The game I’ve been working on for the past year and a half is finally, officially announced!
Age of Empires Online Official Site
Sign up for the beta and experience first hand the addictive fun of the game!
Robot Entertainment Game Page
For even more information on the game.
Age of Empires Official Twitter
Follow for instant information regarding the game!
Every month at Robot Entertainment the artists select and create art work within a theme. September’s theme was GI Joe.
Snake Eyes is the most bad ass of all the GI Joe! So if you want to see the rest of the art work I created: click on the image!
chazBot construction complete!
I’ve created this avatar for my work’s art blog Art Bot Central. Be sure to head over there and check out all of the awesome art work created by the talented artists at Robot Entertainment.
My new job over at Robot Entertainment has finally put up a cool new and stylish website. Click on the above image to visit!
There are two animations I want to focus on in this production diary. I want to highlight these because I took time to thumbnail and choreograph them; which is typically something I don’t have time to do at a video game studio. So, I really tried to get it right. Both of these are exploratory animations developed to have a loose visual guideline for what the fatality system would look like. Fatalities in Halo Wars happen when one awesome melee powerhouse, such as the Arbiter, kills one of the other infantry units.
The first exploratory animation I was tasked to do was the Arbiter taking out a squad of marines. I soon got the idea that I would portray the Arbiter as an unstoppable shocking killing machine. And the marines would be dumbfounded and unable to react because they were paralyzed by fear and the ferocity of the Arbiter.
I was going to do a lot of drawing/thumbnailing to plan out my shot and I wanted to make sure that I knew how to, at least, crudely and quickly draw the Arbiter. That’s where this first page comes in as it was my attempt to understand how to produce quick gestures that I could read.
The next set of drawings was a loose choreographing of the massacre. I had the Arbiter twirling, twisting, spinning, and all other sorts of acrobatic movements that would make him appear graceful and bloodthirsty.
As thumbnails go, they are just a guide, and as much as I adhered to the drawings I also strayed from them. The Arbiter is pretty much pose-to-pose animation, and the marines are all straight-ahead animation. Here is the result:
From this animation we learned that all fatalities will be done one on one: person killing person rather than person killing a squad or groups of people. It would have been too much unique work to animate the fatalities in such a way where multiple people are killed. The fatalities also locked the attacker and victim in game while they played their animations. And only once they finished could the attacker be selected and moved by the player. (Which is really the only way you’re going to see the animation.) So, on average, we limited fatalities to three seconds, but never going over five seconds. This gave us enough time to create something worth seeing, and thus, losing control over your character for 3-5 seconds.
The next task in fatality exploration was to pit hero against hero: Arbiter versus Spartan. I wanted to make the Arbiter as swift and savage as in the first animation, but this time, his foe would prevail. Portraying the Spartan as instinctual and reactionary rather than purely dexterous: he moves fast and hits hard.
Once again this first image was done to get to know the subject, and to be able to draw him to quickly plan out the fight sequence.
Again, these thumbnails were a loose choreography guide to follow while animating.
The attacker is pose-to-pose and the victim is straight-ahead reacting to the blows. Here’s the result of the planned work.
Unfortunately, the animation workload over the course of the project never allowed us to do special case (hero vs. hero) fatalities. Rather, we had to reuse the victim’s animation and copy it on to the different heroes. Though, if we did have the time, animating hero vs. hero would have been really cool to do!
Neither one of these exploratory animations was ever taken to a true final stage. I only took them to a certain quality level of animation; setting the bar as high as I knew I could reproduce under actual production deadlines.
A great blow has struck the animation community today. Three… yes, three animator’s desks have gone to the dumpster just last week. Here’s a story pertaining to my discovery of them and their subsequent demise:
Ensemble Studios had three (maybe more) pristine animation desks since before I started working there in 2005. Whoever figured out how to persuade the people with the money to purchase such desks is a greater man/woman than I am. Nonetheless, my entire time at Ensemble I had eyed those desks, wanting them, envying those that had them; and, mind you, these desks were rarely used.
ANYWAY…
Robot, (one of the companies formed from the Ensemble closure), retained ownership of everything, including those desks. Last week, was the end of the storage period, and anything that wasn’t wanted would be dumped. Trust me, if I knew these were lying around I would have grabbed ALL of them. Hell, I would have PAID for all of them considering they are so hard to find, and the one from Chromacolour is too expensive. With communication amiss–as well as my memory to even think to ask about the desks–no one wanted them. Now they are gone forever. Dead. In a landfill somewhere; wishing they had a good home.
