Prince of Destruction, and other stories...
Community Forums/Showcase/Prince of Destruction, and other stories...
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| I've been doing all this for way too long... Prince of Destruction was originally released in 1994. Here's the splash screen (which holds up pretty well for a game of that vintage, I think). If this image tag works, I'll post a few more!  (This was composited in Photoshop and Colorstudio back in the days before "layers" had been invented and one level of undo (at most) was all you had. Ouch. Anyway, the pieces were created using Fractal Painter, Stratavision 3d (height map terrain, modelled towers), and Photoshop.) This is a screenshot from a Science Fiction game we started working on using the MARS engine (there's my favorite spacecraft model!). We planned on making much more use of pre-rendered 3D graphics...  Here's our mapping utility, written using MacApp...  The MARS (Multiplayer Animated Roleplaying System) logo (which I believe is a registered trademark, yay me.)  This is a splash graphic for the same game when we got all enthusiastic about doing it again some years later. We had a new hybrid 2D/3D engine (3D terrain, 2D sprites, and a very wonderful Russian artist helping us with some of the animation)...  Ah, the good old days. My first 3D raytracing project. (Good old Stratavision 3d v 1.4.2... Edit note: the queen's crown was created by generating a Swivel 3d script in HyperCard, likewise the turrets on rooks. The bishops were booleaned in another program and imported.)  More Statavision stuff from way back when. Amazing that you can do stuff like this realtime now. I think this took ten minutes to render on my Quadra 700...  Another splash screen from a game we had 90% working and then gave up (this time it was a Xevious clone...).  One of my backburner projects is to do a pirate game (modelling sailing ships well in 3d is pretty tricky), but the trick is to find a project that doesn't have a dozen games in the same category (it doesn't really matter how BAD they are)...  (This is another piece of compositing from the days before layers...) Rendered cover for a never-completed revision of my 1986 paper RPG ForeSight... (Note the re-use of my favorite ever spacecraft model... cough) The text was rendered using Pixar Typestry, a program I played with for maybe 2h total. I've never seen nicer text rendered by any other program (it was basically a front-end for Renderman). Pixar is just an amazing company...  (In contrast to the sailing ship and POD splash, this was done with Photoshop 3 or 4, so it took about 15 minutes total including the 3D rendering...) Oh here's the original cover for ForeSight (created in FullPaint, a MacPaint replacement that could have FOUR documents open at once; it also rocked on a lot of other levels... Fullpaint was my favorite program until I got DeluxePaint on the Amiga.)  This is the kind of thing I produce when working for The Man...   Bill the Geologist. These aren't animation frames, but simply an "identikit" for producing still images with different facial expressions. Bill was a "character" in some CBT courses I worked on...  This is a render done for the splash screen of an MP3 player I wrote back before Apple released iTunes and gave it away for free, putting me out of business :) Edit note: I'm pretty proud of the gramophone model I knocked up for this.  Stills from a video trailer I knocked up for yet another uncompleted game (I use the space station model a lot too)...  Some of the many icons I've designed for AVAYA communications...  And finally an ad for my current project...  |
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| Thanks for the help! |
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| No problem :) Fredborg |
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| Woah. Woah. Woah. I can't believe it - it's the maker of MARS - on the BlitzBasic forums! I've been a Mac user all my life, and *loved* prince of destruction :-) Hehe what's weird is that half of those StrataVision projects, I made too (in stratavision!) The chessboard, and the submarine were both things which I modelled for fun, and when I saw that ship with sails, I had to look very carefully to see that it WASN'T actually one of mine (modelled for a mac board game I was making with my brother). What are you guys up to these days? |
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| Well Andrew Barry, the guy who wrote the MARS engine, went on to write SpotLight -- a widely respected Macintosh debugging tool -- and RealBasic -- a widely respected Macintosh and Windows development tool (both of which he sold to companies which maintain them now). He's currently doing contract programming and working on a new development tool in his spare time. I went on to work as a corporate "suit" and then joined a 3d post production and special effects company as head of their interactive division. We released several children's games while I was there but my pet project -- a hard core 3d action game set underwater -- never got the green light, and I resigned after it was officially cancelled. (The company -- Garner MacLennan Group -- has far greater claims to fame: it did the special effects and much of the production design for season one of FarScape, and it recently did work on Fellowship of the Ring.) I've since formed my own company with an old colleague (One Two Red Blue) and we make most of our money helping to sell (legal) drugs. I'm still trying to do some game development though. |
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