Career Blog Part 9
By mtmckinley 1 Comments
Year 5 (continued)
After the ultimate meeting of bad news, the group got a bit down in the dumps. Perfectly understandable. I especially wasn't very happy. This was my first game industry job and I love it and it was in danger of being taken away from me. The SoR group were tight-knit and good friends. The Outlaw Studio guys were still relatively new to the team and were working on their own project, so while they were sympathetic, and weren't necessarily immune from the repercussions of the cancellation, they weren't as close to the chopping block as many of us. It would still be a few days before we really knew who would be staying and who we would be saying good bye to.Lucky for the new guy, he managed to get on the Johnny Whatever project that Outlaw were working on and was spared losing his brand new job! Not so lucky for the rest of the SoR team though. We lost a large chunk of the team. People who weren't laid off left on their own to go to new jobs they found.
At the end, though, I managed to hang on to my job and even got offered a permanent position with a salary increase! Once the dust cleared, I looked around and found that the original Shadow of the Ring art team had reduced to literally our concept artist, our art director.... and me. I was the only staff artist on whatever Fever Pitch was going to be going on to next!
Well, our boss knew what he wanted to do right away and we got started.
Conquest 2
Immediately, the now-much-smaller team began brainstorming on a sequel to Fever Pitch's original game, Conquest. We would add a new race, improve the graphics with new tech, it'd be awesome! And yes, I got excited again! And a bit nervous. I was the only staff artist on the project! So I would have a lot of work to do. The art director was pulling double duty helping with regular art assignments as well, so I wasn't working in a vacuum, but it was going to be a challenge. But I was up to it! I even started getting invited to Leads meetings. After all, I was pretty much the only non-lead on the project anyway, so what's one more person?
My second project had begun!
At this point in the year, it was about April or so. That meant E3 was just a couple of months away and Warthog (our parent company) wanted us to spend the next weeks creating a demo for something that could be shown and, hopefully, picked up by a publisher to get us a new deal.
So, we did just that. Using the old Conquest engine, and not really having the time to do anything too drastic, we set about updating the engine with the newest tech on the block, ie. normal maps and cool pixel shaders. This technology was still pretty cutting edge for the time and we knew that if we were able to come out within the next year or so, we'd have the first RTS using the new tech and would get more eyes on us, which is always a good thing.
As the sole staff artist on the team, I got a lot of the work. My art director focused on helping with concept art and creating a cool cinematic to show off some eye candy. I was to do the majority of the actual in-game work.
So, Conquest 2 was a sci-fi Real-Time Strategy game... like Starcraft. The original Conquest was, admittedly, a bit of a Starcraft clone. It had three races: human (Terrans), energy based (Celareons), and insectoid (Mantis). Very similar to Starcraft's Terrans (yep, same name), Protoss, and Zerg. With Conquest 2, we wanted to update and improve and really make the races distinct and different. We also wanted to add a 4th race, the Vyrium. This would be our opportunity to drastically get away from the Starcraft shadow and carve our own path. Because we had so little time, we made some quick and dirty units to represent the new Vyrium race for the demo. In truth, the actual Vyrium would be much different in the final product, but we needed something to show.
I went about creating new space backgrounds, new planets and asteroids, new ships and effects... lots of stuff! E3 came and we had a good showing, some interest in publishers, and got a little press. We then got back to work on the actual game! Most of the ship work was going to be completely redone. We started working on the technology that would become our real-time shader engine. It was very cool! I'll get back to that at some point, but it was developed by our graphics programmer named Ryan. He's pretty much a genius!
We started developing the story as well and I was really happy to get to be a part of the story meetings. I really enjoyed that part of it! We were reworking the races and what they were and it was pretty exciting stuff. The Celareon energy beings, for example, were being revamped quite a bit. They were originally just Protoss-clones... ritualistic, kinda high-and-mighty, superior intellect and all that. This time we were revealing that the Celareons were actually composed of spirit energy... that when "born" a Celareon gets funneled into a containment suit to function, otherwise, their energy (or "soul") would dissipate. The Vyrium race were revealed to be slaves of the Celareons that managed to break away and form their own society using captured tech. Their race's technology was a hodge podge of Mantis, Celareon, and Terran ships and structures and had a very unique look.
Anyway, I can get more into the story later if you guys want, as it turned out pretty neat, but I'm getting long. :) I'll talk about what happened next, and what was going on with those Johnny Whatever guys in the next post!