Ton of Clay

Sound Improvement

2011-06-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

I made a little Flash cartoon called "Voodoo Vince Prehistory" years ago during the production of Voodoo Vince. I wanted to show how Vince would have looked in the early 1930's, had he existed during the era of creepy rubber hose-armed animation. When I finished this piece I just dropped in a music track from the game -- a piece called Zombie Guidance Counselor by Steve Kirk. The eighteen people who bought the game may recall this as Steve's score for the selfsame level in the game. It's a great piece, but I always felt that the cartoon would have worked better with real sound design.

Nine years later, Steve Kirk and a band of fantastic musicians have done just that. Steve re-scored the cartoon and did some stellar sound design. It's almost, well, funny now. Or more disturbing. Either way, it's 1000% better. Enjoy!

Czech Please

2011-05-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

It makes me nervous when I do an interview for a publication in a distant land and the only word I can understand in the headline is "idiot." Fortunately, this refers to DeathSpank... At least it does this time. Pavel Dobrovsky wrote a nice Q&A for the May edition of LeveL, a gaming publication in the Czech Republic. The questions were mostly about DeathSpank, Voodoo Vince, my current misadventures at Microsoft and whether my name is fictional or not. Run out and get yours today!

Musical Voodoo Toon for Mardi Gras

2011-03-08T09:20:00.000-08:00

Today is Mardi Gras! It would be a shame to let the day go by without a Voodoo Vince-related post. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found this swell cartoon up on Newgrounds, set to some of the music from the game. It's an embedded Flash cartoon and you need to click past an ad, but it's worth checking out. I think Mr. Emanhattan (if that's his real name) did a bang-up job!

One correction, though. While he does credit the music from the Voodoo Vince soundtrack, he seems to have missed the fact that the music and lyrics for the Vince theme song are actually by me, not Steve Kirk (who did a superb job arranging the tune). It's an easy mistake, since Steve did compose virtually every other piece in the game's soundtrack.

Anyway, this made my day! Laissez les bons temps rouler!

A Spanking Good Year

2010-12-30T13:24:00.000-08:00

DeathSpank made the 20 Best Games of 2010 list over at Wired.com. Very cool! Seems like yesterday he was just a lump of modeling polymer, not to mention a pitch document that languished on the desk of publishers all over the world.

To celebrate, here are some random images, including some concept work for stuff that never made it into the game, and a screen mockup dating back to the very first concept document.

A Fistful of Mobile Splodeyness

2010-12-18T16:18:00.000-08:00

A game I designed for Windows Phone 7 just went live a couple days ago. Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst has finally been unleashed on the world. I think I'll defend my home town against zombie mutant freak things. Or maybe I won't. Folks never become self sufficient if they believe someone will always come along with a particle beam and save them.

Here's a nice review on wmpoweruser.com.

CK

Vanity, Thy Name Is Clayton

2010-10-13T20:41:00.000-07:00

Some people read these things called "magazines." These are created when people grind up some trees, make flat white stuff called "paper," then print words and pictures all over it. It's like a blog, but you can smack spiders with it. One of the finer publications is Gamefan, which was resurrected a few months ago.

There's a nice, if somewhat dense, interview with me in this month's issue. Editor Dave Halverson grilled me on all sorts of topics, including DeathSpank, some recent artwork, Kinect and my projects at Microsoft. Pick up a copy at your local Best Buy, Target or Barnes & Noble if you really want to know what I think about... stuff.

Maps + Mutant Freaks + Guns = Fun

2010-10-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

The incubation team at Microsoft Game Studios works on a bewilderingly cool variety of games and ideas. It seems like I can't go very long without some news about a game I'm working on popping up somewhere.

This is a good problem to have, since the alternative would lead to not designing games and acting out my ideas on a street corner with sock puppets. That sounds okay at first blush, but it gets bad when you think about where the quarters might get inserted.

But I digress...

I nearly forgot to shamelessly post these links to more previews of Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst. One from Pocket Lint, and one from GamePro.

The Little Concept That Could

2010-09-22T21:02:00.000-07:00

I've worked on over ninety thousand games with my friend Ron Gilbert. Or nine. I forget. One of our better known collaborations concludes this week with the release of DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network. Yes, that lovable dumbass with the stentorian voice appears once more in the downloadable game cosmos. The epic story, first conceived in the seedy back alley of a rant-filled blog, draws to its momentous end.

Ron and I started thinking of DeathSpank as a character back in 2004. We schlepped the original concept all over the world, starting with a trip to Europe in 2005. Even after years of "no," we kept adding details to the character and his world. It just kept growing. We couldn't stop it. One vivid memory is the sight of the proto-story and puzzle tree document spread out on Ron's kitchen table as we explored the nooks and crannies of the initial design in 2006. It was a tough decision when I finally made the call to get a "real job," mostly because my family seems to require "food" and "shelter." It turns out you can't live on the sweet, sweet taste of justice alone.

Sidebar illustrations from the original pitch document for DeathSpank, circa 2005.

That DeathSpank was made at all is still astounding. People who create characters are used to having them knock around inside their heads. It's always kind of surprising when they escape and actually appear in the real world where everyone else can see them. But ideas are easy. The endless hours of detailed, hard work is the tricky part. DeathSpank's existence is a tribute to all the awesome, smart, funny talented people involved in its creation and development. Those who weren't awesome, smart, funny or talented were only minimally inconvenient, so that's pretty great too in an odd sort of way.

Head shape work 2008

I'm proud of my work on DeathSpank. I named him. I took a chunk of sculpting stuff and molded the basic shape of his heroic noggin with my own hands. I iterated on his visual design, taking him from a glorified stick figure to a fleshed out hero who could walk and talk and kill lots of things. Hothead does that nutty "we don't believe in regular credits that describe what everybody actually did" thing, so I guess my character designs, juvenile jokes, puzzles and story contributions will just have to remain our little secret. Due credit or not, my time with DeathSpank is certainly over and done with at this point.

Getting closer! Almost there...

It's the end of a six year saga where I've gone from co-conspirator, to frustrated outsider, to a distant observer who feels pride in what the concept ultimately accomplished -- and regret for what it could have been. Still, when it's all said and done, the world is better off with DeathSpank in it.

And now, randomly selected reviews!

IGN
UGO
Gamespot
G4

CK

Verbosity You Can Touch

2010-09-21T20:04:00.000-07:00

One of the casual download games I made a few years ago just got revamped and all tarted up for the iPad. Word Spiral HD launched on the App Store last night. I have to say, it seems to work even better with a touch interface than it did with a mouse. Check it out if you're a fan of word games. Or beaches. Or very laid back Reggae-ish music by (Voodoo Vince composer) Steve Kirk.

Bursting With News... And Suns

2010-09-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

One of the games I've been designing was announced at GamesCom in Cologne a couple weeks ago. Remember those silly ducks I mentioned a few months back? That was part of an ongoing scheme to create a game world that lives across multiple screens and game styles.

Here's another step in that direction.

Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst is a game for the new Windows Phones coming out later this year. We decided it would be fun to combine Bing maps from the real world with light, splashy "stretch & fling" mechanics. The result? You get to defend your own house (or school, or favorite restaurant) from marauding, mutant Freaks and Cell rebels from Crackdown 2. You can station anyone from your Friends list on Xbox LIVE at a gun turret and help them level up -- even when they're not playing Sunburst. Once everybody has a big, juicy base built up, players can coordinate to detonate huge Sunburst devices to clear Freaks from a cities, states, or entire continents.

Below is a clip of our Senior Producer, the redoubtable Justin Robey, showing off Project Sunburst on the show floor at GamesCom:

Pocket Gamer also gave us a nice callout as an anticipated title for those swanky new phones.

The reception has been really encouraging so far. The game is still in production, but it's coming together really well, due to an incredibly talented team of programmers, artists and testers. I'll keep posting about the game as more news and announcements unfold in the weeks ahead. Look for us on the floor at PAX this coming weekend!

How Game Publishers (Seem To) Think

2010-07-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

An acquaintance of mine is looking into starting a game company. That isn't for the spineless, but it's something I can highly recommend. The years I spent running my own studio were ones I will always think back on fondly. It's a roller coaster ride of alternating fear and elation, but it can be a great experience if you want to test your commitment to the art of making games.

Be warned: starting a game company can lead to meetings with publishers.

I actually believe most publishers would love to give a thumbs up to your amazing new concept, but picking and choosing which games to fund (or not) is as much about aligning with the marketplace, or mysterious business objectives, as the virtues of your spectacular idea. That sort of makes sense but it breeds a strange environment where the external message is "We want fresh, innovative ideas!"

They usually don't. I've actually heard variations on this sentiment in more than one pitch meeting: I love it! That means I'll get in trouble if we make it.

That's right. It's a Reverse Treasure Finding Machine. I decided to chart out this baffling mindset for the benefit of my friend. Apologies to the cool, innovative publishers of the world (and you know who you are) since this paints everybody with the same cynical brush.

Click to enlarge

This may not be how publishers are 100% of the time, but it's how they feel after you've weathered a few pitch meetings.

The good news is that there are different avenues for game developers now. Between the explosion of mobile games, and services like Xbox LIVE Arcade, there is a vibrant ecosystem filled with creative, awesome games. And the audience is growing unbelievably fast. It's enough to give a crabby old game designer some hope for the future. We don't have to dwell in that brownish green Delta of Mediocrity.

We will always have the big, epic game experiences. My shelves are crammed with them. But at least there is room for other flavors, risky concepts and more varied creative direction. It's easy to forget that if you look behind a Halo, you will find a Marathon. Tomorrow's big games have to start somewhere.

Oh, and if you want a real conversation starter, try pinning your favorite games to this chart and see how they line up. Good times!

CK

Brother, Can You Spare An Exploding Duck?

2010-07-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

I nearly forgot, what with all the July 4th hoopla. There's a nice little piece on Kotaku about the latest tinkering I've been involved with at Microsoft Game Studios. We've been laying some groundwork for connecting games on different platforms (in this case Xbox LIVE and Facebook) so friends who like different types of game can still pull toward a common goal, even if the games involved are very different.

The usual trollish comments aside, it's been really interesting to watch this stuff take shape. The real goal here isn't to fragment games and force players to jump around between platforms and devices. It's also not just a marketing gimmick. The idea is to create larger world for games and to allow gamers to stay involved, no matter where they are, or what devices they happen to own.

This silly game and our earlier effort with Toy Soldiers are both steps in that direction. Games like Chuck's Ducks 2 and Match Defense: Toy Soldiers aren't the ultimate destination, but they contain interesting hints of things to come.

And yes, I did the initial design on this one, as if you couldn't tell from the part where you shoot hunters instead of ducks.

Sweet Release

2010-06-22T22:14:00.000-07:00

Electronic Arts and Hothead Games announced a release date for DeathSpank today. It's July 13th on PSN and July 14th on Xbox Live Arcade.

The game has come a long way from the random doodle of a bumbling hero in my sketchbook all those years ago. There were times Ron and I were pretty sure the game would never see the light of day, especially after shopping the concept in every corner of the planet. It's ironic. A concept that started as a parody of games from a cartoon that mercilessly mocked the game industry was picked up by one of the biggest game publishers in the world.

It's somehow fitting, since a smaller publisher simply cannot contain the mighty awesomeness that is DeathSpank. Props to Ron who followed our initial vision for DeathSpank all the way to Canada, the fine folks at Hothead Games in Vancouver, B.C. and everybody who gave their blood and sweat (not to mention cash) to make the game happen.

Evil may not be 100% vanquished, but I'm feeling way less downtrodden knowing DeathSpank is about to be unleashed.

D-E3-thSpank Coverage

2010-06-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

It looks like there will be all sorts of DeathSpank-related news and links coming out of E3. I'll just keep adding to this post as they crop up.

GAMESPOT:

This clip (once it actually loads) shows a nice slice of a dialog tree as DeathSpank seeks to appease an old adventurer with a taco. I think I did the character design for pretty much all the characters that appear here:

And some juicy gameplay from GAMETRAILERS:

DeathSpank: My Clip Runneth Over

2010-05-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

It's handy to have something I worked on nearly, almost, kind of about to be unleashed on the world. That means I can post stuff and do very little work.

Here is the latest. It's a quick teaser from the lovely people at Hothead Games. It reveals some of the story in the upcoming DeathSpank game. I fondly remember the first orphan-related story & design sessions with Ron some time earlier this century. We knew then that DeathSpank would be something special.

And wrong. Remind me again why it took so long to find a publisher?

DeathSpank: Now with 20% more orphan!

CK

Impending Spankitude

2010-05-08T10:54:00.000-07:00

My old pal Ron has been hitting the PR circuit for a little game we cooked up a few years ago called DeathSpank. Ron was sequestered in Vancouver, B.C. for the last couple years working on the game at Hothead, but has finally emerged from hiding to proclaim the game pretty much, kinda totally finished.

GamePro has posted a pretty good overview of the game with their interview:

Here's a link to some hands-on impressions, first from Joystiq.

And from Gamespot.

Look for DeathSpank on some form of shiny box with blinking lights near you soon!

CK

At War With My Friends

2010-02-13T13:47:00.000-08:00

I've been a Senior Design Director at Microsoft Game Studios for nearly a year now and I've had the pleasure of working on some damn cool things. I work in an incubation group. We get to experiment with new concepts while pitching in on games across the studio. We also build games ourselves as we explore wacky new ideas. I haven't been able to talk about anything I'm doing, until now. One of our efforts just launched on Facebook. It's called Match Defense: Toy Soldiers.

Toy Soldiers is a truly awesome game for Xbox Live Arcade. It will launch during the upcoming Block Party campaign on XBLA, and it's one of my favorite games in a long time. Really. I can't stop playing it. Signal Studios has created a masterpiece. The game looks as good as it plays, and that's saying a lot.

