Wind Power

Flowers become skeletal hands, logs become carcasses, and dainty sailors become pirates. These are some examples of transformations from Grimm. While all transformations involve items, characters, and locations going from light to dark, some transformations are more active than others. An example is this windmill:

In its “light” state it behaves as might be expected. Such [...]

Something New, Something Wicked

Over the past 12+ months my partners and I have been working diligently to build Spicy Horse into a premier game studio - our goal is to make it one of the best in China, and in the world. So far we’ve had tremendous success in finding people from all around the world to bring [...]

Merry Coconut-mas

Seems I forgot to post a new image yesterday. Things around the office have been hectic. Pushing towards a milestone and preparing for a little Christmas break. In China there’s not usually time off for Xmas - but since we’re an American owned company we feel compelled to honor the St. Nick holiday. In honor [...]

Headless Bunny

One key rule we’ve learned while building assets for Grimm is to push for more interesting transformations. People playing the game tell us “greater contrast between light and dark = more interesting.” Early on, “light/dark” was communicated with distinctly different textures, but somewhat similar geometry. These days we’re trying to build assets that reflect equal [...]

Rainy Taxi Ride

My friends gave me a Canon TX1 video camera for my birthday. So nice of them! And maybe for you… because now I can record and post videos. My hope is to capture some of what’s going on inside the studio, in Shanghai, and with my adventures around China. Here’s the first (crappy) test:
You need [...]

Sad Cat

Concept art is awesome. Over the past few months the Spicy Horse concept artists have generated nearly a thousand unique bits of artwork to drive asset production for Grimm. As a general rule, nothing in Grimm gets built without first being represented in concept. Up until today we were unable to show much of this [...]

Fast Fiber!

Since moving to our new offices back in September Spicy Horse has been limping along on a REALLY SLOW Internet connection. It’s felt sorta like a tin can connected to a guy in Mongolia who’s using smoke signals to relay packets to a shoddy Russian satellite. That’s on the days that it worked.
But those days [...]

Grimm on GameSpot UK

Emma Boyes over at GameSpot UK has put together a nice interview piece where we talk about Grimm, digital distribution, and life in Shanghai. From the article:
In 2006, McGee moved lock, stock, and barrel to Hong Kong and then on to Shanghai, where he set up his development studio Spicy Horse. From there, he and [...]

One Year On…

My head spins to think about everything that’s happened in the last year. On this date 1 year ago I left Lamma Island, Hong Kong and moved to Shanghai. The intent was to help my buddy Xin start his outsourcing company Vykarian, and to launch a new game studio of my own called Spicy Horse.
Both [...]

Alice Halloween

Spicy Horse artist Tyler Lockett did this Alice image in celebration of Halloween. Cool, huh?

Happy Halloween!

“Theis.L” sent along this cool pumpkin carving inspired by one of Ken Wong’s “Red” illustrations.

Here’s hoping everyone has a bloody good Halloween!

UE3 Level Designer Incubation

My entrance into the game industry was a bit of pure luck.
In 1993, John Carmack plucked me from an illustrious job as auto mechanic and dropped me into the role of tech support/tester at id Software. I was a high school drop-out with few prospects, a passion for games, and a strong desire to make [...]

Yellow Mountain - Company Trip

Last weekend, as part of a Spicy Horse team building adventure, we took the company to China’s equivalent of the Grand Canyon - Yellow Mountain. Also known as Mt. Huangshan, Yellow Mountain refers to an area of scenic mountains, rivers, waterfalls, and gorges in Anhui province.
Our adventure began at the Spicy offices in Shanghai. We [...]

New Office

Two weekends ago Spicy Horse Games picked up and moved to a new home. We had been sharing office space with game art outsourcing company Vykarian. But both companies have been growing too quickly, so we moved.
We got lucky and were told of a cool space which had been occupied by a film/tv production company. [...]

Life has been crazy busy, hence the lack of updates. Spicy moved into a beautiful new office. The Grimm project has been humming along. The team has really gelled and is cranking out beautiful work. And today we get to announce the technology we’ve been working with:

 
SPICY HORSE STUDIO SIGNS MULTI-TITLE UNREAL ENGINE 3 LICENSING [...]

Xitang Weekend

One personal embarrassment about the time I’ve spent in China is how little of China I’ve actually seen. Life in Shanghai is hectic and interesting enough - but what’s the point of being in a foreign country if you’re not going to see something of it? Granted, without a decent grasp on the language, [...]

AI.implant - 0$ Licensing Fee

Cool news from the guys over at Engenuity today:
Engenuity will no longer charge a licensing fee for AI.implant and will now offer perpetual source code agreements in exchange for marketing exposure relating to future titles developed with AI.implant.
Qualified Xbox 360 console developers and PLAYSTATION3 game title developers will now have full and complete access [...]

Vins Gagliardi - Chateau Du Charnay

Our buddy Pete Gagliardi over at Vins Gagliardi recently announced a new label in his selection of wines. This continues the series which features dark fairy tale label art by Ken Wong. “Red Riding Hood” is the latest inspiration:

The previous wine in the series was “Rapunzel”, which you can find more info about here.

To get [...]

USATODAY.com - Into the Pixel

Spicy Horse conceptual artist Lin Ran did a series of images during early “Grimm” pre-production. I posted some of these images to my flickr account a while back, like this one, “The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was”:

These images were entered into the annual “Into the Pixel” competition - “An exhibition of [...]

The “Grimm” Logo

Behold it in all its glory:

The process for choosing a logo can be weird and painful. There’s conflicting opinions on the value of a product’s logo and packaging in general. Would “World of Warcraft” be any less successful if it shipped in a brown paper bag with “WoW” scribbled in crayon on the outside? Would [...]