Hi Have a look around and get back to me.

A blog probably isn’t the hippest way to present a back-catalogue but It seems to work OK for my purposes. I use it more as an aide memoire as much as anything. It's often not a priority for me to maintain it though so feel free to hassle me for more info, corrections or just to say hi.

The Trail

I loved making this game. I loved the idea (one of Peter's best I think), I loved the people (a bit of a soap opera at times but talented and mostly a pleasure to work with) and I loved the Art Direction (inspired by 2d illustration and beautifully realised in 3d by the team).

The deceptively simple (things are actually quite complex underneath) was also deliberately chosen so it could be implemented by a small, relatively inexperienced, art team. Despite there being some unfortunate goodbyes at the end of the project and the studio's focus shifting to other titles I look back on this development very fondly and would happily work with any of them again.

Very early on in pre-production I worked with an excellent external artist Vincent Maury on the character designs. These were then further developed internally by Mattia, Shay, Sara and Eddy, as the game-play evolved and the behavioural requirements for the characters became clearer.

I take a lot of pride in the positive response to the visuals from players and critics.The game is still very much alive and it remains to be seen how it performs financially but from a Creative's perspective this was a great success.

Other than Art Direction my hands on contribution was with the G.U.I. as we had no dedicated U.I.Artist at the time. It's not really my natural role but working in Unity and having dedicated code made this a viable option. Shay took over this task for the Premium version and improved things no end.

There are many things I'd like to improve and change so hopefully it will be developed further in future instalments.

Godus

Coming soon.

Curiosity (What's Inside The Cube)

As a piece of conceptual and interactive art it's pretty extraordinary and that's really how I still view it.

This was an enormous subdivided cube that massive numbers of 'players' could simultaneously erode away at by tapping.

During the lifetime of the cube, people clicked 27,798,516,200 cubelets at an average rate of about 1593 cubelets/sec.

What were we thinking of ? Well...we were thinking of an interesting social experiment that would both help the newly formed team to gel and establish a name for the studio as a source of originality for mobile development. All in all it paid off.

MOVIE OF CURIOSITY 'IN ACTION'

Visually it was somewhat of a challenge but an interesting abstract one. The surfaces had a nice mosaic quality, with just enough irregularity to humanise the whole edifice. ended up creating and sourcing hundreds of original images for each face and layer of the cube. At times there were apparently themes and narratives but these were largely emergent and imagined rather than deliberate.

Another emergent aspect was that people used the surface as a drawing/communication tool and notepad. There were poems, doodles, obscenities, collaborative patterns, a marriage proposal and more 'cock and ball' images than anyone could count. Some of the fun was spoiled by hackers who devised ways of clearing vast numbers of cubelets automatically; annoying but somewhat flattering that they went to the trouble simply out of curiosity.

I really wish we hadn't attempted to introduced some of the conventional game-play mechanics and monitisation into the experience. I feel it diminished it a bit, but still, we did get to eat.

22cans

In May 2012 I left Lionhead to became the Art Dictator for 22cans

WOW 2012: that’s insane!

         I don’t know where the time went but this happened...

• We grew a team from 5 to (about) 22 people.

• Released a crazy App/Social Experiment/Game called ‘Curiosity, What’s inside the Cube? Around that time NASA was releasing the Curiosity Rover on Mars, hence the explicit title. Who knew?

• Prototyped a game called ‘All Of Us’. It was looking cool but being an ambitious, unique and unfunded title meant it never left the drawing board. Much of the good bits have resurrected in other projects since though.

• Ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to get ‘Godus’ Off The Ground. Opinion is divided but very successful on Mobile and I’m quite proud of it.

• Developed ‘The Trail’ for Mobile and ultimately, Desktop. I love it.

• Prototyped another scarily ambitious title called Legacy which is currently in pre-production

People have come and gone on the team but I can honestly say that I’m now working with some of the nicest, most talented people I’ve known.

All Of Us

Quite an exciting 'create a world' concept that never came to fruition in its own right. That said, The Trail's visual style was obviously developed from the work  pioneered here and some of the game-play ambition is finding its way into other titles.

I was, and still am, very enthusiastic about melding traditional illustration styles of the likes of Tadahiro Uesugi and Pascal Campion with interactive media. Watch this space, it will happen...

