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| SCORE International Baja 1000 | |
| Developed by Left Field Productions. Published by Activision. Role: Designer.   
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This is my first title as a designer, and my responsibilities are
across the board from level design, game design, doc writing, and light producing.
The game was released in October 2008 to very disappointing reviews. Admittedly, it is not a great game. I would love for every game I make to be an amazing hit, but there is only so much one person can control. In the end, the goals of the team were never accomplished because of an incredibly short schedule and overly ambitious scope. Everyone on the team had every intention of releasing a game as gorgeous as the Ensenada sections of DiRT 2, but intentions can only take you so far. So in the end you have to take notes of all the things which went right, and which went wrong, and try to apply them as best you can for the future. Overall I am proud of the levels I designed: Catavina, San Juanico, Todos Santos, and Cabo San Lucas. Though not perfect, there are elements to each of those levels which are quite fun. And if I was given more than 1 week to design a level, I am sure they would have been even more fun. I learned Excel better than ever over the course of the project, making use of formulas to help in writing the achievements and planning the career structure. I took ownership of the camera control for looking around the vehicle, making it quick and responsive to allow the user to see in any direction around the vehicle, and quickly get back to the action. I wanted to make sure users weren't waiting for the camera to scroll around the vehicle like in GTA4. I was also quite proud of not putting any online achievements into the game. I had a hunch during development that this would not be a title many people would play online, if at all, and took the COD 4 route and made sure there were no online-only achievements. All the people with 1000 pts can thank me personally (all 7 of you.) One of the most significant things I took away from this project is seeing how much fun people have bashing a game and looking for the bad inside every nuance. Whereas someone working on the game has a close connection with it, or parts of it, and can see a small sliver of good in an otherwise chaotic mess (or what it was SUPPOSED to be, not what it is), someone who has no connection has no reason to find that good. This happens between the average user and online reviewer alike. Since then, it has become more apparent in every game which isn't published by Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Activision, EA, or what have you, that people are less likely to be forgiving or overlook things that are wrong. Going back and playing Excitebike 64, while working at the company who made it, I came to realize that the high scores it garnered were more closely related to Nintendo publishing the title than excellence of the game. And anyone who says otherwise is doing so out of the same knee-jerk reaction created by this very same phenomenon. I am not saying if this is good or bad, just something I have noticed. That said, there are a lot of things wrong with Baja. Another thing I took away was seeing what really goes into next-gen graphics. Lighting, shaders, real-time shadows, normal maps, specular maps, and the occasional parallax. There is no new magic trick to how to build a 3-d model. One could look at the graphics of Baja and think I am crazy for saying these things, but it is most apparent over the course of development, especially when studying games like Motorstorm and DiRT. Of course, if the base model doesn't look like what it is trying to replicate at all, no level of next gen touch-ups will do it any good. The best looking games are a series of strong fundamental model and texture creation, executed well to look like their reference material, placed meticulously and often with a layered touch like some great oil painting, with the next-gen filters to then be applied and make it pop. And polish goes a long, long way. Lastly, I saw the difference of what it means to deliver the quantitative goals of the publisher, and the qualitative. On paper, Baja is exactly the game Activision asked for. The number of levels, vehicles, particles, effects, etc. But that doesn't mean we delivered the game they wanted. This is something I don't think I will ever forget, because it is invaluable with all my future dealings with both my bosses and publishers. |
| World Series of Poker 2008: Battle for the Bracelets | |
| Developed by Left Field Productions. Published by Activision. Role: Artist. 
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This game is the first console title I have worked on, and the game
with the longest title. My responsibilities were focused on the
in-game characters and their clothing. I created every color combination
texture for every article of clothing in the game amd made sure all
of the colors would match if the user chose the same colors at the same
brightness settings. This was a tremendous undertaking with more than thirty
articles of clothing and nine base colors each.
Along the course of the project I gained the responsibility of exporting the characters and handling the pipleline for getting character assets in the game. |
| Puck Off | |
| Developed and Published by GFX Construction Inc. Role: Artist.    |
I left GlobalVR to join the ex-Atari team at GFX Construction, and
Puck Off is the funnest game I have had the pleasure to work on in my career. The premise
of the game is simple:
a tabletop shuffleboard game without the table. The game was
built as a kit to go into any of the tens of thousands of trackball (Golden Tee) cabinets
sitting around the world at a fraction of the cost of a new cabinet, and meant
to be put into bars where traditional shuffleboard is very popular, but hard to maintain.
The game was fully functional online and the user was able to play with other user's on other cabinets. To alleviate some of the problems of Breeders' Cup, I devised a method for the user to communicate with the other players on the other machines. The user would press the "communicate" button and it would bring up a prompt where the user could select from twelve phrases which were then sent to the other player on the other cabinet. Unfortunately I was let go from GFX for financial reasons. It was a sad state of affairs for the company with a game which made everyone have as much fun as I've seen with the Wii. The game was eventually picked up by Global VR and I was shocked to see they kept the title of the game, as well as my original logo. The game still contains a lot of my original art and I am looking forward to running across one of these someday. |
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| Ultrapin | |
| Developed and Published by GlobalVR Role: Artist/Table Engineer.   |
My responsibilites on Ultrapin were comprised of a mix of art, scripting, and layout. A lot of the responsibilities I had on this game fall into the design category. Using photographs for reference, we built our tables nearly from the ground up. Sometimes we had real versions of the tables at our office to compare object heights, which proved to be very convenient. On this project I taught myself many functions of the VBscript language in order to make the tables function properly. I created a number of useful scripts to debug and test the tables, manipulate the ball movement to our liking, the exit table animation and prompt, and a few scripts which solved major functional issues within the table. I worked predominantly with the tables "Medieval Madness" and "Attack From Mars" while on the project, and grew a great appreciation for these two tables. I also worked with my team on bits and pieces of the other ten tables, and now know more than ever about pinball. |
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| Breeders' Cup: Tournament Edition | |
| Developed and Published by UltraCade Technologies Role: Artist.  |
I began work on Breeders' Cup as an intern during a heavy revision of the game, and was quickly hired on as a full time artist. I created the main horse model for the game, the male and female jockey, many various environment assets, and textures for all my models created for this project.
At the time there were two other artists working on the project with me, both recent college graduates. The programming and design team were comprised of ex-Atari employees who shared a lot of stories, and advice, with me. This was my first published title and I learned a lot about working on a team, the corporate landscape, and how to keep on the lookout for douchebags. |
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