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An interview with Doug Chang, Art Director for the ships' models in Earth & Beyond, Westwood's upcoming futuristic MMORPG, was published at EBPortal yesterday. Here's a small piece of it:
D: What are some of the challenges you face in the video game realm that you don’t face in film?
DC:You have to design things that really have to work. In film design, you can design things that work for a specific shot, so for instance, you don’t have to show how the landing gear really works, or how a door opens. A lot of times you’ll see a ship land, and they’ll cut away to another action. Whereas in this you play real time, and you will see and experience the ship coming down and you see the function of what it’s supposed to do. So that factor made the design process a little bit more intensive because you have to figure out that component and make sure it actually works and actually animates.
But the biggest factor that was really hard was the modularity of this game. It was “Come up with a design that was really strong as a base design, but then taking that design and adding various components and improving that design at those stages so that each upgrade will make the designs look better rather than degrading.” It’s a hard way of thinking because normally when I design something, I like to create the best combinations of shape for that design and say, “That’s done. That’s it.” When I did that, and the Westwood team approved it, and then said “Ok, now make it even better,” it was like, “Wait a minute, if I could have made it better, I would have given you that.” It was a real hard way of thinking, but it made it challenging because I just came up with elements that were slightly different. But it wasn’t really better in a sense that it was superior to the base design, just different. Each one can be perceived as being better, and an upgrade. |
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Earth & Beyond Interview at EB Portal