Signal's brilliant upcoming Toy Soldiers game for Xbox Live Arcade.

Not too long after I started, my boss Ken Lobb asked me to think up a basic idea for a Facebook companion game for Toy Soldiers. I was already a huge fan of Signal's title, even at that early stage, so I whipped up a quick mockup for a puzzle game that combines a basic match-3 style game with elements of tower defense. Thanks to Ken and the rest of our team, the final result went way beyond that initial idea. Match Defense is a nifty little experience with some surprising depth. Ken's influence really shows in the layered scoring and a robust combo system that brings to mind some puzzle games of yore.

Sure, you can play it like any other swappy, matchy puzzle game, but you can also build huge combos, or go for pure accuracy, or speed, or a mix of everything. I've seen people debating in the hall outside my office about the best technique. Passionate arguments can be music do a game designer's ears. So can music, but that's not the point here.

This is more than a promotional item for the Xbox 360 game. The games are connected by a continous connection to an ongoing Great War. Scores from both games contribute to whichever side players choose: Allied or Central. Two countries are up for grabs every day. The first side to win eight countries first wins. After that, medals are awarded, the war begins again and players once again choose sides.

We expect to continue refining and tweaking the game, especially after the XBLA game is available. It's an early step, but an interesting one where two different kinds of games share a common connection that is as social as it is technical.

See you on the leaderboards!

http://apps.facebook.com/matchdefense/

CK

Dungeon & Dragons & Life

2010-01-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

All I Need To Know About Life I learned From Dungeons and Dragons. An IgniteOKC Talk. from Chad Henderson on Vimeo.

Hilarious talk from IgniteOKC from Chad Henderson. It talks about the many things he learned playing D&D and how that applies to the real world. I can say without equivocation, I would not be a game designer today if my friends hadn't ruined my teen years by introducing me to Dungeons & Dragons. The jury is still out as to whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Everybody Loves DeathSpank

2009-09-01T21:58:00.000-07:00

DeathSpank meets a wizened old adventurer. And chickens.

DeathSpank. He doesn't shoot first and ask questions later. He doesn't even realize there are questions.

To celebrate DeathSpanks impending arrival on the show floor at PAX this coming weekend, 1up is running a weeklong series of articles about the game, Ron and the fine folks at Hothead. For my part, I may descend from my secluded aerie above far flung Bothell to take in the show. As co-creator, I fully expect this to net me a stick of gum and/or t-shirt.

Read all the glorious coverage here.

Resume In T-Shirts

2009-03-15T13:11:00.000-07:00

The game industry isn't as full of excitement and romance as some may think. The hours are long. Stability isn't always that great. Royalties and riches exist only for a lucky few. One thing we do get is a crapload of t-shirts.

There are two big reasons for this. First, it helps companies to identify and collect their employees when they go astray in the wild. Second, we don't get out to the local haberdashery all that often while crunching for months at a time.

I was looking at the ever-growing pile in my closet the other day, and thought it might be fun to make a visual survey of these garments in all their nerdly glory. That turned out to be a terrible idea. Besides highlighting my desperate need for an iron, it was way more work than it was worth. But here it is. I tried to stick with shirts related to companies and product I actually worked on, otherwise there would be another 20-odd shirts.

So Many Years, So Few Bits

2009-02-05T17:38:00.000-08:00

So, you may be wondering, "How did Clayton learn to do that crude, crappy style of animation so wonderfully showcased in the last post?" This may give you some perspective on that. In my never-ending quest to reduce clutter and bring screenshots from games nobody ever cared about to light, I offer the following.

I stumbled across an old portfolio floppy containing a bunch of goofy little animations. These are some background and characters I did way back when for Pink Goes To Hollywood, one of the Pink Panthers darker, more confusing chapters. But it was the 90's -- Pretty much everybody got a sidescroller then.

Funny story... The folks at TekMagic got so used to just calling the game "Pink Goes to Hollywood" instead of the more accurate "Pink PANTHER Goes To Hollywood," it ended up on the box that way. Hilarious. I mean, who needs to know the name of your main character anyway?

Yup. They pretty much crammed the word "Pink" into every sentence they could. The results were sometimes a little unsettling.

We did all the "cut scenes" like the one above in three days. This was back when everybody was still amazed by blinking lights, telephones and whatnot.

The original format for these files was .ANM from Deluxe Paint Animation. The movement is so choppy because I did very few frames, and kept things to an 8 pixel grid. The actual game moved much more smoothly. It's funny what passed for a portfolio back then... or talent.

Just Because

2009-01-24T17:18:00.000-08:00

Being a mighty game designer for all these years can leave a man hollow. Hollow and empty. What fills this vast, desolate void? Animating dancing hippos and rhinos, of course. I did this for HBO's Flight of The Conchords Fansterpiece contest (love those guys), though it may not be quite what they're looking for.

Why?
CK

Character Generation

2008-12-25T15:09:00.001-08:00

Ron just posted some concept art I did for DeathSpank over at his Grumpy Gamer blog. These are two of the many characters we created to populate the game's world. The pieces portray Ms. Heybenstance, the demon witch and everyone's favorite stoner merchant, Bong The Potioner.

UPDATE: And just to prove I can put hands on my character's correctly, here is a revised Bong, with everything pointing in the right direction. Let this be a lesson to all you youngsters: Don't drink and draw.

TA-ncient History #11: Ganz Vernichtung!

2008-12-23T18:09:00.000-08:00

This is skipping ahead a bit, but I always liked the visual simplicity of this French box that bundled Total Annihilation and the Battle Tactics expansion pack.

One of the last tasks as production nears completion on a game is translating the game into various languages. Humongous Entertainment always took a very aggressive approach to translating its games. When most companies in the US seldom went beyond FIGS (the oh-so-hip developer acronym for French, Italian, German, Spanish), HE was regularly releasing their most popular games in a dozen or more languages, including Hebrew, Dutch and Norwegian. That attitude carried over to Total Annihilation, though we settled for just doing FIGS. I like figs.

It's always interesting to see what issues arise during localization. For instance, in the UK I just misspelled the word "localisation." It's crazy... or mad.

Anyway, Total Annihilation was relatively easy to convert to other languages. The bulk of our in-game text used the same tools Humongous used, including their in-house animation tool, Splat, for the 2D artwork (this is what created those .gaf files you 3rd party folks know so well). It only took an artist a few days to replace the text seen in the interface and other parts of the game. Most of TA's movie sequences intentionally contained no speaking parts for cheap translation reasons. We made the game for a mere 1.1 million bucks, so we had to make decisions like that on a regular basis.

We did replace the voice narration for the mission briefings and the intro cinematic. Gamers in Germany might have recognized the voice of the guy who dubbed the German voice of James Bond for decades: Gert-Günther Hoffmann. I'm told Total Annihilation was Herr Hoffmann's last project before his death in 1997.

The voice of Total Annihilation in Germany.

GT Interactive's marketing experts in some countries disliked the name "Total Annihilation." It can be difficult for many non-English speakers to say. Plenty of English speakers stuggle with it too.

The folks in France pressed us to change the name completely. They said they were concerned that "Total Annihilation" might sound too much like "Final Solution" to European ears. They suggested the name "Hegemon" instead. The folks at GT's French office also thought the Arm Commander on the front of the TA box was too similar to a character in Heavy Gear, so he was removed from their version of the box.

The strangely empty French Total Annihilation box layout.

The people handling the marketing for Germany had ideas too. They attempted to translate the English name and lobbied for "Ganz Vernichtung," which definitely has a cool ring to it. It also might have compensated for the fact that German words barely fit on our interface. The German box was somewhat different as well. They placed hash marks indicating the number five in the background. This tied in to their marketing campaign which used the number five to connote the five senses, along with the slogan "Use Your Senses." It's sort of catchy, but I don't remember how Total Annihilation smelled... or tasted. Anyone who does, please keep it to yourselves.

"Ich bin ein Riesen-Roboter."

Humongous was already established as a successful division within GT Interactive, so we were asked nicely about the the renaming ideas and not simply ordered to comply. We felt it was important to keep the name consistent throughout the world, so we did. It may be an awkward tongue twister, but it was awkward for pretty much everybody, including Americans.

CK

Below The Jurassic Strata

2008-11-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

If this blog isn't proof enough, this should seal my reputation as a horrible pack rat.

I've been struggling to tame the mountains of old paper heaped in various places around the house. On one recent expedition I found some original animation cels from the Secret of Evermore television ad. This was probably the only game I've ever worked on that had actual ads on the air.

Here is the original context, for those who care:

CK

Bad Drawings from A Good Weekend

2008-10-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

L to R, upper row: Bob Bates, Gordon Walton, Tom Abernathy, Ralf Adam
bottom row: Rich Vogel, Lee Sheldon, Ken Rolston, Hal Barwood.

Every so often I try to attend an informal gathering of game designers known as the Game Designers Workshop. The most recent gathering took place last weekend in Seattle. It's a great opportunity to hear what game designers from all over the industry think about issues confronting our craft these days. It's a pretty amazing bunch of designers and creative types, so I'm always overwhelmed by the great ideas and immense perspective the group can bring to bear on a topic.

I'm an incessant doodler (which is illegal in 14 states), so I couldn't resist doing some crude likenesses of some of the other attendees while taking notes. A few of these are semi-okay, even though I'm pretty rusty when it comes to caricatures.

Apologies to my victims. I promise to be more flattering next time.

CK

Life Imitates Fiction Imitating Life

2008-09-02T20:57:00.001-07:00

I think we may have a copyright issue on our hands. You Voodoo Vince players can vouch for me.

You might recall the boss battle at the end of the Bayou level where Vince pits his powers of running, jumping and Voodoo against a hurricane. That hurricane's name? Okay, ours was called Hannah, but we added the "h" so it wouldn't be completely like our art director's last name, which was "Hanna," the name of the hurricane currently churning its way across the Caribbean.

It's back. And this time it's personal. If it stops by, tell it I went to the store.

Between this and another odd parallel I posted about back in 2006, I'm starting to think that hurricanes and video games don't mix.

CK

The Spank of Death vs. PAX

2008-08-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

I stopped by PAX today. I always enjoy seeing the unalloyed bedrock of the game biz in its natural habitat.

Hothead games was showing some teasers for DeathSpank. It's always amazing when something finally migrates off the drawing board and out into the world. Ron Gilbert and I dreamed up DeathSpank and spent years pitching it to publishers. Most were skeptical. Those who were not usually lacked the means to fund this little gem of episodic mayhem. I have to say, the folks at Hothead really get the concept, and these teasers show why. Things are still at a pretty early stage, but I'm thrilled with how DeathSpank is coming together. These bits only show personality, but a game like this lives and dies on personality. It sets the mood for everything to come.

Here are the three teasers for your viewing pleasure.

CK

More Juvenile Humor

2008-05-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

I promised a Vince statue to Dave Halverson from Play Magazine longer ago than I care to remember. He was patience itself, and now he has this fine decoration in his lovely home. It depicts a somewhat off-model Vince reading Dave's excellent publication while sitting on the can.

Dave was remarkably understanding and has agreed not to sue me.

TA-ncient History #10: E3

2008-05-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

The Electronic Entertainment Exposition 1997 was in Atlanta

My first trip to E3 was in1997. It was also my favorite E3. I wasn't burned out on the annual dose of noise and stress and I was only marginally aware of the colossal production road bump E3 would create for so many future projects. This was when E3 still alternated between Atlanta and Los Angeles each year.

I almost didn't go. Many parts of Total Annihilation were unpolished, broken or just plain nonexistent as we crunched our way into the Summer of 1997. Multiplayer was touch and go. The interface was in the middle of a major overhaul at that point. Our producer didn't think the project could spare me, but Chris went to bat for me. He mentioned that I'd already bought some clothes for the trip, fer gawd's sake. The moral weight of that carried the day.

We were beyond excited to show our game to the world. The recent magazine ad was getting some good buzz. We launched the Cavedog website right before the show and there was already a lot of activity in the very first fan forums. The "animated screen shots" on the site also helped to build anticipation. E3 was the perfect opportunity to build on that.

So, like an idiot, I bought new shoes. Things were going great until we got off the plane in Atlanta. Chris and I were feeling more hyper than usual, so we decided to run to baggage claim. How far could it be? Anyone familiar with Atlanta's behemoth Delta hub only need to combine that with the"new shoes" concept to imagine the state of my feet by the time we got to our luggage. Remember those sides of beef Rocky trained with? You get the idea. Cavedog's new VP of production, Scott Wallin, was nice enough to provide bandages and and soothing unguent.

We checked in to the hotel then went immediately to a press reception at the convention center. GT Interactive and Humongous PR folks whisked Chris away before we were there five seconds, taking him from one clump of press to another. I decided to seek out free food and drink while trying not to ruin the carpet with the bloody stumps that passed for my feet.

Okay, it wasn't that bad, but they really hurt.

After the reception Chris and I went down to check out the booth setup. For anyone who hasn't witnessed it, the construction of "old" E3 was in many ways more impressive than the end product. Picture a gigantic room, filled with thousands of workers all building what amounted to a small city in a few days. It was busy. It was noisy (almost as noisy as the show itself). It was damn hot with the loading bays wide open and the whole placed jammed with workers and machinery. Disney's Greco-Roman fantasy was rising up in one neighborhood, while an ersatz Medieval dungeon received dabs of paint next to a futuristic assembly of lighting truss and monitors.

There wasn't much to see of the GT area, much less a Cavedog display to inspect. Just about everything related to Cavedog was still packed in crates while the union guys wrestled with wiring and other logistical concerns. There were shipping problems. Parts of the display was still in transit and nothing could happen until everything was there. This is when we learned the laserdisc containing the TA trailer had been sat upon.

