A Debt of Gratitude

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

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

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

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.

CK

Team Voodoo!

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.

I'll Just Have The Salabog

I didn't expect to post much about Secret of Evermore 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.

CK

Slighted Over Germany

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.

CK

Fun With Sculpey - Chapter 1

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

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

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.

CK

TA-ncient History #7: Prime Artistry

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.

CK

Enough tiles and I can build the world!

Copyright 1995 Squaresoft, Inc.

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