In this article I'm going to make an exception and tell you a bit about my part in the creation of Angry Viking, an iPhone game, developed by Zaxis Games, now released for android as well.
We had a small production-team consisting of 5-6 people. I worked close together with Bo Daugaard, in order to produce the games graphics, animations and interface. My programmer background was also a help during the prototyping phase.
In the first part of the production phase, I was mainly building lowpoly assets, upwrapping them and painting textures. Bo did the initial work on the character models, after which he turned them over to me, to be lowpoly optimised. And then I turned them over to him, to be rigged and animated.
That's how we divided the jobs anyway, but in reality we were both part of every process, because in the initial phase there were nothing to be animate, and towards the end there were nothing to model. So we were doing a lot of overlapping and retouching of each others work.
In the project, we were facing some technical difficulties. We didn't have a polygon target / limit when we started the project. iPhone development was rather new to Zaxis Games at the time, and we were building the assets based on what we thought would run on an iPhone. And when we did our first tests on the iPhone platform, we could tell that we had way too many polygons and drawcalls, for the game to run smoothly on the older iPhone systems.
So we went back and optimized our models even further, by reducing detail, in order to get framerates to an acceptable level. Some of the models we optimized 3 or 4 times, before we ended up with what you see on this page. And in the end we got it to an acceptable level, without killing the level of detail that we had hoped to achieve.
I really loved working on this project. We were working hard and long hours, but we were still having fun. One morning I walked in, and overnight Bo had figured out that this game needed some cows and chickens. The task fell to me, and within a few hours I had made some lowpoly models for him. He then rigged them, while I painted some textures. And I think we spent the rest of the day laughing and making rather funny animations with them. That was the spirit in which the game was made. And the fact that there was room for suggestions and improvements during the production, made it a much better game, I think.
But it wasn't all fun and games. We also had to kill a few darlings along the way. Some of them were mine, such as having female civilians in the village. That idea was killed rather quickly, fearing what Pegi rating that would earn the game.
The main character was the angry viking. We were trying out different ways of texturing him and settled on a clear line version, with no facial features, to keep within the style of the game.
One of the last things I worked on, was the interface. At the time we were talking about implementing special abilities into the game. Unfortunately that didn't make it into the first release. But part of it was incorporated into updates afterwards. As for the interface, a good portion of my work was used. Other things were scrapped, to maximize the playable screen.
Looking back at the project, working together with Bo, was really educational and fruitful. He had a lot of experience, from his time at Funcom and Zeitguyz, that he gladly shared with me. I wasn't a complete rookie when I started on this project, as I had been part of mod teams as an artist. And was familiar with deadlines in production teams, from my time as a frontend programmer. But this was my first paid job as a game artist.
I must say that it's rather cool to see someone play a game that I've worked on. It's also fun to read reviews. I'm really happy with how the game turned out. And last time I checked, the game had more than 100.000 downloads.