Nickname: None

Irrational Title: Art Director

Qualifications: I did a lot of work in the animation industry I worked for about 10 years. The job I was doing previous to this was directing 3D animation for a couple of different companies. I started working at Irrational doing concept art, freelance at first. Then I was brought on board later on towards the end of Freedom Force to pull that together and tighten it up. I have been here ever since. I did a lot of the concept stuff for the Tribes pitch as well. I did animation for 3 years and Games Workshop for one year, which was actually pretty horrible, I stopped that after a year. I went to Southern Star Animation to work on Ren and Stimpy with some friends that were working there. I hung around Southern Star, they gave me full time work after we did Ren and Stimpy, and we did a lot of pictures for cartoons. It is actually very similar to what you have to do for a game.

Previous games worked on: Freedom Force

What do we have here?

Hardest moment in development of any game you have worked on: I have only worked on games at Irrational and it is a pretty good environment here. I haven't had any big problems. I think that the biggest challenge on Tribes is to have all the assets that an art team is making look like they belong in one game, rather than looking like 10 different people did them. We had a relatively fresh art team and they stepped up really well. During the prototype they developed a lot to the point where they are making really great stuff now.

First Gaming system: A PC

Earliest gaming memories: Pong

Favourite game of all time and why: Recently I really liked Viewiful Joe. I thought it was fantastic, it was different and was a lot of fun. It is a platformer with tons of slowmo effects and things. It is cell shaded and looks a lot like a cartoon. I got a lot out of UFO when that came out, I would get home at 5.30 and start playing UFO, play until I passed out then go to work and wait to go back to playing again. That's the only one that has sucked up that much time. I play a lot of games it is hard for me pick one out; it would easier for me to do a favourite on each platform or each year. I like any game that is different, that offers a different spin of a previous idea or is a new idea. Being an Art Director I am really into nice looking art.

Games currently playing: Prince of Persia.

Home PC rig: I have all consoles and a PC as well; I haven't played a PC game for a while though.

Console or PC: Depends on the game

Single player, multi-player or co-op: If you wrote down the stats on all the games that I have ever played and how many of them I have played multiplayer then it would obliviously come out way in favour of single player games. I think that is because most games are single player. I went through a stage of really liking multiplayer games when I was working in Sydney in a big office, we were playing multiplayer games, Quake and Half-Life. I started playing multiplayer games with Doom on a friends LAN set up, by the time we got to Half-life and Quake I had done a lot of LAN style gaming and I was kinda sick of it. I don't really dislike it; I am not particularly enthused by it. I don't have a lot of time for games anymore either, when I was younger I had more time to play games. The idea of playing a game for 3 or 4 hours was exciting, now I don't get really get to play a game for 3 or 4 hours. I look for a game that I can play in smaller chunks and multiplayer games you really have to practice at them, you can't really play them 10 minutes a week and expect to be any good at it.

How hard is it to getting artist into a unified style. Does everyone come in with their own individual style?
When you are making game art you can't really afford to have your own style. If you can only work in one style you are pretty much out of work in one or two projects. Tribes is semi-realistic so it is not too hard, to get some one to make a concrete bunker it is not like everybody draws a concrete bunker differently or has a different idea of what a concrete bunker might look like. For a lot of the character stuff there was a bit of a learning curve with everyone just getting them together. I have done a lot of work in the last couple of months with going over those [characters] and bringing them all together. Compared to previous jobs that I've had working on games is a lot less of a headache than working on a TV show or a 3D animation. I guess the designers have a lot more headaches then I do. From the art point of view you get a lot more freedom in this industry I think then you do in television.

What are you artist influences?
When I was growing up I was heavily into comics. I worked on "Issue One" with some of my other friends when I was in college. It was a reasonably successful Australian comic, it was very bad though, don't look for it - it was awful. I wanted to be a comic artist when I was about 16 or 17, then I changed my mind about it and ended up going into animation. I still really like comics and if someone hands me a really good one I will be really enthused about reading it but I don't collect them, I haven't collect comics since I was about 17. I don't mind going into a comic store and having a look around but I'm not into the collecting side of it anymore.

