Tuesday 26 May 2015

Evil Genius Online

Over the coming weeks/months I'll be writing about my time as Lead Artist on Evil Genius Online.
I have to say that these were two of the best years of my game making career so far. I'll be telling the story of the development of the style from the original game to the "updated" (late 1960's) feel of the online F2P game. How we designed and built new props, repurposed old props, and got nearly 1 million triangles drawing to screen in a Flash game (not easy).


October 2016 update
Ok now I am confused. My page on Evil Genius has disappeared. The forces of good will not thwart me... I'll dig out the old images and write a new page.

It is also with great sadness that I have to report that due to dwindling player usage there will be no further updates (not that there have been in a while). I would love to say that the plans for Evil Genius 2 were progressing well, but it is not and seems to be stuck in development hell.
I loved my time on EGo and I think we did some stunning work with a small team on a tight budget and short time scale.

We had some wonderful user comments basically saying that we had created a real game rather than the usual Zynga style WhateverVille or other Give-us-your-money-Sim-Builder. That is probably part of the reason its popularity has dropped off.
Shame really..

Friday 15 May 2015

Maya for 3DS Max-heads

I am learning Maya for work and it has not been easy, though I am getting there and have discovered some great tricks and tools that are just so off the wall from a Max point of view.

For anyone coming to Maya from Max I have shared my experiences and workarounds in the "Max 2 Maya" page (on the left under "Pages"). I hope it is of some use to someone, though to be honest, re doing things to check what I am saying has been very useful in cementing the new workflow into my legacy Max filled brain.

Enjoy :-)