It was hard to see how it was going to come together, but the crew working on the booth were unconcerned. I'm sure it was a walk in the park for them.

It did come together, such as it was. GT Interactive was touting itself as the number three publisher, so they had as much real estate as the other big shot publishers. Thanks to their cutting edge design sense, they conceived of a booth that looked like a cross between a 1980's hair salon and a scrap yard. It looked like it was built out of leftovers from 11 other booths, or like a giant robot had taken a large, clattering dump on the show floor. When E3-goers weren't wondering where to get a sassy new mullet they savored GT's lineup of games.

GT featured a bevy of games that year, including Shadow Warrior, something Duke Nukem related and the little RTS that could, Total Annihilation.

I'm sad to say I don't have any pictures of the Cavedog section of GT's chrome wonderland. The setup was simple enough. We had three kiosks, each with three screens. We mostly ran skirmish mode with cheats enabled so we could quickly toss together a conflict during quick demonstrations. A couple PC's were networked, so we could do a little multiplayer, but that didn't run particularly well. This was flanked by a wall with a GIGANTIC 35" monitor set into it that showed the Total Annihilation intro movie all day (sort of like the one in the Unreal display below).

When you show product at E3 you don't always get to see E3. I pretty much lived around our three kiosks featuring Total Annihilation, with occasional trips to the nearest bathroom. I didn't mind. It was fun to show off our game. The enthusiasm from the people who stopped by just fed that. Some people stopped to play TA every day of the show (in the case of one guy for three hours). I met countless game developers, buyers for every major retail outlet, press and lots of gaming enthusiasts. Unknown to me at the time, I met and demoed the game for two future co-workers.

About the only folks who didn't seem happy to see our upstart RTS was Activision. Our kiosks were practically surrounded with Activision employees the morning before the main doors opened. Most would just stand there and play with grim looks on their faces. It was generally accepted that Dark Reign was destined to rule in 1997 (at least until Starcraft showed up). Suddenly, they were forced to share Christmas with Total Annihilation.

We never planned to have a showdown with anybody. We generally avoided those endless "bullet point wars," but "TA vs. Dark Reign" was a common forum thread until TA shipped. Given the wildly different resources, marketing and E3 visibility, it's amazing Total Annihilation did as well as it did against such a high profile game.

We left the show floor buoyed up by the reactions to TA. It really was a great experience. After three days of demos, parties and shouting ourselves hoarse, it was time to get back to Woodinville and finish our game.

CK

Sweet, Sweet Voodoo

2008-04-28T21:15:00.001-07:00

I really thought I'd do another post about Total Annihilation or something next, but this was too good to pass up. A very talented mom named Toni sent this picture of a Voodoo Vince cake she made for her kid's birthday. As if the cake wasn't impressive enough, Toni says she created a whole Voodoo Vince party to go with it.

"I used the spool of craft wire in the background of the close up picture for his pins, and topped them off with gum balls. The whole party had a Voodoo Vince theme, with Mardi Gras colors, an Imp piñata (which sadly I don't have a picture of) filled with Mardi Gras beads and candy and super balls, just to give it the same feel as the big loose beads from the game. We had jambalaya, gumbo, catfish...we ordered the VDV Cd...blah blah blah...I could go on and on!"

What a lucky kid (and a creative mom)! For those who don't remember or care what the Imps in Voodoo Vince looked like, here is a dark, murky picture:

One thing is bugging me, though. Given that Vince is a voodoo doll, who feels chewed when he gets eaten?

Good News From The Distant Land of Canada

2008-01-09T10:04:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to announce that a concept I developed with my old friend Ron Gilbert has been picked up by Hothead Games. DeathSpank: Episode One: Orphans of Justice will be winging your way via the Intertubes in the not-too-distant future.

DeathSpank started as a joke character on our sporadic Flash cartoon on Ron's Grumpy Gamer site, but the big lug assumed a life of his own. Before too long he had a world, supporting characters and our insane belief that the game had to be made. This had to be more than a wiggly cartoon. It had to be a game.

Before I rejoined the ranks of the respectably employed last year, Ron and I spent a couple years developing and pitching this game. We loved everything about the concept, but it was nigh-impossible to convince publishers to back something that wasn't A. The Be All, End All Blockbuster, B. A Sequel To The Be All, End All, Blockbuster or C. Something Based On A Famous Crappy Movie. Anyway, Ron continued to fight the good fight and met up with a great publishing team. I'm delighted that something I co-created is going to see the light of day.

One question that might remain is whether I will be involved in the day-to-day work on DeathSpank. I wish that were possible, but I've been working on yet another cool game in the meantime (as yet unannounced) with Gas Powered Games. I'll be looking in on DeathSpank, though and pitching in where I can.

It's a feast or famine situation. Sometimes the game industry spanks you. Sometimes you spank back. Here's to Ron raising his mighty designer hand to paddle the bum of mediocrity.

Go DeathSpank!!!

CK

The Trio in The Flesh

2008-01-03T20:51:00.000-08:00

Not to be outdone by Stewart Howe, Leesa G. sent this photo of her lovely tattoo art. Leesa has opted for a part of the Beep Industries logo, namely our alien mascot Arichitor and his two victims, Chet and Brenda.

I'm still amazed when someone likes my art enough to have it inscribed in their skin. Once again, I'm impressed and a bit flabbergasted. Mostly impressed, though. I just didn't want to get too far into 2008 without writing the word "flabbergasted."

CK

Belated Pumpkin Post

2008-01-02T20:27:00.000-08:00

I'm kicking myself for not thinking of this one. A thoughtful dad did this superb Voodoo Vince portrayal for his kid last Halloween.

CK

¡Hola Vincente!

2007-09-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

I'm amazed at how many Voodoo Vince fans have created their own dolls. The resourcefulness and creativity they show is a whole new level of cool. I posted about this phenomenon back in '06.

Over four years after VV's release, they're still at it. This latest Vince doll was created by a player with the tag "DanteNeverDies" from Spain. It certainly ranks among the best!

Voodoo Vince Prehistory

2007-08-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot about this.

I've always loved that vaguely creepy rubber hose animation from the 1920's and 30's. I did a little Flash movie back in 2002 showing how Vince may have appeared in an earlier era. The music is from the Zombie Guidance Counselor level of the game and is one of my favorites, as always by the extra super talented Steve Kirk. This doesn't have the scratchy film filter pass I did for the final edit, but that lovely YouTube compression kind of delivers that.

Lions & Tigers & Cthulhu... Oh My!

2007-07-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

An ultra cool cartoon by GPG animator Bobby Pontillas

Some of the artists at my new job decided to start a blog where they can have fun, showcase some art and generally goof around. They were nice enough to include me, even though I've contributed squat to the communal art pool. It's called Unleaded Artists. Check it out!

The blog issues periodic art challenges using a random word generator, though the crew can contribute whatever they like. It's a little portal into the twisted minds of some very talented, funny people.

Vince Gets Under Man's Skin

2007-06-15T16:18:00.000-07:00

Of all the things Vince fans have done, this has to take the cake. Stuart Howe didn't let the lack of toys and merchandise get him down. Far from it. He now has this awesome 7" Voodoo Vince tattoo on his left forearm. It shouldn't be surprising in this golden age of body art that somebody somewhere would want a Voodoo Vince tattoo. I'm surprised anyway.

The tattoo was done by Jeremy at CMB Tattoo in Huntsville, Alabama, and he did a fantastic job. It's appropriate that the image was created by poking Stuart countless times with a needle. He can now relate to Vince on a whole new level.

CK

My Cup Runneth Over... With Gas!

2007-06-13T19:43:00.000-07:00

A lot of people have expressed curiosity as to where I ended up in the brave new post-Beep era. By "curiosity" I mean "apathy," and by "a lot" I mean "virtually none." "People" still means "people" but they're strange and different now. They smell funny.

Still, there is bound to be some concern that I might be sprawled in a gutter tilting back a jug of Everclear mixed with soy sauce (which, btw, I call a High Road to China. It's great!). Personal hobbies aside, I have remained in the game industry, firmly clutched to the sweaty bosom of Lady Interactivity. It's probably no surprise that I accepted an offer from Gas Powered Games and started as their Creative Director last March.

I'm really enjoying it. I'm back among some very familiar faces, including my old friend Chris Taylor. There is an interesting cross section of former Cavedog, Beep and Humongous folks here, plus loads of new acquaintances who I'm just starting to meet (there are over 100 employees at GPG). It's a strange, cool sort of time warp... A former cubicle mate from my very first job is down the hall (Kevin Pun). A couple programmers I worked with at Squaresoft are here as well. Most people look like their old selves, but with slightly more tattoos. The computers are much, much spiffier and way less beige.

I'll do some updates on my current projects if time and my NDA allow it. Meanwhile, I'll continue with the flashbacks already in progress.

A Debt of Gratitude

2007-04-18T21:07:00.000-07:00

Brad Kauzlaric in his studio some time during the 1980's.

My dad passed away a couple weeks ago. He was, among other things, an artist. This helped me understand at an early age that it was okay for grown ups to keep their imagination and sense of wonder. Dad never liked this Internet thing, but I figure a few words are in order. This is even vaguely game-related.

Dad loved science fiction. He usually devoured a novel in one sitting. There were always lots of books and magazines around the house, especially Analog during its glory years. I loved looking at those classic covers by Kelly Freas and John Schoenherr when I was a kid. Once I started reading them, I loved them even more. These publications fired my imagination and formed the foundation of my future as an artist and a designer of computer games. As a so-called grown up, I've had the pleasure of working with all sorts of artists, writers and engineers to create imaginary worlds, not unlike the ones depicted on those old covers.

I would be doing something completely different for a living if Dad hadn't left this wonderful stuff laying around the house. I'd probably be a mule skinner or something.

CK

A Worthy Enterprise

2007-03-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

Well, it was a fine six or so years, but I decided to hang up the ol' Beep spurs a few months ago. Before the usual sympathy notes and garment rending, I wanted to say that this was a decision that actually felt pretty good. Beep, as I know it, actually ended several years ago with the completion of Voodoo Vince. My efforts since then amounted to a case of serious denial. I kept the hope of a Vince sequel or that next big thing alive, but many of you know what the climate is like out there for new IP's or anything with a hint of humor (For all you non-grizzled game industry vets, it's not good).

Beep Industries was initially created to be an ideal first party developer for Microsoft. I wanted to build games for them from the first day I heard rumors about the Xbox, with the hopes of building a mascot... or at least the mascot's distant cousin once removed. After starting Beep, my partners and I learned everything we could about their process and bent over backwards to be a solid, reliable partner for them.

It worked. I'm told Beep was one of only two developers who never missed a milestone in the history of Microsoft Game Studios. I don't know if that's a fact, but it feels good to believe it. I am immensely proud of what we created. Content always outlives code, and there is some amazing art, stellar music and flat out cool stuff crammed into Voodoo Vince. For that matter, even our code was pretty damn cool. Xbox 360 developers using the Vince.api (and there are many) are still using technology we created during the production of VV.

Above: Company mascots Brenda, Chet and Arichitor. Arichitor got his name from a misspelling of the word "animator" on a magazine subscription my wife used to get at work.

But, future incarnations of Vince were not to be. The market was changing, as was the emphasis on the bottom line. Trapped between these two realities, I guess there was no longer room for a creature like Beep at the table. The fact that all our eggs were in the Xbox basket, and our only game was a wacky little closet hit didn't help when it came to finding a new publisher. The Vince team went their separate ways in 2003, and all but one of my former business partners left the game industry altogether. Two of them are now farmers. I enjoyed my foray into casual games, but I missed that experience of working on something substantial and that particular type of intense teamwork that comes with larger projects.

The good news is, there will be that next big thing, it will just happen under a different roof. I recently accepted a job with a great game studio here in the Seattle area. I'm really excited about it and am looking forward to working on awesome, original games again. I'll post what information I can once things gets rolling there.

I want to heartily thank all the former Beepsters, both pre and post Vince era for their incredible efforts, talent and friendship. I also want to thank the fans of Voodoo Vince who have created a small, but vibrant community around the game. Their enthusiasm and devotion has been a real highlight for me the last few years.

CK

ps: Don't worry -- Ton of Clay will continue to serve as my mental laundry service and dumping ground for pointless, long-winded memories.

TA-ncient History #9: A New Cave

2007-02-24T15:43:00.000-08:00

Okay. Before I get into the whole E3 thing I had some other odds and ends to cover...

The months leading up to E3 in 1997 were what you'd expect. For the first year of work on Total Annihilation I averaged 65 hour work weeks, but this soon went to 75. 80 and 100 hour weeks were common. This isn't a big deal to anyone who has worked in games. This was universal with the whole team on Total Annihilation. It's fair to say that most of the game was created in one type of crunch mode or another.

A screen from June of 1997. This was the last iteration before the look of the UI was finalized.

Features were flying in and my old temporary art was replaced at a steady clip thanks to our ever-growing art team. Units were in decent shape. Clay Corbisier, Mike Fisher and Keven Pun had been making them for almost year at this point. But I was still doing all the background and interface art.

An early, cheesy pass at the mission briefing screen. My layout would remain about the same, though the color and texture was much better in the final version.

By the spring of 1997 we finally added a few background artists and things picked up there as well. Artists John Baron and Mark West started with Bryce template files I supplied, but added plenty of their own ideas along the way. John came up with a handy Photoshop action file which aligned the height map to the rendered images more or less automatically. I was using a crude system with registration marks and basic eyeballing before this came along. Steve Thompson and Casey Burpee rendered a lot of trees, rocks and other planetary decor items.

