Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Basically a total conversion of Unreal Tournament, I integrated every character, (we later had several races), weapon and vehicle into the Unreal 3 engine, including rigging, skinning & animating, setting up shaders and scripting the vehicle handling and cameras.

It was a fun diversion for a few months and one which I believe proved the studio’s initiative for multiplayer content, but ultimately one that led to my departure, with the studio’s future being out of sync with my own goals.

A summary of their GDC 2011 talk, my extremely talented team-mates Aleissia Laidacker and Nic Barbeau take us through Brotherhood’s Crowd Life, Data-Driven AI and Animation Systems.

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I initially thought this would be another coffee-table art book celebrating the long journey from pixels and sprites to the fully mocapped characters we enjoy today, and this assumption met disappointment as aesthetically the book is all over the place. Each spread is customised to the game in question for better or worse, and many of the screenshots showing less-than-flattering views of games I know to have much more to offer visually as well as featuring a notable absence of any form of concept art.

Thankfully, the term “art” appears to cover more of a general creative expression than just visual, with selection criteria including creative use of technologies, and how world events and popular culture influenced the games; referring to games as “an artistic medium, both technologically and creatively”. Broken down into four epochs of the authors’ determination, the book chronologically charts the evolution of the medium in a series of eighty 2-page spreads, voted for by the public from an assembled pool of 240.

Where the book shines is in the blurb accompanying each game, which more often than not features insightful commentary on the game’s relevance to the medium – sometimes providing societal references from which they were drawn, and often their place in the technological progression. Perhaps of most interest to the casual reader, (i.e. videogame fan), will be the colourful anectdotes on the game’s creation. One good example is Shigeru Miyamoto’s supposed inspiration for the Zelda series being taken from his real life lamp-lit exploration of  forest caves as a child. I myself  noted the near carbon-copy similarities between the layout of Hyrule Field and the game series’ development home of Kyoto when visiting there some years ago.

There’s a lot to gain from a developer’s perspective also. Of perhaps even more value are the exclusive interviews with industry vets – though I must admit I haven’t heard of the half of them. Ploughing the usual roster from the speaking circuit, there’s an injection of relevance from the likes of the ever-entertaining Tim Schafer. Notably, when taken out of the context of a web interview and placed into a book like this, his hilarious musings are given an added weight. “I didn’t like the way early 3D appeared; it always looked like someone had printed an image of a body or a face and stretched it over a bunch of cardboard boxes”, giving rise to the visual style of Grim Fandango.

Coincidentally also releasing this week, thatgamecompany’s Journey producer Robin Hunicke offer’s insight into the studio’s consistently successful approach to game development, with a focus on collaboration and simplification: “At that stage of the process, we’re thinking about what items we could leave out. What can we take away from these ideas that would make it even closer, even more compressed, like a diamond”.

While not an exercise in visual design, The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect is not only a solid attempt at recording the young history of our medium, but more importantly stands as a testament to the value of chronicling its progression as not only this century’s newest form of creative expression, but as part of our culture as a whole. I hope this is the beginning of a larger movement to archive and document our burgeoning artform, and that the Smithsonian exhibition is only the first of many.

Click here to view the embedded video.

UPDATE: Behind the scenes video here.

As a gamer I was sold on the series after receiving a copy of AC2 from Ubisoft, and was fortunate enough to be asked to join that same team soon after completion of Mass Effect 2, (before AC Brotherhood and Revelations were created), to immediately set about creating the next big leap.

With a new Assassin in a new era, along with probably the largest animation team ever assembled for a videogame project, I have been tasked with refreshing the entire animation of one of videogaming’s favourite characters.

I really hope you’ll like it – and can’t wait to show you more of what we’ve been doing in the coming months…

Over the proceeding year, beyond the expected growing pains of a newly formed team it was rapidly becoming apparent that it was impossible to see eye to eye with others on the leadership team when developing something as large and complex as an action-RPG, especially coming straight from successfully doing so on Mass Effect. I could say a lot worse, but will instead acquiesce to many of the disagreements falling on my shoulders as I took literal the Eidos mandate that we were to create games with modest team sizes and schedules, myself always looking for the most dynamic and efficient solution rather the grand ideas of my colleagues, wherein lay the conflict. Having now worked in Montreal for around 5 years I have a better understanding of the culture that many of my former team-mates had come from, and simply accept that they just didn’t know any other way. Their risky gambles ultimately paid off with the miraculous purchase of Eidos by Japanese publisher Square Enix granting an additional two years of development.

And what happened with those extra years? I honestly enjoyed much of the game. The level design is as tight as it comes. The feeling of “being” in a cyberpunk future is unmatched. The visuals swing between some of the worst character realisation ever to moments of real beauty, (so in that respect it is a very accurate homage to the original), and the audio landscape lends itself the credibility of its forebears, (again an homage for better or worse). Certainly by no means a game worthy of 4 years of development, I remain confident I made the right choice in leaving during pre-production to start the BioWare Montreal studio and with a few good friends instead helped ship what was to be one of 2010′s games of the year in Mass Effect 2.

In summary, much like the “choice and consequences” mantra of the game’s design, Deus Ex : HR ended up playing out exactly as a consequence of choices made early on in the development cycle – with Square Enix’s intervention providing a literal Deus Ex Machina to that project’s story.

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While mostly a lighting demo of Infinite Realities‘ scanned head we’ve encountered before, seeing it running in realtime on a PC at work both terrifies and exhilirates me. Once he opens his eyes and begins to move around, it will be our task to breathe life into characters that look like this in immersive worlds that are consistent and do not break the suspension of disbelief.

Since arriving in Canada, I’ve worked exclusively on games with character casts are in the hundreds, requiring procedural and systemic solutions to create their animation. Perhaps this leap in character realisation will instead force us to concentrate on stories with fewer actors that have an unprecented depth of character.