Atomic-city: Difference between revisions

The game has '''a lot of my energy''' in a number of different areas from the game play design, art and scripting. It was an honor to have worked with such a talented but fledgling team and when I look back on all the long hours we spent making this game it is with a big smile, the thought of '''this game cheers me on'''. I would have loved to worked on one last Medievil game (but only if I was involved as I was on the first).  Maybe there will be another Medievil game in the future, it would be odd to think I would not be involved but it would be interesting to see how it might turn out.

Medievil was the brain child of '''[[Chris Sorrell]]''' whom wanted to make a 3D version of the arcade classic 'Ghosts and Goblins', at the beginning I was involved only in an art capacity. We wanted the art to resemble the ''''Tim Burton'''' movie 'The nightmare before Christmas' but for it to be more colorful. At a certain point in the projects development the '''game play was found to be lacking''' as it was just a simple run around hack and slash game, I was then '''charged with re-designing big elements of the game''' as I have a game design background. I wanted the game to resemble an adventure (of the type I love to play) with arcade elements like the SNES 'Zelda game.'  

Some people (with long memories) say that Medievil took a '''very long time to make''' and yes that is true BUT the team did have to learn how to build the technology from scratch having never made a game like this before and write the code a number of abortive platforms (Saturn, PC and then finally Playstation). When the game had to re-designed I did the job very quickly - I think it only took about four months and then a few months of implementation with everyone helping out.  

Not only did I serve as Lead artist and Lead designer on Medievil but I also got to write the preliminary script for [[Sir Dan]]'s bumbling journey across [[Gallowmere]]. This was great fun working with INSERT NAME{{sic}}, coming up with as '''many innuendoes and camp moments''' as we could get away with. It's not surprising that the main bad guy Zarok turned out to be the campest video game villain (at least that I know of!) but people really liked this humor and it think it '''made us different from a lot of games'''. I got to direct the voice over actors (as I have experience in directing voice over work), I got to work with one of my childhood heroes ''''[[Paul Darrow]]'''' of (BBC) Blakes 7 fame. He was a real joy to work with (and I believe he was used on another of the Cambridge Studios games 'Primal'), very friendly and extremely interesting in the game itself. It was a bit of buzz for my inner child and at the end of the recording session I politely asked Mr Darrow to sign his recording script, it's little things like this '''which make the job very worthwhile'''.

=====[[Scarecrows]]=====

The scarecrows. Animated mannequins of Zarok, these creatures would twirl and spin towards you and if this attack failed they would reach deep within their dark hearts and release evil crows to peck at Dan. The scarecrow fields level of Medievil had a nice dusty sunburnt feel to it.

=====[[The Sleeping Village|Mad Village]]=====

The swamps. Dan has to navigate his way through the treacherous site of a [[Battle of Gallowmere|great battle]]. The drowned corpses of the knights have swollen to bloated proportions and attempt to belly barge Dan from the safety of dry land. There were some great features on this level such as the massive ghostly dragon snake you could release that acted as a smart bomb. The weird creature in the middle was an abandoned design for the [[The Swamp Guardian|swamp boss]], he was a gigantic creature that rose from the swamps, occasionally blowing a fountain of mud out from his blow hole and if Dan is not careful he would have been blown up into the air and injured. To the right is a concept for a dragon-boat, again another concept that was dropped due to time.

=====Gameplay Design=====

Medievil gameplay design. Pictured here are two examples of the gameplay maps I drew up for Medievil. I would write and draw everything up by hand and every single detail, puzzle and enemy behaviour was mapped out on these sheets of paper. During the time of Medievil I was more interested in game design than I was in art but later on in my career I was steered more towards art which has its good and bad points. The end results of these maps were plans that look like pages from a comic book. I had great fun driving the level content for Medievil, in total I probably mapped out about 80% of the levels.

=====Sunken Village=====

Underneath Gallowmere is an ancient land that Zarok seeks to plunder. Part of this ancient land is the sunken village. Each area of the ancient land contained a number of crystals that Dan must activate in order to cause the land to implode thus ending Zaroks plan of domination. Pictured above is a schematic of the sunken village from which the artists would model the level (we only had a small amount of memory so our levels were quite small but as a designer I was very keen on lots of different events, puzzles and enemies to be incorporated into such small levels - bigger levels does not always equate to better game design. To the right is a guard of the sunken village.

=====Morten=====

Abandoned levels. Two big levels were dropped from Medievil, I even went so far as to design the level maps and characters. The biggest loss was the level featuring Morten the worm, Morten was a friendly worm that lived inside Dan (an idea from Chris that I really loved). Morten was to have gotten a whole level to himself as he undertakes a perilous mission to steal a door key from the abbey of the mad monks. Morten had to navigate a range of obstacles and there were a few funny moments such as inching your way across the bare feet of prisoners (tickling them in the process) who are hanging upside down in racks. The creature to the right is the Jabberwocky, this was to feature in a chase level with Dan pursued by the overweight turkey monster. Both Morten and the Jabberwocky went as far as to feature in the FMV sequences from the final game.

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