Help with the background art came along a bit too late. We were barely able to create the custom maps needed for the missions, leaving very little time for modular map sections. This is why there are so many oddball chunks of terrain in the original Total Annihilation map editor. We did a better job planning the map assets for Core Contingency and Kingdoms, but I always wish we'd done more modular, reusable map segments for the original TA. Then again, there are tons of great tilesets thanks to the 3rd party community.

The biggest big change in early 1997 was to our workspace itself. Until then, the Total Annihilation team was scattered throughout the building occupied by Humongous Entertainment. Humongous went through a number of dramatic growth spurts over the years, and the company filled a series of rambling, segmented spaces at the Woodinville West business park as they took over more and more of the building. Except for a few of the programmers, most team members were sprinkled in ones and twos throughout the premises.

The Total Annihilation team was working in nooks and crannies throughout building A.

All this changed when Humongous nabbed yet another suite in building B, across the parking lot. The Total Annihilation team was finally in one place. The air had a strange stank to it. The floors were always kind of springy, but at least we had a cave of our own. The previous tenant had left all their furniture months before and never returned, so most of us finally stopped working on the ubiquitous folding banquet tables that have supported countless computers in the game industry.

The TA team was eventually housed here in building B. A suite on the second floor (other side of the building) is where we finished TA and TA:CC.

A large space downstairs was occupied by an evangelical church whose weeknight activities often spilled into the lobby area. We would carefully tiptoe around groups of kids reciting bible lessons as we made our way back from dinner to continue work on a game about killer robots. The whole thing felt pretty surreal.

TA was no longer the only game in the works for Cavedog. Preproduction for Amen: The Awakening, was underway at yet another office park a few miles north in Canyon Park. Good & Evil was also in the works, only months after we started Total Annihilation. A flying shooter called Glider Wars had already been started and canceled before TA ever made its debut.

Before TA was out the door, Cavedog had all sorts of irons in the fire.

Humongous itself was doing great with its kid's titles and was outgrowing office space faster than it could be leased. The church was nice enough to lend Humongous it's space for its weekly company meeting since the company had grown to over 150 people by this point.

The new space had good and bad sides. It was great to have everybody in one place. I wasn't wearing out a pair of shoes every week just checking in with the art team, and it was easier to pull together for TA's last big push. This definitely helped to cement the team's identity. The down side was that we didn't feel as much a part of Humongous, or even the rest of Cavedog for that matter. I think the fact that Cavedog wasn't so much one company, as a collection of separate fiefdoms would prove harmful to its long term success.

I was no longer sharing a dank little room with Chris, but there was almost no time for the spontaneous brainstorming that characterized our first year on Total Annihilation. We were both managing more people and the game had to get out the door. Working on TA at this point was less about chemistry, and more about just surviving.

The project had plenty of momentum by the middle of 1997. Once we got through E3 it would be time for the final stretch.

Ok... Next up, I'll really talk about E3. Really.

CK

Fun With Sculpy Chapter 2: Tombstone Serenade

2007-02-20T15:42:00.000-08:00

After dealing with RL fun for the last couple of months, it's nice to get back to something meaningful, like posting time wasting diversions on this blog.

Yes, I slowly made my way through the process of finishing the Vince statue I mentioned here 30 or 40 years ago (above). Below is how the statue looked with after the basic sculpting was done. I used some mineral oil to give some surfaces a smoother, more finished look, though the piece is still covered with finger marks and crude details that a better sculptor might have refined and improved. I shoved this in the oven and baked at 275 degrees per quarter inch of Sculpy. The polymer doesn't change much in appearance after it is baked, though it seems to lighten a bit.

Now that the Sculpy was hardened into a plastic-like substance, I broke out my aging liquid acrylic paints. I didn't really have a strong vision for a color scheme, so I went with some basic, unimaginative hues. I did a couple coats of the base colors, then did a couple more coats of dry brush work to give things like the tombstone a bit more texture.

I should have used the macro setting, but here is a fuzzy detail of the flipside of the tombstone.

And that's it. I finally got that sculpting bug out of my system. I did another piece while I was producing this one, but I want it to be a surprise for its recipient. I'll post pics of that one once I ship it and the deed is done.

Team Voodoo!

2006-12-24T11:25:00.000-08:00

I got an email from an American Flag Football club in the UK last year called Team Voodoo. Their team President asked if they could adopt Vince as sort of unofficial team mascot and maybe put him on some shirts for the team. I passed his request on to the powers that be at Microsoft (they own the Vince intellectual property) and they were nice enough to consent.

Maybe I felt a special affinity, having broken a wrist playing flag football in junior high. I offered some of my nonexistent free time to make the art and the end result is at the top of this post. I'm reasonably happy with it. I can't wait to see and wear the final product.

CK

ps: Hey! I noticed a YouTube clip of Team Voodoo in action.

Powerless in Seattle

2006-12-17T11:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, not Seattle proper. Just someplace near there. Some of you may have heard about the big wind storm we had recently. If anybody has been trying to email me at my Beep Industries address, or visit the Beep web page, they will find things aren't working and bouncing left and right. The same goes for the info address at Beep. This is because our ISP still has no power (or phones) and our email isn't working. I'm kind of surprised they weren't even able to get web mail or some kind of reroute working, much less a simple announcement via other channels, but that's the way it goes.

Anyway, I have electricity (duh) and am busy procrastinating on my next thrilling post. Hopefully all the Beep stuff will be back up soon.

UPDATE: Looks like Beep's ISP is up and running again as of Sunday night!

I'll Just Have The Salabog

2006-12-10T14:25:00.000-08:00

I didn't expect to post much about Secret of Evermore on this blog, but it seems to be enjoying a small rebirth as a cult classic. Don't ask me why. I'm as surprised as anyone. I hear the new issue of Game Informer lists Evermore as their third most anticipated pick on their "top 10 retro game we can't wait to download on our Wii" list. That, plus the fact that folks keep posting clips of it on YouTube make for a quick easy post on a lazy Sunday. So, yay.

This clip is of the third boss battle in SOE, the big swamp snake thing, Salabog. I did the background art and Salabog himself (based on a concept painting by our art director, Daniel Dociu). The big critter himself contains very little animation, at least by an artist. The movement of the head and the body were all done with programming (I keep thinking it was Jeff Petkau). The neck is just made of a small overlapping sprites. The sections of the monster seen in the background got their motion from good old fashioned color cycling.

Below is another craptacular doodle from the notepad I had on my desk at the time.

As I said in earlier posts, lots of people who went on to Cavedog (and Beep, and later ArenaNet) worked at Square's Redmond office. The main character and dog were animated by Rebecca Coffman. TA fans might be interested to hear the score by Jeremy Soule, who accomplished some amazing things with the limited audio palette available on the SNES.

Slighted Over Germany

2006-12-03T14:57:00.000-08:00

A friend of a friend snapped this picture. The elusive Voodoo Vince plush has been unceremoniously strapped to a rope and incorporated into a display on the suspended lighting at a Saturn store in Frankfurt, Germany. It doesn't look very comfortable, but it probably offers Vince a fine view of the tops of German shopper's heads. I can only approve of his proximity to that giant bag of coffee, even if it is just robusta.

Fun With Sculpey - Chapter 1

2006-11-22T14:35:00.000-08:00

Here's Vince in a whole 'nother kind of 3D.

Sometimes I like to break out sticks, sporks and other things that poke and prod so I can make feeble sculptures. My medium of choice is Super Sculpey, a polymer clay which can be purchased in alluring fleshy bricks at your local craft store. I did a few pieces with regular Sculpey, but prefer the flexibility of the Super kind.

I promised Vince sculptures to a couple friends some time in the late precambrian period, so I figured it was about time to break out the tools and get something done. I'm posting about the first half of the project here on TOC mostly so I'll be more motivated to finish this up. The first sculpture I'm attempting is of Vince sitting astride a tombstone, happily playing a ukulele (or tiny guitar).

As I said, my sculpting skills aren't much to shout about. The process I describe here was taught to me by Tom Collie, who was the resident sculptor back at Humongous. Tom made great, polished pieces of the characters in the kid's games at HE. These were handy reference for animators, and dang cool to look at. Here is my bastardized, sloppy version of what I learned from him.

First, I start off with a wooden base. I drill some holes for the primary armature pieces, which I fashion from quarter inch copper wire. The base can be a simple post cap for fencing from any home improvement store. Craft stores have more polished (and expensive) wooden bases. I went with the slightly swankier craft store kind here. I use a narrower gauge of regular metal wire as an armature for the smaller protrusions. I'm the worlds worst engineer so I do a lot of needless twisting and bending so I feel like I'm making it stronger. I'm probably not.

No, that's not an energy being from Star Trek.
Just flash photography gone awry.

Next, I jam aluminum foil into any major gaps within the wire armature. This should be packed as tightly as possible to avoid any sizable air pockets.

Once this is done, I slather a base layer of Sculpey onto the armature. If I don't like the way things are shaping up, I can still nudge the wire and foil pretty easily. I try to work the material into the many, many nooks and crannies I have created in my sloppiness.

After the basic Sculpey is in place, I add another layer or two. Something of where I'm going has started to emerge at this point.

Next on Procrastination Theater: the detail work which will include a big pile of bones around the tombstone, Vince's other arm and other untold wonders.

CK

TA-ncient History #8: Destroy With Care

2006-11-13T11:31:00.000-08:00

The intro movie for Total Annihilation was a pretty important piece of work. This was the first impression we made when players launched the game and it was the only piece of snazzy video we would display at the humble little Cavedog corner of GT Interactive's booth at E3 that year.

The cut scenes were headed up by Kevin Pun. He started with a rough framework centered on a long, continuous pullback I tossed together, but added an amazing amount of drama and wonderfully orchestrated motion to the final sequence. Kevin created a huge chunk of the assets used in the introduction. He also incorporated models and animations from the unit artists, and a small team we added specifically to help out with the cut scenes. The movies came together so quickly the intro was extended by about one third at the last minute, incorporating new shots largely created by Rebecca Coffman. Cavedog was the third job I'd been at with Kevin and Rebecca, and it was a pleasure to see them kicking so much ass.

Page one of Kevin's storyboard for the final intro movie.

It's amazing how well most of this sequence holds up today. The movie was made by a handful of folks using relatively simple, inexpensive tools, but it delivers a great sense of action and anticipation.

Two excerpts from the original storyboard.

Once the final animation was rendered, a few dissolves were added using Adobe Premiere. The sound effects were added by Frank Bry, using an early pass of the theme music for Total Annihilation (by Jeremy Soule, of course) as a backdrop.

The question at this point was about what sort of media to use for E3. This was before DVD's came along. Plenty of video displays at E3 were still played off various formats of magnetic video tape, which necessitated rewinding your cool eye-catching movie every so often. To avoid that I asked if we could burn the intro sequence to a laser videodisc. I figured this would avoid the risk of jamming or wearing out and the movie could just be set to repeat all day.

I owned quite a few laserdiscs, but had no idea how to go about getting a single one-off disk made. It wasn't hard, but there were lots of little steps. First, I had all the individual frames for the movie rendered and numbered sequentially. We didn't have a CD burner in the office (we were that low budget) so I had to transport the frames on a stack of Zip disks. I took these, along with a stereo .AIFF file of the soundtrack to video post facility in Seattle, called Pinnacle Post. They combined the frames with the soundtrack and recorded the assembled movie to a betacam tape. This was FedExed to a facility in New England where they burned a single laser disc, containing the intro movie.

Make that two disks. I found out that unlike regular laser discs, a one-off was burned onto glass. Instead of the typical aluminum and polycarbonate plastic used for CD's, DVD's and regular laser discs, we would receive a disk made of perfectly flat, brittle glass. I had a bad feeling about that. Between getting shipped back and forth across the country, sent to E3 and the chaotic process of setting up the booth in Atlanta, I just knew something would happen to that lovely circular mirror containing our movie.

The shockingly reflective intro movie disk.

I was right. A teamster sat on one of the disks while the booth was under construction.

The version of the movie shown at E3 was slightly different than the one that shipped with the game. We hadn't done the full orchestral recording of the soundtrack yet, so the music was an earlier synthesizer-based version. It sounded pretty convincing to any casual listener, but lacked the punch of a real orchestra. We also hadn't recorded the narration, so the introductory voice over was accomplished with on-screen text.

Back to the story... The surviving disk played perfectly and we didn't have to worry about looking up to see if a tape needed rewinding. Next to booth babes, the most common way to lure dazed attendees into your booth at E3 is a mind-numbing display of sound and video. We had a fairly small screen, and the audio was almost impossible to hear, but the little TA intro movie did it's job. I couldn't believe how many businessmen would walk up to the big screen and dutifully record the intro movie on their camcorders -- and never once turn around to actually play the game itself.

That was fine, since lots of people wanted to play Total Annihilation anyway.

CK

Virtual Vince

2006-11-02T19:05:00.000-08:00

This might look familiar to anyone who read the previous post about the Voodoo Vince storybook. In the early, heady "let's start a company and not get paid" days of Beep, our art director Gary Hanna made the first 3D rendition of Vince. It's almost eerie when something you draw is recreated so perfectly in 3D. This image was done using Maya. I really like how crude and craggy Vince is in this rendition. The burlap is nice and raspy looking. Those pins mean business. The patches look like they were stitched on in a hurry. After looking at this I almost think Vince got too smooth and cuddly later.

TA-ncient History #7: Prime Artistry

2006-10-31T13:26:00.000-08:00

We didn't get our giant CG intro movie with dancing clones, but we still had to make all sorts of fancy pictures for marketing and the game. The universe I wanted to portray would still need a lot of high quality visuals to give players a decent sense of Total Annihilation's setting. We also needed plenty of promotional stuff for E3.

