulted in much trial and error, (with the latter being most prevalent), and the unfortunately disproportionate ratio of actual creative-to-technical work was quite the learning experience. But hey, I didn’t know any better…

4 years later and I make the jump across the Atlantic. After a brief stint with the Xbox, it’s on to the Xbox360 (at the time, known as Xenon) and the then unfinished Unreal 3 engine. Again, lots of over-estimation of hardware specifications despite being some of the first developers to receive the new hardware kits and being the UE3 early-adopters. Again, having to relearn how to create animation in games from scratch as we apply new methods such as blending, additive animation, IK and an entirely new facial system, not to mention the poor artists who had to completely rethink their workflows with the move to normal maps and Z-brush modelling.

So here we are once more. 5 years later and on the verge of when another hardware generation cycle is expected to be announced, so I’m going to put it like this…

Can you imagine how crippled the art of filmmaking would be if every time shooting starts the vast majority of the crew’s time is spent creating reels of film and re-designing how it works inside the camera? If every time an author sits down to work on his or her next bestseller they must first spend years establishing workflows for simply getting the words down on the page? And every new album is delayed months as your favourite band is holed up in the studio, luthering their own guitars?

For the first time ever I’m coming into work and purely creating art. Not worrying about whether I’ll get the tech in time to finish the workload. Not dealing with crashes, bugs, delays and instead just knowing that when I want something to work, it does. For the first time in my career I’m spending 100% of my day creating mature, thought-provoking content, and it’s really something of a marvel to be discussing character motivation and story arcs safe in the knowledge that everything else is taken care of.

To this end you can keep your new hardware and your fancy camera inputs and magic wands, because I’m concenrating on content.

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 wait until the real deal to throw it up here.

Virtually all of the cutscenes in both videos were done by our team here in Montreal, so a special shout out to the hard work of the guys both here and in Edmonton, and Parrish’s moustache.

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 really cool way, punch the URL in here.

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’ development.

Above is the poster I drew up for the event using the IGDA template, (click for the hi-res), exclusively featuring the first actual screenshot of the game released to the public. If you’re in Montreal on the 20th why not drop by and make a night of it – details in the poster.