Flythrough trailer
I wasn’t involved in putting together this particular trailer but it shows one of the FA levels I worked a lot on: ‘the subway’. The basic level geometry was already in place when I joined the team. My job was to bring everything to a shippable standard by adding props, SFX and finalizing textures, shaders and lighting.
This is 100% in-game footage by the way. It was recorded in Arcade Mode, using a modified build in which the camera was moved in front of the player-controlled character, thus giving us the first person perspective. Jakob Rød from Creative Services did a fantastic job acting out the role of the cameraman. Our post production whiz Adrian Lazar added the viewfinder graphics and some compression glitches while an out-of-house sound specialist composed the audio.
K & L cutscene lighting
This is a little odd job I did while working on Kane & Lynch : Dead Men – lighting for one of the cutscenes. A fun little detail: if you pay attention, you will notice that the frontlight seems to be varying in intensity throughout the scene. I had done this by using a simple ‘ping-pong’ script on the light, causing the light position to oscillate back and forth along a horizontal axis, and thus varying the intensity and direction – low-tech as it gets …but much easier than animating the light.
The goal was to support the sound, which suggests a pulsating city off-frame (traffic? signage?) but also to add some menace to key moments (gradually dimming the light just as Kane yanks Yoko by the hair, for ex.).
The Paris job
Hitman contemplates a cryptic quote:
The ‘Hunter and Hunted’ level from Hitman: Contracts was the first I made at IO. The entire project was to be a rush job and at the time, I knew nothing about the company’s game engine so the leads were reticent to hand a newcomer like me an entire level. The original plan then was to have me learn the ropes by doing some props for the ‘Bjarkov Bomb’ level. I picked up the basics pretty quickly though, and ended up being assigned the small Paris level as well as a few odd jobs on the ‘Seafood Massacre’. Contracts took just 9 months to make.
Little known fact: I wanted the track playing in the OD’ed junkie’s room to be Shurik’n’s ‘Fugitif’ but since IO couldn’t secure the rights, we used ‘Le Souteneur (Mr Claude)’ by Faf Larage instead.
A Disney game
This is an exclusive clip of two of the Tarzan Untamed (aka Tarzan Freeride) levels I built while working as art director on the project. The first was a waterski level in which Tarzan was pulled along a fixed path by a crocodile. The second was a roaming level in which Tarzan ran, jumped about, slid along snaking branches, climbed walls and of course swung on vines. If anyone got in his way, he skewered them with a spear. Music by Kode 9.
Hype the Time Quest: final fight
Oh this one brings back some memories. We’re going back, way back …to 1998. This is the very first ‘level’ I ever made: the arena for the final boss fight in ‘Hype the Time Quest’. I seem to remember that it had a total of just 1200 triangles.
memory swap 