For the game itself, we needed to make a short intro sequence, two victory sequences and a host of what we called mission paintings - The last items being a little visual reward shown to the player after successful completion of a level.

For the mission paintings I organized a simple assembly line. Every 4 or 5 models, the artists would make a "high res" version of a given unit. I put that in quotes since these only had 2,000 to 5,000 polygons. Models with higher poly counts are now common in real time environments. I think there are more polygons than that in Master Chief's left nostril.

These models were handed off to staff artist Jarrett Holderby. It turned out the same cheap, simple tools I chose for the game worked equally well for the mission paintings. Jarrett dropped these models into KPT Bryce, added some textures, rendered an image, then retouched the image in Photoshop and Painter.

It helped that Jarrett was a classically trained illustrator with a couple decades of experience. His eye for composition and lighting were (and are) superb. The Bryce scenes were devoid of grit, smoke, explosions, motion blur and other touches that help bring a futuristic war picture to life. Jarrett's ability to add these things "by hand" to a rendered images without making it too obvious was another rare gift. At top is an early image of Core Prime (a.k.a. Metal World). This setting was used for many pictures, but I don't think this particular image was ever used. I stole some of those textures when I made the metal world map segments.

All the renders for maps and mission paintings were done on Macs. Back artists had both a Mac and a Windows rig on their desks. An early rendition of Bryce existed for Windows, but it lacked the ability to export height maps bigger than 72 pixels on a side. We needed much bigger elevation maps for the background sections. We certainly needed huge height maps for these mission paintings. We mostly used Power Mac 8500's and 7600's. Opening or saving Jarrett's super big print files would take minutes. The same went for applying the simplest filter. The fact that Jarrett didn't go completely insane working on them is a real tribute to his fortitude.

This same technique provided most of the big, lush images we made for magazines and marketing. Jarrett assembled some truly fine scenes, all of which helped to build an image for the game and its universe.

I think this image was made for a game magazine that never got off the ground. It would have been TA's only magazine cover prior to its launch, but that was not to be.

The models from the unit artists were supplemented by additional pieces from the small team working on the movie sequences, giving Jarrett had a pretty decent inventory of models to work with. This added a lot to the scope and complexity of the pictures. Some images are more effective than others, but overall it was a great way to get a lot of pictures made in a small amount of time.

The movies represent another big push for the art team in the weeks leading up to E3 in 1997. More on that in the next TA-related post.

Enough tiles and I can build the world!

2006-10-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

Yes, another glimpse of our primitive pixel roots. This screenshot is from my time on Secret of Evermore at Squaresoft, Inc. This is part of the market from the desert town late in the game.

There is a certain pleasure in working within limitations. Any artist who worked on console games in the pre-3D, 16-bit era had to get very friendly with tiles. On the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) any given level had a limit of 1024 tiles, each of which could only use one 16 color palette. Little tricks were needed to build everything a level design called for: X and Y flipping, color cycling, palette swapping and tile animations were usually needed to stretch the tile budget. That, and some careful planning made it possible to build the requisite hills, valleys, roads, rivers, rocks and huts in a given level. It was a challenge, but it was actually fun to figure out how to get the most from every pixel.

Evermore was my first experience with an isometric top-down view as well, which came in handy during Total Annihilation.

Above is a page from my production notebook. This has a basic inventory of things I'd hoped to build with the tiles allowance for the market level. Most of my career in games can be summed up by countless pages of random notes and awful doodles like this one. It looks chaotic, but it's amazing how much information I find on them today. Just to make myself seem even more ancient, it's like putting a needle into the groove of a record. Once I start looking through the reams of pages from Total Annihilation or Vince, I can usually place the exact time and place I made each crude doodle and notation.

Games are still subject to many limitations today, but the boundaries are a lot more mushy. Storage is hardly a problem anymore. Movies and audio assets often take up more space than the games themselves. Tile counts and finite palettes have been replaced by polygon counts and texture memory - but a bit of your frame rate or a few seconds of load time can be (and are) sacrificed in the name of "but it's so cool!"

We spend a lot more time creating wonderful visual content nowadays. I have no complaints, since that's my bread and butter. But the spiraling cost of developing a game has grown along with our technical horizons. Games now take years to make, rather than months. Back in the SNES era, when a cartridge was full, it was full. It was kind of nice to have that clear line in the sand.

Do I have a big, important point? Nope. I just wish I hadn't run out of tiles before I could make some hanging pots and pans for that one merchant's stall. Dammit.

CK

Vince Cutting Room Floor #3: Roachfort

2006-10-23T16:38:00.000-07:00

Why do I keep repeating myself? All this concept art is by Doug Williams who is brilliant, blah, blah, blah.

So many ideas... So little time. It's important to aim high when designing a game. As the realities of the development process have their filthy way with your ideas it's always good to have more ideas than you need waiting in the wings. Change and compromise are like an unholy Master-Blaster out to thwart your good times at the Thunderdome of game creation. You've got to be ready to roll with the punches and come up with good alternate plans, even when Tina Turner has a wrist crossbow pointed at you and... um... you get the idea.

As I said in an earlier post, I sort of wish Roachfort had been cut in favor of the riverboat level, but that's just the hindsight talking. There are some great things in the level, but many ideas were scrapped during development. It seemed like harmless little bits and pieces along the way, but I think the overall quality of the level suffered as a result. Nevermind the fact that the water table in New Orleans is about three inches underground, making large subterranean caverns pretty damned unlikely.

At the heart of the biggest change were the residents of Roachfort. I originally planned to populate the subterranean world with effete French cockroaches who still thought it was the 18th century... hence the name. The Rochefortians were to be vain and silly. They believed the surface world is a myth and that their dank sewer is the center of the universe. Someone like Vince wouldn't fit their world view, so he needed to travel in disguise using a tattered, unconvincing cockroach costume.

The last big alteration had to do with Vince's escape from Roachfort. In the first draft of the design document Professor Ethel was a bit more helpful. Rather than abandoning Vince like a complete jerk, she makes her escape using Vince himself for balloon material. This was based on a mini-game where players would have steered Vince around sharp pointy things as he ascended a long twisty pipe leading to the surface world.

One thing that doomed these parts of Roachfort was the way I approached the design. Rather than create a coherent system from which puzzles and gameplay could flow, I wrote a lot of "one off" stuff in this level (I did a bit too much of that in the whole game, really). The time and effort needed to make the exploding gas cannister puzzle the airplane level and the laundry basket ride cut into more atmospheric goodies like these poor, deluded cockroaches.

It was a trade. I didn't get to recreate the court of the Sun King with bugs, but that plane was pretty cool.

CK

Ye Olde Downtown Tulsa

2006-10-19T15:07:00.000-07:00

One great pleasure I've discovered about this self-serving blog is finding new things lurking in pieces of old art and memorabilia. Until lately, I seldom took the time to look at this stuff or reflect on my strange little career. I now find myself looking at artwork from old projects in a whole new light.

I managed a team of about 35 people during the development of Kingdoms. I also worked with a half dozen or so external contract artists, most of whom worked on illustrations for the game's cinematic sequences. The contractors varied a lot in their experience level, ranging from veterans with decades of experience (like the aforementioned Greg Call) to fresh young talent, right out of art school.

One of the veteran illustrators was a man named Dale Rutter, a long time instructor at the Art Institute of Seattle. Dale was primarily responsible for painting a panoramic view of the capital for each of the kingdoms in our story. Above is his lovely painting of Lendra, the capital city of Veruna... the side with all the nautical stuff. Upon closer examination, I can't help but think that some of the city seen behind those evocative, ancient battlements has a distinctly modern look.

In fact, I'm sure of it. This looks more like the sort of place you'd find insurance brokers, condos and health clubs than the seat of power for a distant magical land. Dale has a reputation as something of a prankster, so I'm guessing this was intentional.

Good one, Dale. Too bad it took me almost eight years to notice!

CK

TA-ncient History #6.1.4: First Ink Amended

2006-10-17T09:37:00.000-07:00

Those of you familiar with the high journalistic standards here at Ton of Clay know the premium I place on the truth -- A premium so high only the very rich can afford to bribe me. I started thinking about my reference to the ill-fated demo map called Boris. Was the map really 100x100 screens?

I had to verify this for you, the reader. Yea, though I sift through many a worn CD-ROM, risking flying shards of frail, shattered disk in my eye, I will persevere. Anyway, I got curious and found the remains of the original map earlier this evening.

Above are the sections of Boris, assembled in something approximating the original design. Each square chunk was about 5 by 5 screens (2560 pixels on a side). I recall now that the plan was to expand this by placing large strips of open water between each type of terrain. So, the ultimate goal for Boris was probably closer to a mere 40x40 screens. Much smaller, but still insanely big for an average computer in 1997. The real problem was partly the physical dimensions, but also the high number of memory-gobbling unique tiles in this design.

In retrospect, Boris just seemed like 100x100 screens, much as memories of a playground bully can make them seem like they were ten feet tall, with a helpless nerd in one hand and a twisted jungle gym in the other.

I regret the the lapse in accuracy extremely. I apologize to my vast readership - but I mostly apologize to Boris. He just wanted to be loved and probably came from a tough neighborhood. Boris was, if anything, simply ahead of his time. Poor little fella.

CK

TA-ncient History #6: First Ink

2006-10-15T20:37:00.000-07:00

Copyright 1997 - Imagine
Ironically, a sequel to our producer's most famous game graced the cover
of PC Gamer the same month as the first Total Annihilation preview.

Getting the press interested in yet another real time strategy game in 1997 was no easy feat. Approximately 24,000 RTS games came out that year. A new game from an untried studio wasn't exactly catching the eye of editors and journalists. The glut of RTS games created intense competition for the hearts and minds of gamers. Some publishers were putting big money behind promoting their entries.

Many upcoming games engaged in what I call bullet point warfare. Lists of features and visual gimmicks were dutifully recited in prepress coverage and endlessly compared and debated by the nascent Internet community. A week didn't passed that some helpful person would come into our office and say "Gosh, this game XXX from XXX has unit morale, cyborg pez dispensers and dancing pie charts showing alfalfa comsumption... Do we have morale, cyborg pez and pie graphs?" We did what any good developer does when asked about stuff like that. We completely ignored it and concentrated on making the game.

Our ship date had floated around for about a year. We changed it twice, but by the spring of '97 we were finally pretty sure we would RTM (route to manufacture) in September. Ship dates don't seem as stressful when nobody knows you exist. We were getting a little anxious, though. US game magazines had a lead time for stories of three to five months -- some still do in spite of competition from gaming websites. That's pretty simple math. It was already March and we still weren't sure how the world would ever hear about Total Annihilation. We had that spiffy print ad figured out, but E3 was just around the corner. We needed to make at least a decent splash or Total Annihilation would be in the bargain bin before Christmas.

Word finally came down that we would get a preview story in PC Gamer (US version). A staff writer from San Francisco would come to the Humongous/Cavedog offices in glorious Woodinville, Washington. We were told the plan was for a one page write-up in their preview section. We geared up by pushing even harder to make the game presentable (old multiplayer UI below) and to create high resolution assets for our future marketing needs.

It wasn't enough that we already had maps bigger than any other RTS game. We had to do something truly awe-inspiring... something that would astound and amaze. Ron, Chris and I jointly conceived of Boris, a 100x100 screen behemoth (Editors note: See next post). Maps that size are no biggie to the TA 3rd party community these days, but we attempted this with a mere P200 with 64 megs of RAM. I stayed up for days rendering and assembling pieces of Boris. The stability of the engine was still fluctuating from day to day. We didn't really know what would happen.

It's pretty obvious what happened: My PC went into shock and curled up whimpering in the corner for days after my first attempt to load Boris. After those days of sleep deprivation and stress, I still shudder when I hear that name. We had to make do with our regular maps, which served us perfectly well.

There is an expectation that games are built using piles of slick concept art. It won't do to give magazines some doodles on a stained burger wrapper. Nope. Concept art has to look like it came from the halls of Skywalker Ranch or Ridley Scott's wet dream. The visual standard for games today makes walls of concept art a common sight. We didn't have much stuff like that for Total Annihilation. The design for a 40 polygon tank isn't much to look at.

So, we faked it. We had some great artists who were fully capable of making froo froo art like that. We were just too busy to make it most of the time. But it looks swell in a magazine article, so Kevin Pun (another Square alum) whipped up some nice juicy marker comps of units after they were already finished and in the game. Here are his wonderful, tarted up takes on some TA units.

PC Gamer never used these for that piece, but they were handy for other articles and interviews that came along later. We fed the marketing and PR machine at GT a steady stream of high resolution renders and more concept art for months to come.

Our real unit designs were certainly nicer than something on a burger wrapper. Below is a real first design pass for a Core aerial unit by Mike Fisher, the artist responsible for the bulk of the Core units. I usually asked for a quick pencil treatment so I could sign off on a unit design before the unit artists waded into 3D land. Mike always worked with wonderfully clear schematics, worthy of an engineer.

It would have been about April of 1997 when Michael Wolf from PC Gamer paid us a call. Michael was a reviewer who later became the disk editor of PC Gamer. Michael is now a PR manager over at Microsoft's Windows game division. He arrived late in the morning. My impression was that he may have expected yet another C&C clone and I can't blame him. As we showed off our game he seemed to grow more impressed and excited as the interview progressed, asking lots of good questions.

Ron, Chris, Michael and I piled into Chris's Mazda 626 and went to lunch at a local Chinese place. I only remember that because I have a strong recollection of ignoring my wonton soup while riffing on the notion of the Core Commander writing a lonely hearts advice column. That later made its way onto the Cavedog website as a semi-regular feature.

