Chinese Gaming Boom

China is a fun place to be a gamer. If you aren’t buying 360 games on the street for 10RMB, you’re downloading them from P2P and sharing them with your buddies at work. We had to put a stop to that latter practice at the Spicy Horse offices - we found some of our guys [...]

Teddy Bugs = Hugs

Still cranking away on Grimm production here. The Chinese Government forced everyone to take a 3-day holiday at the end of last week. Actually, just a 1 day holiday on Thursday, then a “fake” day off on Friday - and here the whole country is back at work on Sunday to make up for that. [...]

Exciting Times

All kinds of new things are happening at the virtual Spicy Horse. Some of you already noticed that the new site has options to eventually purchase Grimm - and you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t clicked through every. single. page. And that is awesome.
As a neat little reward, I’d like to show [...]

New Spicy Horse Website

Spicy Horse has a new website! You can check it out here: www.spicyhorse.com

The site was built by a company in Shanghai called Mediaman. It took us almost a year to search through local web development houses before finding their team. During that time several companies built proposals and test sites - the results were always [...]

Evil Mushroom

Been insanely busy around here. Trying to get some episodes of Grimm to “final” in the coming weeks. No real time to update the blog, or make additions to the concept art feed. But here’s an evil mushroom to keep you occupied:
Check out my flickr account for more stuff. I often put new images there [...]

Midget = Good

Every good game, movie, or entertainment product should have a high percentage of midgets. Just because. Obviously, Grimm is himself a “man of small stature” - more a dwarf than a midget, but in the same ballpark. “Little” characters like dwarves, midgets, trolls, and gnomes are found throughout fairy tale stories. This “Spear Midget” is [...]

Naked = Evil

When building episodes for Grimm our design team is faced with the constant (and enjoyable) challenge of dreaming up light/dark ideas for everyone and everything Player will encounter in the game. Things like grass, trees, dogs, houses, windmills, and fountains - all must be imagined, then rendered as conceptual images in a light and dark [...]

Baby Roast

Strange, it seems the Chinese government has suddenly un-blocked flickr. I guess those Pirate Children did the trick! Go evil children!
When playing Grimm you’ll likely notice an underlying theme of “animosity” towards children in the dark versions of the tales. Children are run over by carts, fall to their deaths, crushed by church bells, [...]

Great Firewall of China

If it seems things have been quiet around here there’s a reason. Well, a few actually. One, after returning from GDC I found myself swamped in catch-up work on Grimm and pre-production work on some new concepts. Two, the Chinese government decided to block access to Flickr via the “Great Firewall of China”. When I [...]

Back in the PRC (2)

Once again, I return home to China. GDC went great. The GameTap PR machine (driven by the very protective Wendy) lined up the interviews, and I did my best to knock them down. It seems everyone liked what they saw of Grimm - and press since the event has been nothing but positive. On top [...]

Games For Windows - Podcast

Games for Windows is hosting an audio interview they did with me during GDC:
Welcome to GFW Radio, the podcast homepage for Games for Windows: The Official Magazine. Here, through the glorious magic of the Internet, you can listen to the GFW editors and occasional guests pontificate and yammer about all sorts of PC game related issues. Plus [...]

Grimm in USA Today

I’m heading back to Shanghai from San Francisco. Sitting at Narita, waiting for my connecting flight - I saw that Grimm was mentioned in USA Today:
 If you think Shrek wreaked havoc on the Disneyized version of classic fairy tales, wait till you see American McGee’s Grimm. The former id Software designer and programmer (Doom,Quake) re-envisioned the Alice in Wonderland story in his 2000 [...]

Grimm Trailer Release

Gamespot and Kotaku are running news of the release of the Grimm trailer. Gametap has also updated the Grimm site with new content - the trailer and some screenshots. Check it out the Gametap Grimm homepage here. To celebrate the occasion, a duck with a broken neck.     Btw, Kotaku crowd: American McGee loves you too. 

San Fran-Pirates!

In San Francisco this week for the Game Developer’s Conference. The trip from China was uneventful. It’s been a year since my last visit to the US. I’m struck once again by how *bright* the world is. It’s as if someone has removed a filter from the sun. I remember that sunglasses aren’t just a [...]

Chinese New Year Update

My flickr-wordpress plugin was dead for a few days, so I was having trouble adding new Grimm images to the site. This morning I sorted things out, and am back on track. Btw, if you’re getting “API expired, error code #100″ when trying to use flickr-post, I suggest just upgrading to the latest “Flickr Photo [...]

Hell Hound

Today’s image is a Hell Hound. A flaming good example of something cute and cuddly becoming evil and scary when influenced by Grimm’s dark power. I particularly like NPCs that vomit various elements - flame, puke, blood, etc.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we create a lot of concept artwork. There are a total of [...]

Chopping Block

Today you get the chopping block:

During level review this afternoon I was delighted to see some gruesome in-game chopping going on. When Grimm converts normal Lumberjacks into insane ax murders, they run around hacking at each other and any nearby forest creatures. Bloody fun!

Under Siege

Siege Towers are fun. Especially when they go from cute and happy to morbid and corpse filled.

Here in Shanghai the team has been working hard to complete episodes for an upcoming milestone. We’re finally starting to play around with “little” stuff like finished menus, loading screens, and other UI elements. Previously we ignored these bits [...]

Funky Fisherman

The image for today is… a Fisherman!

Again from the “Fisherman and his Wife” episode. This character is considered a central character - the actual Fisherman. Characters like this are used in “narrative scenes” throughout Grimm. Narrative scenes are what link together the story inside an episode. For something like “Fisherman” those might be, in order, [...]

New Year’s Mega Squid!

Happy New Year’s everyone! I have a feeling 2008 is going to be a great year. The first episodes of Grimm will be released this year, 2008 is the year of the Rat - which happens to be my Chinese sign, 8 is a lucky number in China, I’m 35 this year (3+5=8), etc, etc. [...]