Insanely Twisted shadow Planet has caught the eyes of La Presse, Canada's largest francophone newspaper. They did a video interview with me a few days ago, and today, they published a cool little article in both the printed and on-line version of the newspaper. Here's a link to the article.
My apologies to my partner, Joe Olson, who gets referred to as Joe Wilson in the article.
We're going to have some big news about the game very soon. We're all working around the clock as our completion deadline approaches. We're asking everyone for a bit more patience. I guarantee you will all agree that it was worth it when you see the finished game. In the meantime I thought I'd post my 1995 short film, Prelude to Eden, which I just uploaded on YouTube in full HD 1080P.
I recently became aware that the famous movie critic Roger Ebert wrote,"videogames can never be art". I find it puzzling that he could make such a statement, since what attracts me to videogames, as an artist, is the unlimited potential for art. The cinematics are one of the many aspects that get my creative juice flowing.
While building the cinematics, I've been forced to constantly use my imagination to solve creative and technical problems while remaining on target for our milestones. It has been challenging and exhilarating at the same time. One of the thing that Joe and I agreed upon right off the bat was to keep them short and sweet - focus on quality rather than quantity. I'll take two great minutes of animation over twenty minutes of average any time. We want the cinematics to feel like rewards, not something you want to fast-forward through.
The next challenge will be to make the transition between cinematics and game play completely seemless. I look forward to that!
We're very happy to officially announce that the music of Dimmu Borgir, courtesy of Nuclear Blast and Prophesies Publishings, will be featured in our game's cinematics. The music is beautiful and epic and really adds power to the images.
A bunch of us from the studio went to see them in Seattle the last time they were in town and we loved the show. We’re delighted to have them be a part of our project.
Our trailer for ITSP inspired Ian Fagan, an artist from Portland, to create a stencil painting of one of the creatures featured in the game. He posted a video on YouTube demonstrating his technique. Check it out.
When I started doing animation work on ITSP, Joe told me that 30 frames (or more) per second was standard for video games. I've always animated at 24 frames per second, that being the standard for the movie industry. Since a lot of the animation I do is hand drawn, increasing the frame rate by 20% meant a lot more hours to produce the same lenght of animation.
And so, Joe and I decided that I would animate at 24 fps and the game engine would adjust its playback speed when displaying my animation.
But then, I saw how smooth and silky my animation looked when we mistakenly displayed it at 30 fps. I was immediately hooked. I love how animation looks at this increased rate, especially when it's hand drawn!
So no worry, all the animation in the game will be at a minimum of 30 fps. No cheat!
