Contracts, Levels, & Shaders

This past weeked marked the start on some new work for a variety of projects which I am very excited about.

First up is a continuation on an art contract that I am doing with the great guys over at 21-6 Productions on a product that they are developing called Dimenxia (which is an educational based FPS game). I recently completed some character, enemy and weapon art for them and now I get to work on a few more character weapons & items, some teaks and a bad ass tank!

Realm Wars work continues at a slow but steady pace with construction on a new map/mission for the next release. Right now everything is getting concepted, roughed in and sized up so that the environmental artists will have an easier time getting everything just right. I am probably going to take some time too and get into the Map/DIF creation process and hopefully keep a full head of hair. I am still waiting on a response from Markus about the new shield DTS shape and the latest bug we have on it, but hopefully that won't be too long of a wait. In the mean time though I am going to start work on a new Axe and tweak the hand to hand animations once again so that they are a bit cooler.

Lastly work continues on a new HUD for Lore Invasion infantry. The overall goal I am approaching with this HUD is to utilize much of what we have going already for the MAV but give it a more simplistic approach (while also giving the MAVs a bit of a tweak to look more technical than they already are in regards to their HUDs).

As an added bonus I am going to start playing with Shaders next week on one of the Lore Invasion MAVs as a test using Torque Shader Engine. The overall goal is to get the in game MAVs looking as cool if not better than some of those high resolution shots I did for the GDC '05 posters. This is obviously a real boon as it will assist in the creation of Realm Wars going TSE sometime after this next release.

Side Note: Need to remember to put in more images to help outline and describe my current task lists better.

Lore Invasion Scores a 9 out of 10 Review!

As some of you probably already know, I have been involved in the Independent Game Development scene for a few years now and have worked on a few projects, most important of which is my first published game Dark Horizons - Lore : Invasion.

The game has done pretty good thus far with decent sales, for an indie game, and some really cool accolades and achievements such as being on of the 10 finalists for the 2005 IGF competition (which is held during GDC), but what is really great is when you get a great review from a site thats known for being real hard ass reviewers. The site that I am talking about here is GameTunnel.com, a site that specificly revolves around Independently Developed games and takes a very serious matter at reviewing them.

The guys over at GameTunnel recently reviewed Lore Invasion (or Lore version 2.x) and gave it a killer score: 9 out of 10! This is not only a huge achievement because these guys can be serious jerks from time to time cutting a swath of destruction through unsuspecting indie games and tearing them to shred like a kitten meeting a leather sofa for the first time, but also because it was just 8 short months ago that they quietly labeled Lore Invasion as "Most Overhyped of 2004" (they technicly claim that they didn't since they only had access to an Early Adopters release at the time, but the stone was still thrown). So this is some serious wow factor here!

If you haven't check out Lore Invasion and like Mecha games and FPS games I recommend that you try it out. It's seriously fun and addictive.

Blogging... The Canadian Way

I had resisted the need to get a blog up and running for quite a while, but lately a number of friends and colleges have started up their own blogs and as such have motivated me to get off my ass and begin a blog of my own.