If you read this early coverage, you'll notice Ron's name sometimes comes up more than Chris's. His name is the only one mentioned in the table of contents above. The industry at large hadn't really heard of Chris, Cavedog or our game yet. Ron was an acknowledged industry heavyweight. His background as a design god at LucasArts and the upcoming Monkey Island sequel (though unrelated to Ron) sometimes made him a focus for journalists who came to look at TA. Ron was always gracious and pointed reporters right back to Chris. He really believed that a designer should speak for his own game.

When the preview finally hit magazine stands in their July issue (on the street in June) we were amazed. It was as nice as a preview gets. Phrases like, "...it could very well be the most revolutionary real-time strategy since Dune II" had us pinching ourselves (we did that to stay awake anyway). The timing couldn't have been better. This was the edition of PC Gamer that was circulated at E3 that year. Our ad was in other major game publications that month as well.

We had plenty of good buzz going into E3. Now we just had to get the game halfway polished for it's big debut on the show floor.

CK

A Tangled Rope

2006-10-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

This is the last of the visual prototype images we brought to the Voodoo Vince green light meeting. Just about every picture shows Vince doing something different. We felt it was important to show as much variety as possible by putting Vince in a variety of settings and in an assortment of vehicles. Here we see him swinging his way though a fanciful forest canopy. Of the four mockups, I think this is one of the prettiest. It's definitely in the top four.

During the creation of this picture Gary Hanna jokingly referred to all the bright, radiant plant things as "glowberries." We didn't really have glowing bits like that in the final version, but that did provide part of the level's name, Glowberry Tangle. For players who don't like bottomless pits (and there are many), this level was pure hell since the whole thing is one big bottomless space with thin, twisty tree limbs to land upon.

Different modes of travel always create interesting issues for art, design and technology. Keeping the camera under control, physics, strange clipping and character behavior all present different challenges. This visual test depicts a cable-like vine for Vince to swing on. We soon found that making a polygonal model look convincing as a rope (in real time) is pretty damn tough. A solid rope object also did some odd things when it passed around or through the in-game camera. We opted for a string of stretchy particles instead. This avoided strange rope malfunctions and pulled Vince away from the camera quickly, which helped to avoid clipping and a loss of orientation.

Original take on the Glowberry "perfect world" image by Doug Williams

The illusion of distant foliage in Glowberry Tangle was done simply by wrapping the level in some layers of leafy texture, forming a surrounding tube of sorts. Again, the original take on this didn't work out. The original has a light, distant sky layer with a slight gradient to it. This tended to make the leaf backdrop stand out more, and look more fake. The brighter, more intense backdrop also competed too much with the branches and landing places, making an already challenging level even harder. So, the final version (again) made use of a simple dark backdrop with the distant tube o' leaves mostly obscured by distance.

A skilled player can breeze through Glowberry tangle in mere minutes, never suspecting the long list of boring decisions that went into its creation. That sort of makes me wish a "directors cut" of a game were possible, with running commentary so players could be made aware of the developer's self-centered, long winded thoughts. That wouldn't work for me as a player, though. I'd probably get distracted by some comment about the code or art while a monster is going to town gnawing on my leg.

CK

The Carnival DePrave

2006-10-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

Nothing beats a worn out, deserted carnival for sheer atmosphere and spooky good times. The level artists did a great job creating Kosmo's base of operations, the Carnival DePrave. This was the final location in Voodoo Vince. Once the level designer John Baron finished laying out the platforms holes and the structures, Doug Williams created these superb black and white mood pieces. The level artist (also John Baron, come to think of it) worked from these to create the final level art.

Hmmm... In retrospect, the entryway to the carnival has a somewhat goatse-y look to it. Shame on anybody else who thinks that.

Every level in a game like Voodo Vince is a big accomplishment, but each one is filled with reminders of things that might have been. The Carnival DePrave was, if anything, a bit too empty and deserted. I had hoped to fill the booths on the midway with playable minigames. But our ship date was looming. The mini-games ended up as static pieces of background art, but you can still see the original idea thanks to the textures in the level. John Baron thought up most of the games while doing the initial level design.

The final in-game textures were given a wonderful air of festive decay by Dan Cole. You can almost smell that bilge water taffy.

I can only imagine what sort of bent mischief these might have turned into. All you super elite Ton of Clay readers will notice that Madam Charmaine's original name makes a slightly modified appearance. All of these images incorporate bits and pieces of walls we photographed in and around New Orleans.

CK

Homespun Voodoo

2006-10-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

The incredibly rare Voodoo Vince doll. These have sold for millions of dollars on eBay.

The most common question I get via the Beep Industries website (next to "Are you guys dead?") is from people who want to know how they can buy, beg, borrow or steal a bona fide Voodoo Vince doll. We would have dearly loved to see vast heaps of shoddy Vince merchandise, dolls included, but that was not to be.

A Vince doll was made (above), but it was mostly sent to members of the gaming press. The crew at Beep and some of the Microsoft people snapped up the rest. It couldn't have been more than 100 or so dolls, total. I managed to get three. One is on the shelf in my office. Another is being kept in its wrapper for my kid when he's old enough to really enjoy long, pointy pins.

Speaking of which, one sad aspect of the promotional dolls is that they didn't include Vince's pins due to the usual hand-wringing and liability concerns. Vince without his pins is, well, just a doll. The pins you see on my doll were made by my good friend Patrick Hoynes. He melted authentic Mardi Gras beads onto antique hat pins, creating pins as lovely as they are dangerous. That earned Pat the third doll from my small supply.

It's sad. Given the lukewarm reception Vince had in some quarters, those dolls would have been better off in the hands of eager Vince fans. Maxim magazine mailed theirs as a gimmick to a random recipient. I stongly encourage indifferent members of the gaming press to put theirs up for sale on eBay. Contrary to my caption above, you will only make a few bucks but it would help to right a great wrong and restore balance to the gaming nerd cosmos.

This lack of dolls hasn't dampened the spirits of determined Voodoo Vince fans. Since no Vince merchandise exists, they've made their own. Over the last few years I have received some great pictures (and one actual doll) from fans who have made t-shirts, artwork and quite a few home-made Vince dolls. No mass produced chotchkey will ever match these for personality, warmth and all-around coolness.

One lucky Vince fan received this statue for her birthday from her very talented son:

I have to smile every time I look at these. When I think about the hours these must have taken to create, I'm simply amazed. This proves that an idea can live on in the hearts of gamers long after the machines that play them have been converted to goldfish bowl case mods - with or without the help of marketing.

This final image by a grade schooler is better than any sign-off I can think of.

CK

TA-ncient History #5: The First Ad

2006-10-05T16:32:00.001-07:00

Some of you old timers might remember the first print advertisement for Total Annihilation. I think that ad scored a first for Cavedog. Or a close second... maybe third. Definitely no more than sixteenth overall. I'm positive.

Y'see, print ads for games almost always followed a time-honored format. Crack open any game magazine from before 1997 and you will see that the advertisements are remarkably homogeneous. They all looked something like this:

This dates back to the time when game art was relatively crude, so some sort of swanky art or a big juicy photograph would be used to build an image for a game. The game itself usually couldn't do that. A character with only twelve pixels just doesn't have a lot of presence.

The thing is, game ads still looked like that decades later, even after in-game art started to look reasonably slick. It's a common design even today. I don't blame ad agencies for doing this. I'm sure they can crap out nineteen of these in a single afternoon and still have time for some blow and a round of golf. And to be fair, it's a pretty common approach to any print ad. It works for selling lotion and cars... Why not games?

That is exactly the sort of ad the marketing firm working for GT Interactive showed us when they came by in early 1997. We hated it immediately. We knew the game would have only one or two print ads before it launched and we wanted them to have maximum impact. Chris and I were adamant that we sell the game with the game. We insisted that the ad feature a full two-page screenshot.

I don't recall seeing this before. It's not like we thought it up. It was just a matter of time before giant screenshots became commonplace, but Total Annihilation was certainly one of the first games to do it. There was some resistance from the agency. The concern was that (gasp!) the pixels would be visible since a computer game couldn't match the print resolution of a magazine. That sounded fine to us. It would absolutely show gamers what they were getting.

We did have one advantage. GT Interactive owned the fold-out ad space inside the cover of all the major PC gaming magazines for a couple years running. This prime real estate was mostly used for big versions of the standard formula above, but we would get that spot for one or two display ads before the game hit store shelves. Chris, Ron and I wrote the basic copy which the ad folks polished up a bit. I did a rough layout then went to work creating a big, big screenshot. Here is the original image:

Okay. This was the original image, but Blogger crunched it down quite a bit.

A few months later, Total Annihilation would later have a built-in screen shot key command. We could take snapshots like this with no problem - but we didn't have that feature at this point. I had to take a series of smaller shots and drop them onto the original .PCX file we imported into our map editor. I took a second shot with the mesh view enabled and did a small mask reveal in Photoshop to communicate the 3D-ness of the terrain.

It had the desired result. Between this ad and our first preview coverage in PC Gamer, we went to E3 in 1997 with lots of good buzz around Total Annihilation. Several competing RTS games had print ads almost identical to this (including the landscape mesh) within a year. Giant full page screenshots are pretty commonplace now, but you still see plenty of that Game Ad 101 ethic between the pages of magazines to this day.

CK

A Family Portrait

2006-10-03T17:19:00.000-07:00

I always liked this one. It really helps to give some idea of how much content is created even for a modest game like Voodoo Vince. Just about every character is here, except for a couple of the zombies from the Zombie Guidance Counselor level (though zombie football player and zombie chef are representing for the team). One of the doomed critters from the Sausage Factory might be missing too, but that's understandable.

This picture was used in the Voodoo Vince preview in Play Magazine, and on the back tray of the official soundtrack CD, but hasn't been shown much outside of those things. The characters were done by the Beep animation crew (based on Doug's concept art, of course). Gary Hanna did the rendering using Mental Ray.

TA-ncient History #4: Dogs, Yaks & Boron

2006-10-02T21:40:00.000-07:00

By the Spring of 1997, Total Annihilation was shaping up nicely and the public was about to get its first glimpse of the game. Our first magazine previews, print ads and E3 were just around the corner. We'd known from the start that the game couldn't be released under the wholesome family-friendly Humongous label. It wouldn't make sense for their audience, or the one we were hoping to reach with TA. This didn't stop some of us from drawing pictures of Putt Putt bristling with guns. A new name and a completely different image would be required.

Chris and I tossed around ideas for names from the start, but nothing jumped out at us. We opened it up to ideas from the whole company.

I compiled all the suggestions that rolled in. We heard some standard software developer-ish sounding names with "mega" and "soft" in the name. A couple programmers raided the element chart, submitting ideas like "cobalt" and "boron" Since we worked in the Pacific Northwest near Seattle, we heard plenty of pleasant names incorporating rain, fish, mountains and more fish. After sifting through these, Chris and I narrowed it down to two choices: Cavedog Entertainment and Frozen Yak Entertainment, both of which were his contributions.

We liked both names. I did some crude doodles in my notepad during a meeting.

I fleshed them out a bit more at home that evening. Here is a rough Cavedog.

These two pictures were pinned up on the wall of the office Chris and I shared. It was put to a vote, and Cavedog won by a narrow margin. The pooch was ready for prime time. That sorry looking Frozen Yak wasn't completely lost. It was unearthed as part of an April Fools joke on the Cavedog website about a year later.

The Cavedog logo ended up on all the usual things like business cards, letterhead, hats and the all-important t-shirts. I've done a lot of logos over the years. I still think this is one of my better efforts. I wanted to evoke paleolithic cave paintings, while keeping the lines simple enough to stand out, even when printed very small.

It did. I was relaxing at home in 2000, watching my favorite family entertainment, The Sopranos. It was season two, episode seven... the one called D-Girl. Toward the end of the episode, Sal "Big Pussy" Bompensiero was having a heart-to-heart with AJ in his room when something in the background caught my eye.

Could it be? A TA: Core Contingency poster in AJ's bedroom?

It is! You can just make out the Commander to the right, but the Cavedog is plain as day.

And there you have it. My small supporting role in television history. It's fitting that the Cavedog shared some screen time with the Big Pussy character, since both would be bumped off within the year.

The Lure of The Shrimp Sub

2006-09-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

This is the third of the four 3D concept pieces created for the Voodoo Vince green light meeting. Once again, Gary Hanna and his crew did a spectacular job. This portrays Vince in a mini-submersible shaped like a shrimp. It's funny how wonderfully clear the water is. It's like a tropical reef rather than the incredibly murky water one really finds in the bayou country. Real swamp water slooks like unfiltered apple cider, teeming with countless bugs and reptiles. But hey, zero visibility wouldn't be much fun in a game.

I mentioned the four "perfect world" pictures earlier, but I figured I'd talk about them a little more. After a year of meetings, rejections and building a demo we finally landed a deal with Microsoft. We didn't dive into production right away. There was a prototype phase first. We had six months to create a bigger, better, more detailed version of the demo, finish a first draft of the comprehensive general design doc (GDD), and initial draft of the technical design doc (TDD), and a detailed milestone list for the whole project with tasks, assignments and workflow charted out. We also needed to establish how the game would look. All this was wheeled into a conference room for the meeting. These images were brought in on 2 by 3 foot enlargements mounted on foam core (which delighted MS execs promptly snapped up).

The purpose of pictures like the one above was to allow Gary and his crew to create something that approximated how the finished game would look without bogging down the prototype itself. The theory was that we could then make the prototype visually crude and concentrate on gameplay.

That's a nice theory, but we ended up making the prototype as visually strong as we possibly could. Visual polish is a double-edged sword. Everybody says they can imagine how things will look in a rough version, but the inevitable "That's not final art, is it?" question is the bane of artists throughout human history. You just know it was said of the Lascaux bison. On the other hand, if you work too tight you can paint yourself into a corner, visually speaking. We decided to err on the side of polish. Voodoo Vince at six months looked better than a lot of finished games.

