Big Plans

As new members joined the Civilization V team it became important for me develop a consistent vision and direction for the game external to the art director. Often this is handled by having a few extremely successful concept images; a mix of ideal screen shots and inspiration images. Usually a team gets tired of looking at the same image over and over again and being told to make their art more like it.

I needed goals that the team could agree on, which would provide context for success and failure. I also wanted artists on the team to be able to argue for their decisions in a way that could win others over, while making the game better in the process.

Here’s the list I developed and tried my best to follow:

This list includes a concept painting of the Oracle by Erik Ehoff. Erik created some key images which captured the romanticized view of history we wanted to explore. 

I will be taking a look at each goal in more detail, evaluating how successful each goal was, not just in its own achievement, but also as a way of making a better Civilization title.

A friend in need

One of my close friends from college owns a small game development studio in Brooklyn. He asked me help him look over some animation portfolios. As we started going over the project deadlines, and the amount of animation needed, I realized he might need some of my help.

One of the first things we needed to solve was the best way to achieve the look of the concepts. I created a quick lighting setup, and tweaked the toon shader values to get a good match.

This was my first experience working with huge headed characters. Initially I struggled with the head taking up so much space on the character, and I had difficulty pushing poses as far as I wanted without making the character look off-balanced. Once I got into it though it was quite fun!

Where do we go from here?

I was assigned as the project art director to a very small team beginning development on the next Civilization title. Civilization IV was already our best selling title to date, and the studio wondered what we were going to do to make a worthy sequel. Many of the big game play concepts we decided on early, including the move to a hexes and the limit of one unit-per tile. One of the first changes we made was to modify the Civilization IV engine to support armies of little warriors. With that change alone war went from being a stack of units to massive battle lines of hundred.

Epic historical fiction became the tag line to establish a clear visual direction, and we needed to explore that concepts in all aspects of the game. I put together a bunch of old artwork to imagine how cities could look to emulate cities in history.

The largest visual component of a Civilization title is the terrain. It is the backdrop on which the game is experienced. Not only does it establish the scale and scope of the world, but it is also the dominant source of the game’s color palette. We wanted to add the the variety that players experienced when exploring the game world, and with that in mind I worked with concept artist Erik Ehoff to establish these regional color studies.

We also wanted to push the variety of the Civilizations in the game. The goal was to create each leader’s ideal environment in which you would engage with them during diplomatic negotiations. Marc Hudgin’s leader thumbnails became the basis for the larger concepts and the eventual 3D scenes developed for the game.

A Little Bit of Everything

I was given the lead role for the 2nd expansion pack of Civilization IV, called Beyond the Sword. The idea of the expansion was to add to the modern era of the core game and to create a series of scenarios that would push the modding capabilities of the engine. We had a fairly small team, and we pushed to be co-located. The game gave a large number of people the opportunity to design their own mods and created the need for a variety of styles to be included in one game.

I worked closely with Jason Winokur to Prototype the various designs in the game engine. Each problem was given 2 weeks to solve, usually involving a quick animation from me that showed scale any unique camera controls needed. I would then create “in-game” assets for Jason to use to match the look and feel in the engine.

The first game concept that we looked at was a mod called Final Frontier. designed by Jon Shafer. The initial plan was to create a version of Civilization in space, where the planets were the ground, and space was the ocean. Here was the quick example that I made for him:

As the game design continued to evolve, so did the concept of the game centered on. The scope of the game become much larger and now the player claimed solar systems instead of parts of planets.

The Afterworld Mod was Tim McCracken’s homage to X-Com on an alien world. This is an example how even a quick animatic can be useful in determining the scope of the game.

This is the world we finally created for the game.

While working on Civilization IV I had quickly made some thumbnail concepts of the different missionaries. We had a very tight schedule, and there were plans to make a single generic missionary to represent the different religions. This hasty sketch was enough to change people’s minds.

On this project I also had a chance to experiment with some different approaches to concept art, and I wanted to build on what worked with that micro concept. I decided to the best of my ability I would make my concepts at nearly the same pixel sizes that the final art would appear in the game. I also ended up making  simple billboards with the concept art attached for all the new units in the game, so very quickly we could test “in-game” readability. My favorite of the units were for Paul Murphy’s dire near future scenario, “Next War”.

Another new experience for me was the chance to work with an outside production team to develop the opening cinematic for the game. I worked closely with animator Kevin Bradley to come up with the storyboard. We had a very tight budget, so we designed the story structure to be low cost to realize.

How’s that for Over the Top?

During the Pre-Production of Civilization Revolution it was hard to avoid the term  Next-Gen when discussing creating content for consoles. There was a strong desire to re-invent the idea of Civilization for the consoles. The XBox360 had just launched, and Nintnedo’s upcoming wasn't known as the Wii, but the Revolution. I imagined playing a game of Civilization on a round globe, and knew that screenshot of this would instantly stand apart from what we’d done in the past.

There were thoughts to reuse the leaders developed for Civilization IV early on. Even though the plan was to update them with new animations and textures it seemed obvious something else needed to change in their presentation. Usually when a map is up on your TV, you’re watching the news. This idea was the birth of Gandhi, the weatherman!

Here’s an approach to the tech tree that ended up not being used. I was interested in the seamless zoom with each icon hinting at a world filled with information, the visual interface encouraging you to get lost in exploration.

I was tasked with adding character to the way that cities grow. Inspired by the building animations in SimGolf I added a lot of squash and stretch into the structures as well as experimenting with bricks dropping from the heavens and city walls that behaved like rubber bands.

The game prototype started to give players exotic gifts from around the globe. Messages were sent explaining that Courtesans, Jugglers, Acrobats, and even Dancing Bears were now awaiting you in your throne room. In an oddly revisionist moment, Sid Meier has gone on record saying that certain things are best left to the imagination. Here’s proof he hasn't always felt that way.

It was also important to explore the early experiences of the game, making the choice of civilization, world size, and difficulty level exciting. I imagined the collection of playable leaders made of different materials, denoting your achievements in the game. I also couldn't get away from over the top musical cues.

How I learned to Love Prototyping!

A few years after joining Firaxis, I was given a chance to work on a new game prototype with a small team and a new designer, Soren Johnson. This was an amazing experience, and shaped the way I approached working on games as an artist. The game that was developed is one of the best games I’ve ever played. Unfortunately, the game that the publisher was more excited about developing was Civilization IV. It’s understandable, and it really was a blast taking those lessons learned and applying them to a highly esteemed franchise.

My role on that project was as the animation lead. I focused exclusively on the “in-game” animations,  while the excellent Ed Lynch handled the leader characters. The first character I worked on was this early prototype for the warrior.

Plans for the units changed shortly after playing the land battle component of Pirates. Sid Meier included groups of units in the turn-based portion of his game, and we realized we could improve the battles in Civilization IV by doing likewise. These animations were developed to help visualize how the various match-ups could look, as well as handling some tricky combinations.

I continued animating the units, including the inevitable surprises that get added to make a good game great. The last few months of production were extreme in many ways. I was tired at the end, but it was an amazing experience seeing every prototype decision come to life during those last months of production!

I am a digital artist without an online portfolio...

Until now. This blog will be a space for me to share work that I’ve been involved with over the years, and a way for me to continue to push myself as an artist involved in making games.