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. [...]

Look Ma! No Hands!

This character comes from one of the more gruesome tales we’re dealing with. As you can see she’s been “given the chop” - rendering her handless:

Since my days at id Software I’ve been a fan of  blood, gore, lava, and guts. Back then we used to revel in “gibs”, laugh when imps were exploded into [...]

More Christmas Fun

Christmas Holiday in China isn’t that big a deal. Mostly the Chinese use it as a ploy to push more stuff at retail. Then again, that’s what it’s become in most parts of the world. The Chinese just aren’t as good at masking the underlying capitalistic nature of the holiday. But give them a few [...]

Grimm Buildings - DynoBait

So far all the Grimm concept images I’ve posted have focused on characters. But as I’ve mentioned before, everything in the game is built in twos - light and dark: Characters, vehicles, props, and buildings. Here you see an example of a building from the game.

This structure is taken from the episode based on “The [...]

Burnt Blacksmith

Today I’m working on the script and “scene listing” for a Grimm episode based on “The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was”. So I thought I’d post a bit of artwork related to that episode. Here you see the light/dark version of a blacksmith worker from the opening scene of the episode. [...]

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 [...]

Dirty Baby

Since yesterday was my birthday, I figured it would be appropriate the post a baby today.

Human characters like this baby often get re-used between episodes in Grimm. Unless the character is visually or narratively unique - like a Red Riding Hood or Cinderella - we don’t see much point in wasting effort on modeling tons [...]

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 [...]

Roger Jackson - The Voice of Grimm

At the start of the Grimm project I had the idea that we’d manage to record 99% of our voice over work in-studio. Our office has a dedicated sound guy, a beautiful sound recording room, and everything else necessary for the task - except one thing: voice talent.
The team tried a few times to capture [...]

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 [...]

Grimmy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from GameTap!
To mark this dark day, they’ve launched the official placeholder for the official “Grimm” site. Check it out here.
And they’ve prepared a spooky Halloween card for everyone:

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 [...]

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 [...]