That paid off in the green light meeting, though we still had a lot of content to create before the game crossed the finish line.

CK

The Vince Storybook

2006-09-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

"In the darkest corner of the oldest voodoo shop in the French Quarter of New Orleans was a doll made of rags, twine, burlap and strange unspeakable things. He was named Vince."

My experience in the game industry has taught me that most people don't read... even all-wise, benevolent publishers are sometimes too busy to wade through a long wordy document. I decided to make understanding Vince as easy as possible for busy executives with too many concepts to evaluate. I wrote what amounted to a children's book and put it in the first concept/pitch doc for the game. This may be why I still hear from parents who say their kids are crazy about Voodoo Vince.

Vince's appearance didn't change too much from these early concept pieces.

Kosmo and his goons (Jeb and Fingers) are much as they appeared in the game almost three years later.

Curio (above) and the roustabouts (above right) by Doug "Mr. Prolific" Williams.

The biggest changes were made to the Madam Charmaine character. She was originally called Madam Curio. We changed her name once we discovered there was a professional dominatrix using that moniker (gosh... thanks, Google). We also went with a somewhat younger look for her.

This approach was really well received. It opened doors and led to many upbeat meetings with publishers. I found that just about everybody "got" the idea behind the game. Everybody was enthusiastic about the concept too, but that didn't loosen any purse strings. It took a playable demo to accomplish that. But it was still a great way to establish some basic elements for Vince and his world.

CK

TA-ncient History #3: Mid Nano-Stream

2006-09-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

Backdrop for a temporary title screen - Fall of 1996

Total Annihilation came together fast. Really fast. The bulk of the game's code and content was created in less than a year. I credit this to two things: insane work hours and a good preproduction phase.

Preproduction is frequently overlooked and underestimated by publishers and game developers, even today. Taking the time to figure out tools, techniques and a look for a game sounds like good sense, but it is often written off as indulgent fluff. It doesn't always feel like you're producing something, and it's sometimes hard to show that you are (especially to a stressed out executive) but preproduction is incredibly useful. It gets a solid production pipeline in place, and makes it easier for a small core team to share the Kool Aid and quickly indoctrinate new recruits. I firmly believe that every week of preproduction saves at least three weeks of regular development time. It's true. I have notes.

By the Fall of 1996 we were gearing up for full production and adding staff in a hurry. A lot had happened by then. We had figured out our excuse for a story. We had marginally functional tools. We started getting a good feeling about the game.

We also had a new publisher. GT Interactive bought Humongous Entertainment in July of 1996. Chris and I had no clue that was going to happen. Saying we were surprised is putting it mildly. Total Annihilation was started under the auspices of a mom n' pop, bootstrap operation and now it belonged to some guys in New York. Stuff like that happens in business, but there were some moments of stress and consternation.

GT (originally initials for "Good Times") was as surprised as we were. When they bought the makers of Putt Putt, Freddi Fish and Fatty Bear, they were only marginally aware that an RTS game was lurking somewhere in the building. It seemed like a good match. GT had risen to be the third biggest game publisher by distributing Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem. Total Annihilation looked like it might be a good fit for them. The game would certainly get better distribution than it would have before the acquisition. Funding for TA's completion would also be on more solid ground. We did a quick demo for some GT Interactive execs about a month later and they seemed to like what they saw. So, it was full steam ahead.

These screens are mockups from a time when different interface designs were being considered (though the maps and units are all legit). That's why there are structures and vehicles all mixed up on the same menu.

These are from January and February of 1997, or roughly the mid-way point of the production phase. This is just a month before we started making screenshots for our first print ad and our nearly nonexistent preview coverage.

It's still rough, but quite a difference from just a few months earlier. Many units will be familiar to anyone who has played the game, though some saw major changes in the months ahead. Let's have a fun "guess that unit" contest. We were briefly considering a whole heap of team symbols (including some suspiciously like lab glassware) for multiplayer, several of which can be seen here. Those were too hard to see on most units, so we just went with the basic Arm/Core insignias. The engine only supported 640 x 480 resolution at this point, which is why the UI looks gigantic and the units seem ready to crawl up your nose. Dig the groovy yin-yang on the Core Kbot lab.

The build buttons are from a brief phase where I thought a blueprint sort of look might work. We had all those 3D models, so a simple shot of the wireframe seemed like a good place to start.

That brings up an issue we had. There were continual headaches with those itty bitty polygonal units. It was always a challenge to make them distinctive and engaging. Everybody knows what an airplane or tank looks like at a glance, but the same wasn't true for a damn K-bot lab, much less a metal storage facility. The software renderer wasn't helping much either. Textures tended to shift and "swim" a lot. Early incarnations of the engine often had polygons popping in and out of existence depending on the barometric pressure that day. We were genuinely concerned about how our little robots and gizmos would stack up against the crisp prerendered sprites found in so many other games. We knew our game would have an edge once people saw the units in motion, but we were never happy with how the units looked in static screen shots.

This lead to the final version of the build buttons. Ron Gilbert suggested we go with small "glamor shots" to help sell the units visually. At left is an early version of a build menu for Total Annihilation.

The "unit problem" also lead to the creation of our animated screenshots, the first of several novel ways we used that newfangled Internet thing to find and build an audience for the game.

CK

More Chunktastic Pixel Love

2006-09-23T21:35:00.000-07:00

This screenshot is from an unreleased Tarzan game for the SNES. Manley was developing it for the now-defunct publisher GameTek. This image probably dates from late 1993. The Tarzan character was done by Jim Bradrick, a highly skilled classical animator and master chili chef. Jim turned me on to the music of Django Reinhardt during this project, which would later have a big impact on Voodoo Vince.

The background, including the strange blue tree, are mine. This was probably near the ultimate saturation point for 16-bit sidescrollers. I think publishers were shoveling any character with limbs into a sidescroller (and some without).

The project was pretty close to content complete when it was canned. We had stumbled along for a good five months without any real design, apart from what the artists and programmers cobbled together on the fly. The game's cancellation may have been related to the way good ol' Tarzan methodically slaughters his way through the endangered species list over the course of the game. The fact that doing so wasn't even fun just sealed the deal.

This is a sort of interesting halfway point in the look of 16-bit tile based games. Lots of games still had little tiles... a "chicklet" look to their backgrounds. The limits of the NES were still embedded in how many developers worked. But games started to appear with a more thoughtful approach to how tilesets could be used. Lush, rotoscoped games like Flashback and even Disney's Jungle Book got a lot of developers thinking differently about tile graphics and animation. I was shamelessly ripping off Flashback with the background foliage here.

Just a year or two later, games like Earthworm Jim and Donkey Kong Country would take tile graphics even further, just in time to see the platform give way to the first generation of 3D consoles. As usual, developers start getting the best from a piece of hardware right before its trip to the scrapyard.

CK

Vince Cutting Room Floor #2: The Skeeterhawk

2006-09-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

Of all the stuff from the Voodoo Vince cutting room floor, this is probably the cuttingest roomy flooriest. You see, once a project gets underway and the tires of software production meet the asphalt of reality in the great rally race of gaming excellence, a lot gets changed, rearranged and just plain hacked off.

The Skeeterhawk is a good example. I originally planned a sizeable riverboat level between Brusque Manor and The Bayou. The Skeeterhawk (ol' Southern slang for a dragonfly) had some ambitious ideas, including the illusion that the whole thing was steaming up the Mississippi. Vince would be trapped aboard until it reached its destination, which would naturally happen after he fought a bunch of monsters, solved some thorny puzzles and a emerged victorious from a climactic riverboat race.

Kids just love them zombie riverboats.

The whole game was ambitious. It's always good to aim high so there is still something decent left after the inevitable cuts occur. There were things I really liked in this level, but some of the puzzles and characters didn't quite come together the way they should have. Given more time I'm sure it would have shaped up, but there was a schedule to keep and everybody felt it made more sense to focus on the quality of other levels instead of just churning out some potentially shakey real estate for Vince to explore. It was a sad day, but the Skeeterhawk was sacrificed on the altar of expedience and common sense.

Man, I hate that altar sometimes.

Supersweet concept art by Doug Williams (again)

In retrospect, I have to admit I wish I'd nuked Roachfort instead (more on that later), but you know what they say about hindsight: It can really suck.

Bat Lady... With Flapping Action!

2006-09-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

This is Thirsha, head honcho of Zhon from Kingdoms. A fine leader in spite of her wacky ears.

An amazing amount of content is created for nearly any game. We had over twenty artists on the team for Kingdoms plus another half dozen or so contract artists working off site. In addition to all the units, maps and interface art there was an incredible heap of pictures made for the cinematic sequences known as the Book of Darien.

This painting is by the brilliant illustrator Greg Call. Greg did portraits of the four monarchs as well as the superb box art for Kingdoms. He was a real treat to work with. Besides being a talented artist and a nice guy, Greg put a lot of effort into learning about the world and its characters before tackling this assignment. I especially like the winged figure worked into the vambrace and the subtle Zhon insignia on the spear.

This piece was seldom seen in its original state. It was cropped and heavily compressed in the movies or reproduced at a small size in various print ads. Here's the whole picture in all its batty goodness.

CK

Voodoo Shop Triviata

2006-09-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

Madam Charmaine's voodoo shop serves as the setting for the game's front end in Voodoo Vince. After flying through the front window after the sundry logo screens, most users probably zoom to the crystal ball to continue their game, but using the joystick will take the camera from one corner of the shop to another. If you look in the background, you'll see some pretty silly things.

Before the level artists went to work filling the shop with a lot of nifty Voodoo clutter, Doug Williams came up with a whole lot of ideas for various decor items. Here are some of his funnier ideas.

I think everyone needs a pickled businessman in a jar. Not everything made it into the game. I know the Zombie Flakes, the carton of chicken milk and the poor little trapped bug are pretty easy to see in the background at different spots around the final version of the shop. The saucy "Men of Voodoo" video cassette didn't, but there's an idea waiting to happen if I've ever seen one.

CK

TA-ncient History #2: The Non-Story Story

2006-09-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

What the hell?!? Did Duke Nukem and Vanilla Ice have a love child?

Total Annihilation was well received for it's gameplay and design innovations, but there was some criticism for its lack of a deep, engaging story. The heavy hitters in the RTS genre all had swell movies, choc full of the best cut scenes 3D animators and B-list actors could provide.

We started the project firmly convinced we could somehow pull together long, ambitious, jaw-dropping cinematics. During the first couple months, Chris Taylor and I laughed ourselves silly with random ideas for a premise. If we ended up snorting teriyaki and Diet Coke out our noses, we'd put it in the story.

We were leaning toward an extremely, violent, comedic style that would be familiar to fans of the Venture Brothers today. We knew we had a central figure in the Commander. We had a limited budget, so we figured he would be the only real character in the intro movie. The idea was that the Commanders were identical clones who were at war over the shape of the glassware in which they were spawned.

Yes, I'm serious.

One had a regular test tube as part of his insignia. The other had an Erlenmeyer flask. I went home one weekend and whipped up a storyboard for a long, drawn out space battle between two gigantic starships, ending with both Commanders crashing on a desolate alien world. There, they would duke it out to the death. Hot n' spicy... Total A style.

Here are some excerpts from the insanely long storyboard...

Don't worry. We came to our senses. It soon dawned on us that we could have no such thing in the game. We thought the ideas were a hoot, but they would have cost more than the game's whole budget to make. Keep in mind that Total Annihilation was made for a very modest 1.2 million bucks. Game developers spend more than that on Red Vines and spa treatments these days. We scaled back to simple mission briefings with static graphics and settled for a short intro sequence, and a couple of short movies for the end of each mission series.

A while later, we came up with the names of the sides. Chris and I batted names back and forth like "The Syndicate," and "The Corporation" for our villains. Chris shortened that to simply "the Core." Unit artist Clayton Corbisier came up with "the Arm" for our so-called good guys. He just liked the sound. We did too. Chris then asked me to go home and come up with a simple backstory one evening. He said, "Just some good guys, some bad guys and some reason they're fighting. That's it."

I came back the next day with a document outlining the war between the Arm and the Core, along with some history and possible story arcs for the game. Here is an excerpt:

"Once, the galaxy was united and whole — ruled with scientific precision by the Core. Their citizens lacked nothing. At the zenith of their civilization, the ultimate dream was realized: immortality.

"Those receiving this awesome gift were selected by Core Central. Their minds were carefully recorded as an advanced digital simulation. Weak and fallible human flesh was cast aside and a perfect, artificial body of dreadful abilities housed the remaining consciousness. This guaranteed that the best and brightest minds could be of use to society indefinitely.

"This practice made certain factions uneasy — most notably the best and brightest minds in the galaxy. Not every promising leader looked forward to this “immortality”. Gradually, this faction united and chose to live where the influence of the Core was weakest: in a remote spiral arm of the galaxy. As their numbers grew they became known simply as the Arm.

"This war of ideas became a war in fact. Uneasy with an increasingly vocal opposition, the Core decided to squelch this provincial backwater.

"At first, the Core had a clear advantage. Most of the population and resources of the galaxy were still theirs. But the Arm had a certain resourcefulness that stopped the Core’s best attempts to eradicate them. The Arm learned something new with each encounter, eventually building a war complex to rival that of the Core. What started as a minor skirmish soon blossomed into a vast conflict which would last for thousands of years."

This was later spruced up by veteran game writer, Dave Grossman for the now-familiar (and much catchier) intro sequence to Total Annihilation:

"What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides, now crippled beyond repair. The remnants of their armies continue to battle on ravaged planets; their hatred fueled by over four thousand years of total war. This is a fight to the death. For each side the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other."

