Paul Mc's Game Portfolio

Fable: The Journey

2011-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

New year and a new flurry of blog updating. Exciting stuff to appear here very shortly.

Milo & Kate

2009-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

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 achieve 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

2007-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

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 this would have been a classic. However M'Soft had some exciting new hardware (Project Natal) 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...

2006-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

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 it's feet despite multiple team reshuffles. Rune Vendler probably came the closest to pulling it off but the company was going through some upheavel 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.

Black And White 2

2005-09-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

Fable

2004-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to be part of the development team for the original Fable as opposed to having executive involvement. These pics were some studies for the Hook coast level; a fishing/trading port on a particularly windswept part of Albion. These were all done digitally and as much for personal pleasure as anything.

I also worked on content for the game including The Guild, the Temple Of Good and the Temple Of Evil but there's not much trace of these now.

Black And White

2001-04-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

Populous The Beginning

1998-11-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

A much more visually and technically advanced take on the Populous theme. Actually it brought Populous properly into the RTS genre. It was a fantastic team lead and inspired by Alan Wright. All in all a very enjoyable project. I left E.A. to join the Lionhead Studios start-up before the game's completion but I can fairly consider myself to have been the art lead on the team.

I understand that people are still playing POP3 (as we referred to it) today, which is very satisfying if a bit crazy.

Dungeon Keeper

1997-06-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

This was a good one. I remember one day Peter M' coming up to me and asking if I could put together a visualisation of a maze/dungeon thing to help him communicate an idea he'd had. A month later we were developing dungeon Keeper.

Quite an inventive title which again spawned many imitators. Mark Healey did a great job as the Lead artist on the project but I had a 'hands on' part to play as well as my Head Of Art role. I remember it being enormous fun to work on, a really buzzing team.

I was particularily proud of the map and Torture Chamber screens and am struggling to find copies of them to post. If anyone has them stored, please give me a shout.

Hi Octane

1995-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

This shameless reuse of the Magic Carpet engine resulted in us getting a new title out in an amazing 6 weeks. It was visually more interesting than Carpet even if the game was less innovative. I really enjoyed retrofitting in some more hardcore graphics into an engine written for a much softer experience. I was also quite proud my console box cover, it was probably the first time I was able to create a CG visual without fighting the tools and I'm still very happy with it.

Theme Park

1994-01-01T00:00:00.002-08:00

Believe it or not this pretty much set a new paradigm for gaming. There are sooo many derivative titles it's amazing. I guess the graphics were functional and reasonably memorable but, once again, it's hard to be excited now.

It was hoped that the Theme series would form a major franchise for Bullfrog but apart from 'Theme Park 2', the extraordinarily successful 'Theme Hospital' was the only other addition. Also considered were Theme Airport and Theme Prison !

Magic Carpet

1994-01-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

It's 1994 and finally were into 3D game engines. That'll either be really significant to you or you will have assumed they were always there. This was a great team to work with and the game justly deserves it's place in the lists. Graphically it was pretty liberating (for the time) but in many respects I felt as if I was reworking Populous again. Lots of interesting technical challenges however and it really felt like we were pioneers.

We went on to do Magic carpet 2 in 1995. This had all new graphics and some evolved gameplay but was pretty much more of the same. Great if you were a fan as that's exactly what you would have wanted.

Syndicate

1994-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Lot's of people have fond memories of this 1994 game, it still actually has quite a cult following and, for whatever reason, is the old-skool game that still earns me some kudos.
For me at the time it was great to dabble in cyberpunk and work in hi-res (640 x 480, you know, like on that mobile phone you just junked) even if it meant only using 16 colours as a result. I think the wrapper screens and cut-scenes still have some creative merit even if technically they make me cringe.

Many thanks to Tomasz lis for putting this excellent resource together: http://syndicate.lubie.org/synd/html/synd_main.php simply amazing.

Populous 2

1991-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

This was a much anticipated title in it's day. Pop 1 had created a new genre, had enticed me into Bullfrog Studios in the UK (I was in Ireland previously) so working on this sequel was important to me. I think it was a reasonably turned out effort. Nothing much to speak of graphically other than it was tidy and had (IIRC) the first rendered CG intro to a game. I couldn't find anything in the annals to support that assertion so we can wrestle over it if you like.

Treasure Trap

1990-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Treasure Trap on the Amiga again. 320 x 200 and in glorious 16 colours. It was actually quite a nice game to play and lots of fun to work on. This was cutting edge Deluxe Paint use for 1989.

Disclaimer

1989-01-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

I'm immensily proud of some of this work and have great memories of working with some brilliant people but CRIPES some of this stuff is so old I had to chip it out of the rock! We were so pleased with this stuff at the time but the early work looks so basic and tired now. I guess it's comparable to some extent with some contemporary mobile content but remember it was cutting edge back in the day. Anyway, I'll lump all the 'classic' bits together at the bottom so you don't feel you have to look at them too closely :-)

The Deep

1989-01-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

Well, if only for the sake of completeness, I guess I should mention The Deep from 1998 too.
There, done, enough said.

Phantom fighter

1989-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

This is one of the very first games I worked on back in 1988; a Commodore Amiga game called Phantom Fighter. It was renamed "If It Moves Shoot It" for the U.S. market for some reason. All I could find were the Amiga loading screen (cutting edge HAM imagery from back in the day) and two crappy screenshots, one Amiga and one for the PC in glorious 8 colour mode. BTW working in HAM meant that any given pixel could only vary either the red, green, or blue component from the one preceeding it. Ha ha, those were the days, enjoy...