 |
 |
|
 |
Lead Artist Steve Ogden is going retro in his quest to bring the artwork of Civilization Revolution to the DS.
Once upon a time, spiky-haired humanoids in skinny ties roamed the earth. Against a syncopated post-punk soundtrack, they drew pixilated characters with no more than 16 colors. These pixilated works of art walked and ran, talked and fought, all in the grandest tradition of hand-drawn cel animation, aided by the latest technology at the time, and crunched into the smallest memory footprint imaginable. These characters starred in games so addicting that people voluntarily forked over every minute of their spare time and willingly emptied their pockets of every spare quarter just to play them. As many of the spiky-headed folks who created these characters made the transition into the realms of real-time 3D games, the mystical skills of color palette management and simple hand-drawn animation almost became lost to Time. Almost.
But everything old is new again. The Nintendo DS has burst upon the scene, a machine of such lethal cunning that it can make an addict of even the most jaded gamer. It provides double the amount of screens claimed by the Gameboy Advance, with double the amount of gamer-addicting power. Amid the sound and fury of higher polygon counts and a near obsession over the latest shaders heard elsewhere in the game biz comes a machine that has more in common with the late 1980s and early 1990s than the over-the-top NextGen mentality that has come to dominate most game development. Yet it has become a killer platform, so popular that it has outsold all other platforms combined. But there’s a catch, and ain’t there always? The art for the DS must adhere to the old mystical ways of color palette management and the wizardry of pixel-painting. But for all the careful work involved, you can get a great game you can carry around in your hand, on a killer game machine.
Firaxis is developing Civilization:Revolution for the DS, and I am the Art Lead on that project. Fortunately for me, I began my career back in the days of those spiky-heads. In fact, I was one myself. And although today I qualify more as a shiny-head than a spiky-haired wonder, I was in the game industry back when 256 colors was a luxury, and I was a cel animator once upon a time, so I know a thing or two about developing art under those strict rules. While my peers in the business are creating million-polygon characters and generating normal maps to put leather texture onto even the soles of their characters’ shoes, we are creating Civ DS, a game that looks as hand-drawn as we can get it.
Our idea from the start was not to let the game become too pixilated. Although the techniques we’re using are right out of early coin-op games, we don’t want Civ DS to look like those old pixilated quarter gobblers. We’d rather the game look like an animated film, with hand-drawn cel-animated characters and hand-painted backgrounds. Luckily, we are able to base our art on the excellent 3D art assets from Civilization:Revolution, and that makes our jobs much easier. We may be old school palette management types, but we’ll take a shortcut when we see one. We render those Revolution art assets out as reference for our characters, posing them for the best silhouette effect, and then clean them up by hand to get just the right hand-drawn look. It’s a lot of work, but as Sid Meier says, in any game, you have to ask yourself who’s having all the fun: the maker, the machine, or the player? If it’s only the maker or the machine, that’s no good. Well, I can honestly say, on the DS, the player is having the fun. Luckily, so are we, the formerly spiky-headed makers. But don’t worry… I’m sure the DS is having a bit of fun as well.
|
|
 |
 |
|
