State of the Union Illustrated

Well, it's been a while. Kind of understatement really. My .plans are getting semi-yearly and sound more and more like state of the union speech. All is well and I am a shining city on the hill. Or somesuch.
Thing is, this has been a really full year-and-half, full of various projects and thingies. I've finally gotten used to working on a purely freelance basis and love it. There are some drawbacks, such as being a lone wolf, which sometimes make life.. well.. lonely. Not having someone behind you pointing out stuff, critisizing things or boosting morale time to time, is kinda downer.
Partially I've balanced it out, taking on some local contract work here in Latvia, like for CTXM, a company recently dubbed by Gamasutra as "the biggest XBLA developer you don't know about". It's good to be able to barge into some offices time to time, screaming "Banzai!" and see that you are, actually, working for real people in real flesh in real offices, not just some virtual entities who might as well exist entirely in my head.

One of my proudest moments were when "Carribean Hideway", a TGB casual game landed on top10 at Bigfishgames, in third position among puzzle games and fourth position among all the games together. I did the GUI, gamepieces, characters, basically all, except for backgrounds which were done by Ever Great Blake Lowry. The funny thing is, the game was relesead year before as Pirate Tales and it didnt do that well. "Carribean Hideaway" simply was much more polished version with metagame added and..well, it just felt right.
I know, it's been discussed endless times that polish makes or breaks your game but I'll say that again - an additional month of polish can mean x10 financial difference for your baby. Spit and polish!


Another feat I'm really proud about is a project I just completed my part but can't really talk about yet. It's a casual game for Wii, a mix of quest, hidden-object and courtroom drama. It was also a project where I most severly felt how working alone might backfire. Although for the first two months I conscripted my brother to help out, the workload turned out to be much higher than anticipated. In the end it meant me being the weakest link when it came to deadlines and that's really a title I'm not comfortable with. At times I felt really burnt out in spite of project itself being really interesting and people I worked with being really nice chaps.
Main reason was simply underestimating the amount of work needed for hidden object game. For those out there who are planning to ride the wave of current popularity of the genre - think twice, plan carefully and be prepared for surprises, the amount of art assets needed is huge. No..that doesnt sound right... HUGE!
Anyway, towards the end I learned a trick or two, streamlined the whole process and it has been valuable experience. So.. all's well and I'm a shining city on top of the hill. Or somesuch.
:)

Also, I got involved in a really neat project, developed by Max Gaming Technologies and 21-6 Productions- a Firefighter Safety sim - a "serious game" aimed at preparing Incident Commanders - kind of a tool that allows playing out various scenarios and see consequences of various decisions in virtual environment. My work was mostly GUI-oriented with some illustration thrown in.


The local company CTXM contracted me for various thingies but nothing of that has been released yet and some stuff has been put on backburner like this Robin Hood casual game I was asked to write and draw inter-mission comics for.


And then a really zany and cool project that's still in progress by Christian Rousselle, inspired by oldie-but-goodie - "Gravity Force". I'm doing level backgrounds plus some other stuff and it's one of those times when you can have refreshing freedom artistically. The theme and game itself allows me running amok with scissors (and battleaxes and sabres and cutlasses if I feel like it) artistically and in the end it always looks kinda.. ok :) In screenshots you can see the whole level while in game it's usually something like one sixth that fills the screen.


Among in-progress things, there's also an quest "Resonance", low-res, old-school and with quite unusual play-mechanics. Which reminds me that I still owe Vince some backgrounds...


On my own spare time I'm slowly tinkering and experimenting with a pet-project of mine. It's basically turn-based mech strategy with, hopefully, some interesting and unusual play mechanics, with simple metagame thrown on top of it. A bit like Jagged Alliance, man I loved that game.
I'm still just planning and testing some things graphically, looking for where to cut some corners and basically make it feasable for couple of guys to actually finish. Time.. there's never enough of it.. Or somesuch.


Apart from gamedev, I did this and that, some posters-flyers-tickets-whatnot but nothing too extensive, I guess I just like games too much to spend too long on something that's not games. One neat thingie was kinda small story-book project for a company that's selling sports and tourism equipment. They've always been kinda green and hippy company and the book had to reflect that. So it's a story about three weird characters who, in search of stuff to do, become champions of forest. Kinda whacky so I loved it :)


And for those who havent fallen asleep yet - some sketches and thingummies for my personal pleasure:


Oh.. almost forgot... 56K warning! :P