Games Industry Experience (PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
Around ten years after my early experience with 3d graphics, I would have a Silicon Graphics Octane on my desk with a DEC-Alpha running NT for Workstation beneath it. The Lightwave 1.0 I had experimented with had gone to version 5 by then, and in 1998 I was working as 3d Artist in Black Isle Studios, the game development studio that had released Fallout a year earlier. I had started at Interplay as a QA tester, and within a month was moved to Black Isle as one of four embedded QA testers on Fallout 2. At the close of Fallout 2, three of us were offered positions in development, with the opportunity to train as artists or designers. This was before the first college 3d animation program would exist (IIRC Full Sail would eventually be first, with Ringling some time later).
I would spend the next six years as a 3d Artist, Generalist at Black Isle Studios– working on all facets of 3d art production. Back then there was little specialization beyond character artists and animators, but a trained-up generalist could fill temporary roles as such. During my time at Black Isle, I worked on Planescape:Torment, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale Heart of Winter, Icewind Dale 2, and the unreleased Torn tech demo. I left Interplay in 2002 to work at a startup with a couple other Interplay guys called TriLunar Entertainment. We pitched a demo using the Renderware Engine but did not secure funding. I moved on to a small, chaotic company called Vision-Scape Interactive, working on a series of tech demos/POCs that were never released before I started working across the country.
I worked on a series of on-site short-term contracts, working with Shiny Entertainment on Enter the Matrix, Vicarious Visions in New York on another Renderware project, Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart Racing. From there, off to Texas for a mobile X-Men Legends 2: Rise of Apocalypse port, then back to Los Angeles in time to work as a Lead Artist for the PSP launch title, ATV Off-road Fury 2: Blazin’ Trails. I had worked up to Creative Director status, managing small teams of artists and designers. I was working constantly, contracts over contracts, sometimes over salary. After the PSP launched, I took a break from games and created and managed a small CG Architectural Visualization division within a Civil Engineering Firm in northern Virginia. After three years I returned to games as a Senior Artist on an open world GTA-style POC for a game company in Southern California. After another extremely difficult development cycle, I again took time off from games and went east, working at John’s Hopkins University in Maryland as a Lead Instructor in Advanced Animation and Game Design. Shortly after I returned to SoCal to work on an open-world GTA-type game that featured the world’s most epic, project-killing, company-killing feature creep. Yep. From there I launched head-first into serious games. For those not in the know:
A serious game or applied game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. – Wikipedia (Accessed 2024)
Think of educational games. Or military simulators (those Reaper drones don’t fly themselves…yet). Scientific games (surgery anyone?). Cultural games that inform the next generation of people about their past (Archaeology!).
The Great Part of Serious Games: Multi-disciplinary teams take on a new meaning. Used to design, art, and programming are you? Try adding military personnel (of varying branches and specialties), medical doctors, research scientists, geologists, chemists, botanists, geographers, anthropologists, GIS specialists, oceanographers, and geophysicists. Serious about your equipment? You better be. Laser scanners, sub-foot GIS systems, real-time kinematic sensors (RTK), airborne LiDAR scanners, scuba diving gear, total stations, ground-penetrating radar (GPR) seismic sensors, deep ocean core samples, custom camera rigs, and you are getting warm. Oh yeah, how about learning new software for all of the above?
The Bad Part of Serious Games: You don’t get to show work from your projects. Why not? Three tiny little hurdles: 1.) Ethical concerns – your work is confidential for a reason, protecting people and their cultures. 2.) NDA – Your work involves proprietary software, reference designs, prototypes, or visualizations that will never see commercial use, so …uh…no. 3.) Your work requires a security clearance or only cleared people can utilize it…sometimes you have no idea exactly what you are working on anyway, as it is a little piece of a larger project.
CONSTRUCTION ZONE – I’m still working out how I can cover my roles here. More to come in some form or another. Broad strokes – Creative direction, research, project management, and eventually founding a startup for serious games, which closed its doors this year. I wrote up a semi-postmortem for the company that I may post here, so stay tuned.