Ready for a Retro-Future with customizable characters and a wide range of new creative “homemade weapons” to blast away your nuclear waste enemies? The time is almost here! But until then, there’s a range of concept art and sneak peek screenshots. In this interview we feature character artist Dane Olds, who is responsible for weapons as a character artist for Bethesda’s much anticipated Fallout 3.
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Maurine Starkey is a founding member of Westwood Studios. She has worked as an art instructor, lead artist, art director, creative director, producer and game designer for over 24 years, plus continues to paint, sculpt, storyboard, and illustrate books, paper games, and comic books. (more…)

How would you like to travel the world for inspiration and research to create the art direction of a cross-console Next Gen game? That’s just the kind of experience former UbiSoft Art Director Raphael Lacoste had exposure to while working on the beautiful Assassin’s Creed. Although he’s since decided to move into films, he reflects here at Notes on Game Dev on his final game work.

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Without fail, GarageGames takes it away indie style. I recently got a chance to talk with Tim Aste, who is the Director/Producer and one of the three full-time artists on the development team for the upcoming Fallen Empire: Legions game coming out from popular indie tool provider GarageGames. Classic indie production process where roles are shared in a close team. Fallen Empire is a browser-based FPS that will be launched at InstantAction.com.

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Company of Heroes, long time established in the Real Time Strategy genre, continues to develop its visual quality and coding ease with the Essence Engine. And of course, it also recently won the “Best PC Game” and “Outstanding Innovation in Gaming” awards at the Elans. I got a chance to speak to Relic artist Damian Pannell, who worked on modeling, textures, and gameplay aspects of the vehicles and tanks. It’s nice to get a chance to check out leaps in art that are local to me in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia–a mecca of game industry.

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So what’s it like being an artist working with a handheld like PSP? Nathan Phail-Liff, Lead 3D Artist at Ready at Dawn Studios, knows just what goes into making a successful and visually pleasing game within the limitations of the handheld world from his work on God of War: Chains of Olympus. And if you ask me, the graphics are so stunning that it looks comparable to anything you’d find on console.

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Although already well known for its dialog interaction in past role playing games, BioWare’s interactive narrative game play was upgraded by strides when it went for increasing the emphasis on designing cinematic interactive dialog in Mass Effect. This is where Ken Thain, Lead Cinematic Designer at BioWare, stepped in and got an opportunity to incorporate his past experience with making machinima into the actual core game play.

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Massive Entertainment Lead Artist Rodrigo Cortes gave us insight on the art development of World in Conflict, a real time tactical game with a heck of a lot of artistic details that flesh out the environment and the combat during gameplay. For all you console gamers out there, keep an eye out for this PC title as it gets ported to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in the fall.

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Ever have one of those dreams where you’re decked out in post-nuclear protective gear trying to escape and then you realize you’re stuck in turn-based combat and you have to play out the whole scene in your head? Yeah, well, those of us who played too much Fallout in the dark did. Fallout’s unique 50’s pulp sci-fi style is coming back with the in-development Fallout 3. We were fortunate enough to be directed to Nate Purkeypile, World Artist at Bethesda Softworks, to get word on his personal experience with the project so far. It sounds like he’s enjoying dreaming up nuclear Wasteland grit in high-def quality.

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Before good ol’ GDC comes around again, we jumped the gun and interviewed Naughty Dog’s Lead Gameplay Animator Jeremy Lai-Yates about the recently released PlayStation 3 hit Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. When I first played the game, I just stared in awe while I watched lead character Nathan Drake get wet. Yeah, that sounds bad. But seriously, the engine is sophisticated enough to know exactly where Drake’s clothes get wet, and even better than that, they gradually dry over time once you jump out of the water. Stunning details like this are bending real-time in-game environment response to player actions.

Jeremy is one of the artists responsible for the life-like movements of characters in real-time play found in Uncharted. Forget sitting back to watch pretty cut scenes—now’s the time to enact them. And if you leave this interview wanting more, check out Jeremy’s talk with Lead Character Technical Director Judd Simantov—“Uncharted Animation: An In-depth Look at the Character Animation Workflow and Pipeline”—Wednesday, February 20 at the Game Developers Conference.

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