Expletives are flying from my mouth.
I started a new job this past week at one of the two start up companies formed from the Ensemble closure: Robot Entertainment.
The other is Bonfire Studios.
There are tons of talented people at both studios, so wish us the best of luck in future projects!
Halo Wars really is quite a spectacular RTS game. First and foremost: the game was made solely for the Xbox 360 console and controller. Some may question whether or not this was a good decision and if the RTS will hold up without a mouse and keyboard. I can easily assure everyone that Halo Wars will dazzle you with how easy the control scheme is to grasp and use in large battle epic warfare. The controls are simple and intuitive allowing for split second instinctual decisions to be made quickly. They are not laborious controls, but uncomplicated by design. Which will leave you wondering why no other console RTS made inherently mouse and keyboard tasks so basic to accomplish with a controller. All console RTS games will copy the Halo Wars control scheme for years. It’s The Matrix of the console RTS scene.
Like any good Halo game, the core gameplay is extremely combat oriented. Players of any skill and caliber will be able to field an army, starting fast paced battles almost instantaneously. How you manage that army and react to your opponent is part of the strategic nature of any good RTS. The supply gathering is simple allowing for more devotion to the all encompassing stellar combat. Create a supply pad at your base to generate supplies; then supplies will be shipped in from the Spirit of Fire (your command ship orbiting the planet). This allows for minimal interaction with “supply gathering”; something that becomes a chore and distraction from what is really on the Halo players’ mind: high impact warfare, of which Halo Wars has plenty.
The game oozes Halo in a beautiful fashion. As an artist (and having worked on the game) I can say with full confidence that Halo Wars is an amazing piece of art. To put it simply, the game is gorgeous. The art will tell your eyes, to tell your mouth, to drool. A grunt feels like a grunt, and an elite is an elite, and the Spartans will live up to the reputation bestowed upon it by the famous Master Chief. Everything looks, moves, sounds, and feels like their counterparts in other Halo games; it perfectly matches and fits within the universe. If you’ve never played a Halo game, then Halo Wars would be the perfect starting point setting 20 years before the events in the first game, Halo: Combat Evolved. The story is amazing and excellently well told. I envision many sleepless nights for excited anxious gamers. Playing through the stellar campaign missions, pushing forward wanting to see what happens next in the storyline.
If anyone still doesn’t believe me about how great Halo Wars is, then here is a list of great aspects from the game that I haven’t touched upon:
Fantastic Co-op missions up to 2 players,
Skirmish mode versus amazing Ai,
Live multiplayer,
Play as the malevolent Covenant in skirmish and Xbox Live,
more exciting features that I cannot mention!
As stated in the title, if you have a Xbox Live Gold account you can download the demo tomorrow Feb. 5th! So there’s practically no wait for you, go experience a portion of the game for yourself. That will convince anyone of the greatness of Halo Wars.
Here’s a link to some Halo Wars information straight from Xbox.com. Included is a description about the demo and some documentary videos on the game.
Halo Wars | Official Site
Halo Wars | Community Site
Go out and enjoy Halo Wars!
Ensemble Studios’ last day finally arrived, and I was sad to see it come. We were informed early September that the studio would be shuttered after Halo Wars wraps. It was a definite surreal situation: working on a project through “regular” days for the next four months, knowing that it’s completion will ultimately bring about the studio’s closure.
January ushered in a new state of mind. With work tapering off for most, the reality of the situation began to seep in: Ensemble Studios will shut down. It was a sobering time. But Ensemble was not what Microsoft made of it: a closed studio. It was it’s people, it’s projects, and it’s motto.
The people are great, passionate, talented, and fun. It was a pleasure to become a colleague and friend to these amazing individuals. God willing, everyone will go on to do fantastic work, and I wish them all the best of luck doing so.
I only had the pleasure to be apart of two projects: Age of Empires III: The War Chiefs, and Halo Wars. Age of Empires was the bread and butter to the studio and rightfully so. The Age series of games are amongst the highest rated and grossing of all time. Halo Wars will undoubtedly join that lot in the record books. It is a fantastic game and I see it being able to surpass and easily living up to the hype.
Making great games in a great work environment truly was the motto of the studio. This was a remarkable aspect of Ensemble and its managing staff. They laid the ground work for making Ensemble a fun place to work while producing fun and exciting products. I commend them for adhering to the motto when times were wary.
I thank God for my time at Ensemble, and I pray and hope everyone moves on to an equivalent endeavor.
Thanks for the great years Ensemble: the friends, the games, the atmosphere!
