New game is done!

I am very pleased to announce the release of my second game, working in cooperation with DigitalDNA Games. It's called "Avatar Warfare", and as of tonight it's available on XBox Live Indie Game channel for just $1.00. 

It's a multi-player FPS game for up to 16 players, we took the formula from Avatar Laser Wars II and applied it to a conventional-weapons experience. There are several tongue-in-cheek references to COD along the way. :)

For this game I created the environment & level design. We outsourced the weapons & animation (vs. me doing it all again) to save time & share more resources between games. As usual there were a number of issues to clean up with outsourced work, including me re-doing the animation idle pose (!) as well as fixing many animations.

The entire environment is done with diffuse textures & light maps, no normal or specular info is present, since all the lighting was baked. I used 3ds Max + Mental Ray to bake the terrain, structures, and props into a unified model. This was a lot of fun and a better system than we had in Laser Wars, where everything was baked into the diffuse.

With the game finishing up I hope to make more frequent updates to this blog (no really). It's been tough between the game & teaching the last few months to get anything else done. But I have about 5 different blog posts already planned out, including finishing the 3rd post in my F.E.A.R. 3 environment series.

Here's the trailer for Avatar Warfare!