Year 6 (continued)

Hit & Myth became our next project, developed exclusively for the Gizmondo. Oh yeah, and I was the only artist left after a mass exodus from the studio by people jumping ship. Essentially, after the ashes cleared, we were back down to our original core team from when I started, plus a couple of others who managed to get into the beat of our office culture.

We took some time to develop some ideas, concepts, and so on. Our original idea would be a crazy, humor-filled game that took place over lots of different themed levels. We'd have 4 different characters you could choose from, all with different abilities and personalities. These 4 characters were a medieval knight, a blue-haired Sasquatch, a hot female pirate, and... a leprechaun.

The game would be a top-down twin-stick shooter. This was chosen because our super-talented graphics programmer had been spending his free time developing a twin-stick shooter game engine that would work on mobile devices all on his own. The company licensed it from him and had a great head start on getting the game into development.

The levels would be themed upon lots of royalty-free pop culture... Alice in Wonderland, Christmas, Halloween, Sci-Fi, Hell, etc.

Our great concept artist developed some starting concepts for me to work off of, and I got started! I first began work on Cadbury, the medieval knight, and his trusty steed that he rode into battle. He was armed with a crossbow and it could be upgraded with powerups.

Eventually, as time went on, we realized that we were not going to be able to have 4 main characters and get them all voiced with all of the lines that we had written. So we paired it down to just Cadbury and all of the other choices got thrown out. Cadbury lost his horse (since from above it didn't really read very well) and instead of a crossbow was given a sci-fi laser rifle. We thought the idea of a knight weilding a futuristic weapon would be pretty funny.

After a few months, I got pulled aside by my boss. We were going to be hiring some more artists and he wanted me to be the Art Lead on the project, overseeing the new hires. I was floored! I had only been in the game industry a couple years at this point, so to be made a Lead so soon really blew me away.

Hopefully I would do a good job!