Year 7 2006 (continued)
Buzz Monkey was a great studio to work for. They took employee appreciation very seriously and made sure that everyone was well taken care of and that there were plenty of fun things to do on a regular basis. While it wasn't fun-fun-fun 24/7, they did enough that made it feel like a more close-knit team then it could have been with such a large number of people. For instance, they had a semi-regular outdoor fun day on a Saturday where they would team up and compete in a Nerd version of a Decathlon. Instead of crazy Olympic events, there'd be Frisbee golf or bowling. They also had a company-wide retro game tournament where the winners would get prizes. Things like that. Not to mention that with every shipped title, they held a Ship Party like I mentioned before. They'd give tokens of appreciation to all of the team members, and even better, with nearly every shipped title, you'd get a small salary increase. All sorts of things made Buzz Monkey a great studio to work in.
For NFL Street, after completing my warehouse "stadium" I was tasked with another stadium set in Alcatraz. However after a week or so, it was scrapped. I then got tasked with making another stadium set on the island of Catalina. It was actually going pretty well and I had it mostly completed when I got the news that instead of making the field for the PS2, it should be converted to the PSP. The PSP, at that time, wasn't as powerful as it is today as Sony had yet to "unlock" the system's capabilities. So I was forced to scrap a lot of the work on my Catalina field and it didn't really turn out that great.
That was the only real art I made for NFL Street 3, as the rest of the time, I was porting other people's fields from their PS2 versions to the PSP. As an artist, you might can understand that it's not very desirable to work on someone else's stuff, but it's often required. I eventually ported every field to the PSP!
Next: Tomb Raider!
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