We have noticed in the screenshots and concept art the differences between the Tribes. It is something that Tribes2 lost I think, everything was the same with a different coat of paint. You are going for an individual look with each tribe, can you elaborate on that and who made that decision?
It was sort of my decision but we all talked about it. It was something that came up and I went yes I really want to do this. It was decided earlier on that it was okay for me to do that as long as they didn't differ functionally. The general idea was that the Blood Eagle buggy wouldn't be different [functionally] to the phoenix one, it would just look different. It wouldn't look significantly different, we didn't do that so much with the vehicles as we originally planned to. I wanted to have a Blood Eagle tank look different to an Imperial tank but have the same function. It turned out that even doing it the way we did it is a lot of work. The reason they did it on the first two Tribes games, have everything the same, is because it is a lot of work. We wanted to make sure that the individual troopers were a different shape in silhouette, even if you couldn't see what colour they are. That the silhouettes of the different troops were totally different. One thing that really bothered me about the other Tribes games was that it was very hard to see what anything was at a distance. You were always playing at huge distances, so I was quiet keen to have players be able to recognise a Blood Eagle by its shape rather than something on his arm or what colour he was. We just wanted to put a lot of variety into the visuals and not just have suits of amour with different textures in them. Plus because of the story it was a bit more expressive, it gives you a bit more room to have different screen elements. If you have got cinematics in the game and it is all the same model running around it isn't really interesting.

All the Models from single player are re-used on multiplayer?
I don't know about all, I don't think so. There are certainly specific characters in the single player game that are just characters in a story and they are not wearing amour, you wouldn't want to put them in game.

Are there any influences in the direction the Tribes: Vengeance is taking visually? What have you taken from Tribes 1 and 2, is there anything or is it a clean slate?
We started off not, it was suggested to us by the publisher that we start again and not try and be influenced by the first two games. That is how I started doing all the concepts, was doing something completely new and nothing like Tribes. The more I did it got more uncomfortable about that, I didn't want it to look anything like Tribes but I wanted things in the game that would tie it into the other games. When I was doing the Phoenix and Blood Eagle logos I was making sure that they weren't the same but looked like an earlier version that they adapted later for the other Tribes games. Our game is supposed to be the origin of all that stuff.

The time line is like the show Enterprise to the Star Trek series. Tribes 1 was made 5 years ago and obviously T:V is going to look a lot more modern because of the technology available. How do you suspend the gamer disbelief that this game is actually older in the time line that Tribes 1?
For a start I don't think that gamers are really going to think that it is older than Tribes 1, they know it is supposed to be set before Tribes 1. It is a whole different art style to the first one. The first thing I did is that I just didn't put anything from the first game into Tribes: Vengeance, on a basic level. I started to bring things in like the arm guards; I would look at things in Tribes 1 and 2 that I thought looked good. There were only a few of them and I made sure that they went in. We didn't have to do that, I just thought that it would be nice to tie it together like that. The general look we were going for as well was a bit more industrial, Tribes 1 and 2 is extremely science fictiony, and it doesn't look like it would really work and it is all metal with no explanations. So we have tried to put a lot more joints in, it is still science fiction, it still looks cool, it is not as sleek and refined as Tribes 1 and 2. It has got bolts and you can see straps on all the amour holding it on to the guys, which you can't see in other games. Even with the logos I tried to make them look like a modern military logo rather than just a fantasy logo. Tribes 1 and 2 is very fantasy styled science fiction, we tried to make it more (not really modern) but getting closer to this century than 30 millionth century.

The art does look very clean.
We actually started off wanting to do it super crisp, super clean art. We diverted from that fairly early on. The original amour we did was really smooth, it didn't even have joints, it was all plastics and stuff. That was like different Tribes rather than earlier tribes. We really wanted to wanted to push it as earlier technology, hopefully it will look 20x cooler than the other Tribes games but not in the same vein.

You draw a concept and take it to the art department. They then take the concept drawing and make it into an object in the game. How close do they get to your original idea?
It depends on the Artist really. Some artist will get it dead on and it looks great, other artists will change a few things. Sometimes we have to change things for polygon counts, not usually, we have been pretty good. The art team's work is very close to the concepts. You review everything before it is signed off and put in the game, how often do you reject stuff? It depends on the artist and circumstance. The longer the project is going the less you reject stuff because people get a feeling for what they are meant to be doing. Early on I probably rejected everything first off and changed a few thinks. The stage we are at now I don't remember rejecting anything in the last couple of months. I actually ask for changes, I have never actually gone that is no good start again. It is usually move this or that, change the texture here or what ever. There were a few character models that we have thrown out and we are going to rebuild before the game is finished. That is more of a refinement we know that we can do a better job than we did so we are going to do the characters again. We don't do that very much as we can't really afford it. That is why I tend to make changes rather than reject things outright.

Thanks for your time Ben.