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Production
We had not anticipated the enormity of the scope of the game that we had designed. This game was a huge departure from our experience on our other titles. Curbing feature creep became my priority, and as art director I was certainly a big part of the problem. Coming from a film background, I had worked with the storyboard artist to create sweeping camera moves, close-ups, and shifting perspectives. One of my first oversights was not reviewing the storyboards with the lead programmer before getting everyone excited about the shots. As we moved into production it quickly became clear that with our minimum specs and performance issues, there was no way we could have full-screen movies. It started to dawn on us why so many kids' adventure games are 2D. Feature creep was also an issue for our 3D team. Our character designer had a hard time not building characters for the next Toy Story movie. Texture and lighting details that were gorgeous in high-resolution blurred at our 256-color target and often dithered badly. We couldn't have large graduations and had to be careful with lighting glows. Anything that made our movies too big or that dithered badly had to be redone, leaving the team feeling disappointed and frustrated. We soon learned to run test dithers before getting too far along. Much of our morale problems came from the team having to scale down their expectations.
Next we needed to find the actors, and this proved to be one of the toughest parts of the process. I completely underestimated how hard it would be to find actors (animation actors, not radio voice artists) who could do an authentic American accent. Agent after agent assured me that their client could do a U.S. accent, and then they showed up at auditions and couldn't. We hadn't anticipated how long it would take to find the actors and then we needed to get approval from DK. I had not scheduled enough time, and because of the delay the character animation schedule ultimately fell behind. As the animators began animating, our landscape designer was building sets and starting work on the activities. The landscape was something we invested a lot of time in and it paid off. We designed each land to be a separate part of the Oz world, with each land having its own climate, geography, industry, color, lighting design, and architecture. We wanted the child to have the sense of travelling though a world, not just around a neighborhood. The toughest part of the landscape was keeping consistency across the different modelers, as style guides are often open to interpretation. At that point we seemed to have recovered from our scheduling delay, when we found out we were losing our audio engineer. Our main audio designer had left to tour with his band and we had been working with someone he recommended. Now he was leaving and I began to panic. Audio had been somewhat of a problem on Bananas in Pyjamas and I wanted to make sure it all went smoothly this time. We did find someone else but it didn't work out and it cost us a lot of time and angst (more under "What Went Wrong"). However communication was working well and weekly production meetings helped keep morale high. The DK producer came out for a week and was very impressed with the work to date. As we got close to Christmas, the game really started to take shape and we all took the week off feeling fairly confident. The new year started well, and then programming hit our lead programmer like a tsunami. Like me, he hadn't realized the enormity of the game and he quickly became overloaded. We brought on two other programmers, but it was a little too late for our lead to totally hand off so it became a case of "it's quicker to do it than explain." In addition, the executive producer injured her back and couldn't go to Milia. I went in her place, and while it was stressful being away from production, it was invaluable for understanding our foreign publishers' localization needs. It was also great to get such a positive reaction to our demo and we came away from Milia with presales to France, Spain, and the Netherlands, and a lot of interest from other territories. As we neared the end of production, the music composition was finalized, packaging art was put together, and the localization kit was completed. We continued to test with kids and did bug-testing both in Sydney and London. The title appeared to be robust and the kids loved it. As the lead programmer moved onto installers and the audio designer did final mixes, the animation team started to relax. But there was one more hurdle just around the corner. The Interactive Storybook On the way back from Milia, I had met with Dorling Kindersley in London to review the demo. They were excited by the 3D graphics and came up with an idea to reuse the Oz assets to create a companion piece for the title. Based on the concept of a reader or book that helps kids to read, Oz -- The Interactive Storybook would be an animated storybook on CD-ROM telling Baum's original story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The logic was great -- we had the whole 3D team, the models, the programmer and the time to put this together in just 12 weeks. It certainly made sense from a marketing point of view but everyone was exhausted and it was a tall order to get the team to start on a new project. To everyone's credit, the companion piece is a gorgeous addition and matches the game in quality and depth. We just had to have a few extra milestone lunches to get everyone through it. In the End We finished up the adventure game and the interactive storybook, and all took a well deserved break. With plans afoot for the next classic adaptation in the adventure series, I returned in August to the news that Dorling Kindersley had been acquired and their games division closed down. We were horribly disappointed, but Oz is now in the stores and getting great reviews. The entire team is immensely proud of both titles and while there were a few rocky periods in production, to this point it's been a total success. ________________________________________________________ |
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Features