Ah... That's better. Above is my rough storyboard that served as the framework for the intro cinematic to Total Annihilation. Proper units and many more shots were dropped in later, though the Arm Commander didn't change that much.

It's pretty basic stuff, but there are some influences I can cite. I had been reading books with vivid portrayals of what might become of humanity if digitized simluation of human consciousness were a reality. The first was Feersum Endjinn by Iain Banks. The second was Permutation City by Greg Egan. Banks deals with a fantastic distant future where the dead live on in a digitized afterlife using a vast computer built into the crust of a planet. Egan portrays early attempts at digitizing a human mind using a more contemporary setting. Both are great reads, by the way, and influenced my thinking when I went home to cook up that skinny premise for TA.

The inclusion of nanotech was for pure convenience. This was about the time we were trying to figure out how to portray construction in the game. It would have been too complex and time consuming to have little guys with hammers and scaffolds every time something was built in the game. It also wasn't futuristic enough. We needed something like magic, but with a thin veneer of science around it. Nanotechnology to the rescue! Two other books influenced my thinking here - Queen of Angels by Greg Bear and Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. The former has a great segment describing the formation of a building inside what amounted to a gigantic glass jello mold. I thought something like that might fit our super cool futuristic war pretty well. Diamond Age vividly portrays nanotech used in both fabrication and warfare. I proposed the "nanolathe" as the basis for our construction technology. One of the programmers came up with a particle effect (sort of like futuristic space pee) and we were set.

For all that, it's still not much of a story. We were about to enter the Great Real Time Strategy Bloodbath of 1997 and we had a plot you could sum up in one paragraph. Were we crazy?!?

Yes and no.

The lack of story might have turned off a wider audience, but it left plenty of room for all sorts of great expansion and extrapolation. There was room for players to project their own imagination into the story. After I handed off that doc, I didn't write another word about the TA universe. That was okay. Everybody else ran with it. The mission designers added a ton of ideas and all sorts of interesting plot twists. Fan fiction has taken the saga of the Arm and the Core to a whole new level. The Core is no longer a two dimensional villain, and the Arm isn't just a bunch of pouting malcontents. A real, vibrant universe now hangs on the bones of Total Annihilation's spartan backstory.

I wouldn't have it any other way. Not for all the test tubes in the world.

CK

Flaming Zombie Rats

2006-09-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

This is another of the early visual prototype screens produced by Gary Hanna and his awesome team in the Fall of 2001.

People have sometimes asked why our version of the French Quarter was so twisty and bendy when the city of New Orleans was originally laid out using straight Cartesian principles. That's mostly a question of art direction, but I'm convinced that part of this has to do with the city itself. It just feels bendy. After a few Hurricanes, everything does. Even Descartes would have a hard time finding his hotel.

Ah, flaming zombie rats. We hardly knew ye. These were probably my favorite concept among the first generation of monsters we created for Voodoo Vince. They sort of floated around the French Quarter moaning and farting little fireballs. They were eventually cut and replaced with the Bomber Beetles. They were charming, in a bizarre sort of way, but were too lackluster and sad once we saw them in action.

Another part of the game that saw numerous changes was the combat system. The first approach we tried can be seen in the way Vince is attacking the hapless FZR. At one point we tried a system where all combat was carried out by Vince harming himself. Each time he stabbed, beat or burned himself a jolt of magical stuff would create the appropriate reaction in the enemies.

It had potential but there were some intrinsic problems, most of which had to do with Vince feeling too isolated from the monsters. I'll get into that whole story in a later post.

TA-ncient History #.05: The Happy Layoff

2006-09-10T11:43:00.001-07:00

This should have been the first post in the TA-ncient History series since these pictures predate that first TA screen by a few months. What we have here is one of those things you can chalk up to fate, coincidence, kismet, or whatever you choose to call blind stupid luck.

Before coming to work at Humongous Entertainment and hammering away on Really Cool War Game with Chris, I worked nearby at Squaresoft, Inc. in Redmond. That studio created Secret of Evermore for the SNES, but 16-bit consoles were on the way out. While our fate was being decided some of us worked on concepts for possible future titles. A small group of us started tossing around ideas for a real time strategy game. Warcraft 2 was a huge craze around the office and we were pretty thrilled about the notion of working on an RTS game.

The concept was tentatively called Alien Reign, which is ironic given how similar that is to Dark Reign, a much anticipated competitor to Total Annihilation. The concept never got past the early half-baked zygote stage, but some interesting things occurred along the way.

We were just ramping up on 3D at Squaresoft during the completion of Evermore, and I was interested in finding tools that would be simple and easy for artists to pick up and learn quickly. KPT Bryce seemed like it had possibilities. I also wanted a look that wasn't obviously made of tiles like most RTS games. I hoped our backgrounds could have larger pieces of nicely rendered terrain.

These pictures from March of 1996 are the result. I did the terrain. The buildings and robot were designed by our art director Daniel Dociu then modeled and rendered by Square's resident Alias guru Brad Clarkson.

This concept never went anywhere, but it helped get my brain in gear for what was to come. Some of the same factors would help my approach to building the art for Total Annihilation. The art crew at Square had little 3D experience -- most of the original TA crew had even less. Some had never worked in 3D at all. Accessible tools like Bryce and Lightwave helped make TA possible, and reasonably quick to produce.

This little thought experiment helped set the stage in more ways than that. Squaresoft laid us off and closed their Redmond office in the Spring of 1996. There were some very talented people looking for work, including our staff composer, Jeremy Soule. I doubt I would have given Humongous a shot if Jeremy hadn't encouraged me to check them out. Our presence there eventually helped to pull in other former Squaresoft folks, like programmers Bartosz Kijanka, Rick Saenz, Jeff Petkau (inspiration for the Jeffy) and artists John Baron, Rebecca Coffman, Jarrett Holderby and Peter Fries, all of whom contributed a lot to the Total Annihilation products. So, Squaresoft's loss was definitely TA's gain.

It's a small world. I was sitting in Redmond thinking up ways to incorporate 3D art into an RTS game. It turns out there was a guy just a couple miles away working on an engine for an RTS game with 3D height maps. Once those two thing met up, very good things started to happen.

Main Street Lower GI

2006-09-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

Voodoo Vince was lucky enough to have some fine, fine level designers and artists.

Above is the sort of crude approximation I would make for the level layout guys. This is a diagram for Main Street from the very first draft of the Voodoo Vince design doc. You might noticed one or two things called out that didn't make it into the game. But, like all our levels, it ended up being much more rich and detailed than my rudimentary, blocky concept. John Baron and Joe Mullenix added incredible hidden tunnels, strange knick knacks and controller-crushing platform challenges. The artists went on to make it cool, beautiful and filled with all sorts of inside jokes and visual puns. More on that later.

This is a simplified shot of the final geometry for Main Street. Anybody who played the game and got lost there can now see why. I always thought the top-down shots of our levels had a very intestinal look, which makes sense since Vince usually goes in one end and out the other.

Bon Appétit!

Pixelus Maximus

2006-09-07T13:49:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist. Back before I became the mighty gaming magnate I am today, I was a humble pixel jockey. I worked on a number of games for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System at a small development house in Issaquah, Washington. The company was called Manley & Associates (later the late EA Seattle). It was my first job in the game industry.

This is from the Pink Goes To Hollywood sidescroller Manley developed for TecMagik, starring the license-alicious Pink Panther. I noticed most of the development credit on the web is incorrectly copied from the Sega Genesis port by a different studio, which was in fact based on Manley's SNES version.

The picture is made up of sprites and background tiles I created for the Robin Hood themed level using the venerable workhorse of game art: Deluxe Paint from Electronic Arts. This dates from 1993, the heyday of 16-bit consoles.

Just look at those luscious pixels! Ye gods, they're huge! They could put an eye out. These are pixels to be reckoned with. I used to name each of them. The one in the upper left is Chet. A family of five could live inside pixels like that. Each 16x16 tile only had 16 colors, all of which strained my 386 running Norton Commander to the limit. You had to make each one count. None of this willy nilly RGB stuff. There was no spooling your bloated assets to a hard drive. Nosiree.

Screenshots were usually pretty lousy back then. By the time they were screengrabbed, separated into CMYK and printed in magazines (there wasn't much of an Internet yet), you usually ended up looking at a mushy little postage stamp. So, here is some stuff from the original assets in all it's glory. Savor the days when game art was like a mosaic floor in a very fancy bathroom.

Heeeyyy... There's an idea.

CK

Loving Ink for Vince

2006-09-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

Well, cool! The fine folks over at Play Magazine compiled a list the top 25 character platformers of all time for their September issue. Our boy Vince managed to snag a place among some pretty stellar company. Go snag a copy if you haven't already. Buy two so you have one in mint condition to show your grandchildren.

Vince Cutting Room Floor #1: Toxic Alley

2006-09-02T20:22:00.001-07:00

Setting a game in New Orleans just seemed like a cool idea since my first trip there in 1996. No other place in the US has that amazing sense of carefree creepiness. After we received the letter of intent from Microsoft, ten of us went down there. This was partly to celebrate finally landing a publisher after a year of shopping the concept, but most of our time was spent gathering an immense trove of visual reference.

Beepsters in New Orleans

We poked around in the bayou, various plantations and of course the city itself. Besides the usual touristy pictures we took many gigs of texture reference from walls, streets, puddles and trees. The textures you seen in Voodoo Vince really are from New Orleans and the surrounding areas.

Now where is that pesky Crawdad Jimmy?

This was taken near a backwoods hunting shack. The water was teeming with alligators. The fanboat driver/guide was kind enough to advise against trailing our fingers in the water, otherwise the gators might enjoy a "Fing-uh Mac-nugget."

We had to spend a lot of time in the French Quarter. It was strictly business. Yup. Uh-huh.

After we got back to the Northwest, and I dove into writing the design doc for Voodoo Vince. This was in the Spring of 2001. I was aware that flooding was a persistent issue with New Orleans. Even the first city engineer in 1718 advised against building a city there saying "Dudes, this place is gonna flood... a lot!" or something like that... only in French. I thought a flooded portion of the French Quarter would make sense as part of the destruction our villain levels against New Orleans. And no ordinary flood would do. I specified water oozing with toxic waste.

This segment of the French Quarter was to be called Toxic Alley. The idea was to have Vince use a frail hanglider to go from one end to the other, using updrafts and tiny landing places while avoiding powerlines and the toxic waters below.

In light of events a year ago in New Orleans, it is fortunate that this part of the game was cut, though there are some eerie parallels. This sub-level of the game never made beyond the first draft of the design document. Toxic Alley only exists today as pieces of concept art by the ridiculously talented Doug Williams.

TA-ncient History #1: Pixel People

2006-09-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

I went to work in May of 1996 at Humongous Entertainment. I was hired to be the lead artist on something called Really Cool Wargame. For the first six months I shared a tiny, stuffy room with project lead and creator, Chris Taylor. That was a great time. By the time we finished preproduction we had concocted the Cavedog Entertainment brand to set our dark, explodey game apart from Humongous Entertainment's delightful family fare. The game was also given its final name, Total Annihilation.

Total Annihilation is pretty well known for its polygonal buildings and units, but in the summer of 1996 we were building a game that only had polygonal vehicles. We fully expected to use 2D sprites for buildings and human characters (yes, humans). Here is the sole surviving composite of Total Annihilation in its infancy, dating from June of 1996.

It's pretty silly, but keep in mind that one month before this the game consisted of a day-glo green mesh on a blue background and an untextured 20 polygon tank. The Commander is the big silly muscle guy beneath the placeholder, um... I'll say airplane factory. His strange appearance can be explained by an early version of TA's backstory, but I'll save that for a later post.

Once we were allowed to raise our minimum spec to a mighty Pentium 90 and a huge (though still laughable) 16 megs of RAM, we did some tests and decided to go all-polygonal for anything that moved in the game. The Pixel People were thankfully banished to the scrapheap of things that might have been. The rest is gaming history.

I have an immense trove of TA and Cavedog related memorabilia. I plan to display some of it on this blog. My mouldering heap includes concept art, original drafts of a couple different backstories, storyboards, early box mockups and loads of other strange stuff. So, stay tuned for more obscure crap than you can shake a D-Gun at.

A Perfect World for Robot Clowns

2006-08-31T17:47:00.000-07:00

This picture is from the early days of the Voodoo Vince project, or Vince The Voodoo Doll as he was known before we received all sorts of advice about changing the name. This picture is one of four "perfect world" pictures created by Gary Hanna and his art team during the prototype phase. The prototype phase lasted six months. That's when we built a playable first level for the game and a complete first draft of the design document (150+ pages). Gary and his crew fleshed out our goals for how the game would look in its final form. All these things were rolled out at a green light meeting where Microsoft would make the final decision to move ahead with the game... or not. They did, in case you were wondering.

This shows Vince battling the infamous Kosmobot near the end of the game. I've always like this picture... Lotsa juicy action. This would have been completed in late September of 2001. I can't believe that's nearly 5 years ago.

A surprising number of things from this piece ended up in the final game. Even the clown missiles, though you can barely see their lovingly detailed textures as they streak by (and frequently into) Vince's plane.

You're Welcome

2006-08-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

Hi.

I figured it was time to get this blog thing going. I'd hate to be the last kid on my street to get one, and I don't want to be embarrassed like I was with electrification and the telephone.

I expect I'll be posting odds and ends from various projects here. Sometimes that will be artwork, screenshots (some from pre-released versions of the games) and thoughts about games I've worked on. Sometimes I may have a new doodle or piece of artwork to post. Other times I'll just share randoms thoughts and ideas. It's a crapshoot, but you get what you pay for.

Feel free to chime in. I enjoy a good conversation -- even an argument or two. Just keep things civil and above the equator when possible.