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.

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 them respectively as Mass Effect 2 and BioWare Montreal.

Housed within the downtown EA Montreal studio, a slowly growing team of highly talented animators and I are creating animations and cinematic cutscenes for the sequel to our 2007 project. This is a new kind of game development where we are working remotely while connected directly to the Edmonton servers and are in daily contact with the team there. This is all made possible with the help of the fantastic folks at EA Montreal with whom we share a studio space, and a dedicated support team on the Edmonton side.

Additionally, over half of the Montreal outfit is made up of other former Mass Effect team members having worked in the Edmonton head studio before – helping to ensure that rather than just a random selection of folks under the BioWare banner, we are maintaining BioWare’s culture as well as the same high standards to which we are held. This percentage is only set to increase as more and more make the transition from the main studio to this new team.

Now to the important part – we are currently looking for one final exceptional animator to join the team, as well as environment artists and level designers. If you believe you are up to the challenge of helping create one of the most focussed and ambitious RPG sequels of all time and are looking for a new and interesting take on game development, please contact me at alsoran@gameanimDELETE.com or visit the BioWare website at careers@bioware.com – as luck would have it, comments below are currently broken so don’t write via there.

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 of The Year in 2007, Mass Effect is back in with a shot at Computer Game of The Year after the later PC release, though is once again up against some seriously tough competition. (UPDATE: Though it did pick up RPG of the Year – don’t want to sound like sour grapes). Congratulations this year must go to Dave for Prince of Persia and Jay and Laurent for Gears of War 2’s nominations.

Outstanding Achievement in Animation

• Castle Crashers – Microsoft Game Studios – The Behemoth
• Gears of War 2 – Microsoft Game Studios – Epic Games, Inc.
• Left 4 Dead – Valve Software – Valve Software
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots – Konami Digital Entertainment, Inc. – Kojima Productions
• Prince of Persia – Ubisoft – Ubisoft Montreal

Outstanding Character Performance

• Gears of War 2 (Dom) – Microsoft Game Studios – Epic Games, Inc.
• Gears of War 2 (Marcus) – Microsoft Game Studios – Epic Games, Inc.
• LittleBigPlanet (Sackboy) – Sony Computer Entertainment America – Media Molecule
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (Old Snake) – Konami Digital Entertainment, Inc. – Kojima Productions
• Tomb Raider: Underworld (Lara Croft) – Eidos/Warner Bros. Interactive – Crystal Dynamics

Computer Game of the Year

• Fallout 3 – Bethesda Softworks – Bethesda Game Studios
• Left 4 Dead – Valve Software – Valve Software
• Mass Effect – Electronic Arts – Bioware
• Spore – Electronic Arts – Maxis
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King – Blizzard Entertainment – Blizzard Entertainment

I’ve just been messing around with the site, making it a little more easy to find the posts most interesting to developers that may find their way here and have dropped my last showreel onto the About page, so incase you missed it here it is.

This is the reel I made in January/February 2007 to land a job in Montreal so is a little dated. Featuring the second of three Commander Shepard models, (with crossed eyes no less ;-), it also contains the player navigation actions before the final level of polish, but enough excuses.

Continue reading for the full shot breakdown:

Read entire post…

Mass Effect PC is released today in North America – go pick it up! I wish I had a PC that could run it. In fact, I wish I had a PC that could at least run Battlefield 1942 :-(

Read at Mayerson on Animation:

“If you make a half hour TV show and a million people watch it, you’ve used up 500,000 hours of human life. If you make a feature and a million people watch it, you’ve used up two million hours of human life. There are only 8,760 hours in a year, which means that your TV show burns up more than 57 years of human life and your feature burns up more than 228 years of human life for every million viewers. These amounts are not trivial. We should all ask ourselves if we are providing value for the amount of the audience’s life we are using up.”

This got me thinking about the sheer amount of time that can be spent inside a game as opposed to a film or individual television show. Doing a little rough calculation on a large-scale game like Mass Effect:

• The last official figures, (pre-holiday season 2007), showed the game to have sold over 1.7m copies. That number has certainly increased since then, but we’ll stick with that for now in the interests of being conservative.
• We know that only under 20% of games are ever completed, (though I’m estimating that figure might be higher based on the targetted RPG user-base over the perhaps more impatient “Halo crowd”), plus this is a game that actively promotes muliple playthroughs. Again though, in the interests of erring on the conservative we’ll just stick to 20%.
• Depending on how the player decides to approach the game, a single playthrough can last anywhere between 5-6 hours and 30-40 hours, so let’s take an an average of roughly 10-15 hours per playthrough. (Additionally, the remaining 80% will likely have sunk a significant amount of time before hitting a wall, but we’ll leave them out for now).
• 20% of 1,700,000 is 340,000, multiplied by 10-15 gives a total of 3.4-5.1 million hours, or at least 388-582 years of human life spent inside the game-world.

That’s a shitload of time!

Just think what these people could have been doing to further the human race – discovering cures for cancer, solving global warming etc. Of course, there’s a lot to be said for downtime and escapism. Losing yourself on an asteroid hurtling towards a human-colonised planet certainly allows you to punctuate your presumably less (than that) exciting existence, but imagine if we could infuse our unique entertainment medium with the kind of education and exploration of the human condition that has been the staple of much less time-consuming entertainment mediums since inception. We really as an industry owe it to ourselves to provide some kind of cultural value to the people who are going to be investing time in our creations so that not only can they justify the time, but us our creations.

The latest edition of HDRI Magazine has a front-page article on an interview with Shareef Shanawany, Visual Effects Lead on Mass Effect. There are some details on the post-processes that really defined the look of the game, as well as the fantastic work employed for the biotics using the crust system.

I’ve always thought Mass retained something of the same look as all the other games rendered in the Unreal 3 Engine, but perhaps we did manage to put our own stamp on it with little tricks like the grain filter and custom depth-of-field, (the DOF in the image above was Unreal 3’s default at the time). And if I wouldn’t love to make a game locked at 24fps with motion blur.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first time they’ve run a cover story on videogame VFX, which is usually the territory of film and television only. Definitely a great step forward and some great recognition for the excellent work done by Shareef and the rest of the VFX team, even if they did kill the framerate throughout (and to a degree, post) production ;-)