PORCast

The second video is more interesting. In 2006 before they had created the final game engine the team did a demo of the game using an engine for the original Xbox. This is the demo trailer with some commentary by Milham.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAHyOGtzxYg&eurl=http://porcast.blogspot.com/

You can't really say to many good things about the town of Middlesbrough without lying, however once a year the University of Teesside invites people from the games and animation industries to talk at the Animex, games and animation festival. This was my first year going and I got to see a whole lot of presentations, my favorite of which were done by Udon Comics (the people behind the art of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix) and Ian Milham of EA.


Milham was the Art Director on Dead Space and held a talk aptly named "Creating Horror and Immersion with the art of Dead Space". Milham covered a lot of ground during the hour or so presentation and I'll try to convey some of what I thought were the most interesting parts of it, including some captured video towards the end.

In a rather humorous video comparison Milham shows us two clips from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (not anything gory), although in the second one he tacked on a HUD, this of course illustrated the point of why the team decided to leave a conventional HUD out of the game keeping the player immersed. It was not always easy though as Milham explains, especially regarding player navigation as play testers were frequently getting lost around the ships myriad hallways. To compensate the team had to add several features, one of which were the bright signs which are displayed above the doorways throughout the game, this however Milham notes, proved to beneficial to the games visual appeal. Finally of course they added the optional path illumination, which was interestingly based on the path nodes created to guide the AI monsters and characters.


Quickly moving along as this piece is getting rather wordy, one of the game's more interesting points which I did not realize at the time but seems apparent once revealed is the Gothic inspiration. As Milham says they were not trying to build a «flying church» (I thought that was chuckle-worthy), though the games architecture has a lot of Gothic features such as prominent ribbing, especially on the main character.


Towards the end of the presentation Milham shows us a few different videos. The first which I found particularly entertaining was an early dismemberment test they did. Note it's worth listening to Milham's comments as it plays.


em: http://awsy.tk/