Fable: The Journey

OK the Journey is out now and to predictably mixed reviews. Regardless of what you think of Fable and Kinect games in general I'm very proud of the visuals in "Fable: The Journey" and to have worked with such an excellent Art/Animation team. I don't think I'd ever had so much fun, satisfaction or success in Art Directing a project so thank you; Annes, Elliot, Tak, Cris, Mark, Bertie, Rich etc (sorry, too many to list).

The Art team and the engine were fresh to the franchise so this was an opportunity do think sideways a bit. From the very beginning we set out to create something that would be familiar to a Fable fan without slavishly following what was there before. Hoping to introduce some unique stylistic elements and freshness to the visuals.

I wanted the visuals to be clean, easy to read and stylish. In this we were broadly successful. In particular, I think the Character treatment was wonderful, having a lovely chiseled and sculpted treatment. This connected well with the deliberate use of simple shapes and clean silhouettes in the landscape.

One of the things I'm most proud of are the 2D storytelling cutscenes (Frescos) prototyped by Annes and Myself and finally realised by Emrah Elmasli, Billy Wimblett and Skaramoosh.

This was my last game at Lionhead. Given the platform it's unlikely to be a big seller but for me, it was a big success and a real pleasure.

If I was to do it again now I think I'd try remove much more of the visual noise and stylise it even more.

P.S. I'm heartened that the stylistic direction was retained and developed further for the awesome looking, but alas never to be released (?) Fable Legends.

Milo & Kate

This was the interactive story of a young boy (Milo) and his dog (Kate) growing up in a new house by the sea "The Best Summer Of Your Life". 

A highly ambitious evolution of the Dimitri concept but this time utilising Microsoft's Kinect camera. This deservedly gained enormous amount of media interest worldwide. However the response was pretty evenly split along the lines of 'that's just weird' or 'that's truly astonishing'.

 

Visually I wanted to give the title a 'heightened reality' quality, where everything is essentially naturalistic but cranked up to 11. It was part of the brief that Milo was to be the most believable interactive cg character in popular culture. I think he probably still is.

Milo's world had to have a curious childlike quality and I decided to attempt this by having peculiar, arrangements and juxtapositions of content rather than it being overtly 'fantastic'. It was all about seeing the world through the eyes of a child. Seeing wonder in the ordinary.

This production was a first for us in many ways: Motion Capture, Facial lip-sync, Kinect camera inputs. It was also the first time we worked extensivly with artists from other industries: Cinematographers, Directors and Script Writers. Milo & Kate is a genuine phenomena and was key to communicating the, still largely unrealised, potential of Kinect to the world.

Milo's resting at the moment but there's plenty of him on the net. Here's some highlights:

The 2009 Milo And Kate E3 demo

Perer Molyneux presents Milo at TED in 2010

Survivors

Survivors really feels like 'the one that got away' to me. I think this could have been an awesomely entertaining title, and a great gamer's game. I think it could have been Lionhead's Syndicate.

The high concept: The Apocalypse has kicked off and you have to save yourself and your family as you travel across the US. It was a theme common to many disaster movies but most closely realised in the remake of 'The War Of The Worlds. The strap-line was going to be "What would You Do" and that sums up the thinking.

With FPS and action adventure elements combined with Lionhead's skill at building simulated worlds this would have been a classic. However M'Soft had some exciting new hardware (Project Natal aka Kinect) on the horizon and we seemed to be a good bet to take it on. Sorry to see this one go but exciting times ahead...

Project X. aka Dimitri, Eden Falls, Rockwell...

This was a bit of a marathon Blue sky project that soaked up a number of years for me.

The high concept was good. Essentially you played the role of a teenager boy growing up in a small town, making friends in the schoolyard, sneaking out, forming relationships, dealing with life, having adventures etc.

Despite it never being realesed I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project. It was my first truly challenging role as Art Director on a 'next gen' title and I had the joy of working with some fantastic artists; Kareem Ettouney, Christian Bravery, Mark Healey, David Le Merrer, Andrew Lindsay, Andy Bass to name a few but there were many others. Stylistically it was very promising. At the time I was very keen on the paintings of Norman rockwell and Edward Hopper so I pushed heavily for this to be set in 1950's USA. The prospect of 50s Americana with all the associated music and nostalgia is still very attractive.

The seed of the concept was definitely intriguing but the direction was muddy at best so it never found its feet despite multiple team reshuffles. Rune Vendler probably came the closest to pulling it off but the company was going through some upheaval so it was parked in favour of something more 'commercially' viable. The fundamental idea behind it was somewhat resurrected in Milo and Kate some years later, but that's another story.