State of the ArtCo

It’s been a while since I’ve written a devlog, and since we have so many new folks in the game Aether thought it would be a good idea for a reintroduction. For those of you who may not know, my name is Bruce Sharp and I am the art director for Pirates of the Burning Sea, and I started working here at Flying Lab Software three years ago this month. There have been a lot of changes and expansions on this project since then so I thought it would be fun to take a look back to see where we started, how we got here, and speculate on where we’re going.

When I interviewed for the position, the game was entirely a ship combat game and at the time I thought, “This is the coolest bathtub EVER and I really want to play in it!” Granted, it was a cold and ugly bathtub, but that was the point: this game needed an artist! I was very hopeful that that artist was going to be me because I had a vision in my head of how it could look and I was excited to get started on it.

Here’s how the game looked then:

See what I mean? Cold, lifeless… and even though it was set in the sunny Caribbean, it felt as gray and overcast as the Seattle winter (Seattle, being Flying Lab’s home sweet home). As you can see, the game lacked sunshine, color, and Romance.

When I landed the gig I knew what had to be done, so I got to work right away. The day I started we had five weeks before E3 2005 and, frankly, the game looked like crap. The major pieces were there – sky, ocean, and ships – but everything was just “present” in a sort of mechanical way. I sat down with the devs and requested a couple of small lighting-related features and then started painting – yes, painting, texture maps mostly. (The secret to 3D is that in the end it’s all about textures and lighting. I like to tell my students [I’ve been a teacher at the Art Institute of Seattle for 18 years] that a great texture can save a bad model, but bad texture will ruin even the finest of models – I don’t think they believe me though.) To do it well you have to be a painter, which is what I happen to be:

This is a painting I did some years ago. It’s one in a series I was creating for a show in a Seattle gallery. The series consisted of large oil paintings on canvas and was more about my interest in large figurative painting than it was about anything deep. In brief, I was creating a fictional “culture” of tribal white people. If you want to see more, go here.

And so, five weeks later the game looked like this:

So we were on our way.

From that point I was able to staff up an art team from 3 to nearly 30. We are known as the “ArtCo” department, which is short for “Art Coral”. Simultaneous to our expansion, the game started expanding its scope from a small niche title to a full-blown triple-A game.

Everything about the look and feel of the game went through some dramatic changes; characters, towns, animations, rigs, islands, the ocean, ships, skies, etc, were all re-evaluated and put through changes. As with most games, R&D continued through the entire production cycle and right up until launch. Even now we continue to create shaders, tools, and processes to make the game look better.

The team is fantastic; all very talented artists. Most of them I’d met through my teaching experience, although there are a couple of seasoned vets strategically placed in just the right areas. We are divided into our specialties: animators (AnimCo), character artists (CharacterCo), Environment artists (EnvireCo), an effects artist (NickCo), UI artists (UICo?), and ship artists (no name whatsoever). You’ll be getting to meet the team through their devlogs over time.

For the future we are making new tools to assist with production. We have a new dev devoted to it, in fact. This will allow us to produce art content more rapidly, particularly in the area of environments. Also, as baseline user computers get more robust, we’ll likely add cool tricks:for example, I know the environment team is dying to have specular maps in their shaders.

There are a lot of restrictions for the MMO genre that don’t apply to other types of games, like FPS’s. In most games, the number of elements on screen can be entirely controlled. In an MMO, however, we can’t control how many player characters will show up in a particular environment at any time – that’s the nature of the genre – so we are constrained graphically and tend to be a step behind contemporary “next gen” games. But those features trickle our way eventually and we intend to pick them up and add them as soon as we can.

Lastly, if any of you are interested in becoming game artists, I would like to leave you with some advice: specialize. Schools and the internet will try to convince you to be a “generalist”. This is archaic advice, DO NOT LISTEN TO IT. Concentrate on a discipline, like environment modeling or character animation or character modeling, etc. The world of commercial art needs people who are great at one thing, not people who are mediocre at lots of things. Game art is not a game of he-who-knows-the-most-buttons-in-MAX-wins, but the same game it’s always been: develop-your-artistic-vision. We are not software technicians, but artists who happen to use software.

That’s all for now. Ciao.