Grimm Graphic Novel Preview

Grimm 01_01

Grimm Graphic Novel Preview Art

Dwight MacPherson has announced on his blog that the first episode of the Grimm graphic novels is now available for pre-order:

Rejoice, children! American McGee’s Grimm #1 is now available for pre-order!

American McGee’s Grimm #1
Written by Dwight L. MacPherson
Illustrated by Grant Bond
Covers by Ben Templesmith and Grant Bond

EPISODE 1: CRISIS ON EARTH 57
After transforming the fairy tale realm into a hellish nightmare, Grimm launches a secret invasion into the world of comic books! As he enters a domain where villains are doomed to fail, will this be Grimm’s final crisis? Join us for the ultimate American McGee’s Grimm adventure and find out!

Go to his blog to read more and find out how you can pre-order. You can also check out some awesome preview images!

Enjoy!

Grimm Postmortem

Models & Animations Pipeline

Models & Animation Pipeline

Gamasutra is featuring a lengthy postmortem of “Grimm”. The article was primarily written by Grimm’s producer Wim Coveliers with contributions by all of the Spicy Horse team. It does a good job in detailing the high-level things that went right and wrong during the production of Grimm. From the article:

Going into production, we knew we had a lot on our hands: we were going to develop the world’s first weekly episodic game, and we had exactly one year before the first episodes were scheduled to air.

Since nobody had done a project with these variables, we had to create most of our scheduling and pipelines from scratch, based on the team’s instincts and varied experience.

Now, a year and a half after starting development of our prototype, eight episodes of Grimm have been released; sixteen more episodes will be distributed in the next several months.

The game has been very well received: it has become the best-selling game on the GameTap service, and with plans to bring it to other digital distribution platforms, the future looks very bright for Grimm (however much he hates bright things himself!)

And while the article provides some interesting insights, it barely scratches the surface of the story – the energy, ideas, pain, and joy that went into building a new studio in China while developing a first-of-kind episodic game. One thing that always amazes me are the personal stories carried by the individuals in our team – the backgrounds, travels, adventures, loves, losses, and other unique elements that make the people, and in turn the team, what they are… A really beautiful thing.

I’m proud to have been a part of it all. And hopeful for what the future holds in store for Spicy Horse. As we head into the New Year (Chinese!), I’m wishing everyone prosperity, health, and happiness.

Bring on the Year of the Cow! Moo!

Writing in the Age of Distraction

I stumbled on this interesting bit of advice regarding writing. It outlines some tricks I’ve also heard mentioned by writers like Stephen King and Michael Crichton: Writing in the Age of Distraction One of my favorite tricks is the “rough edge” idea (although this is the first time I’ve heard it referred to as that). Basically you always stop work before you’ve run out of ideas, leaving something on your mind to return to the next day. Read the full article for more cool ideas.

Console Dur

Microsoft’s head of Entertainment and Devices Devision recently announced: “Just coming up with something that’s faster and prettier isn’t going to be sufficient,” Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s head of the Entertainment and Devices Division, told the San Jose Mercury News.” To which I say, “Dur.” I’m still waiting for someone smart to help do away with the OLD interfaces and bring in NEW ones… keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers? I/O is a huge limiting factor in what we can do with games. Every time someone improves the I/O interface they’ll create another revolution in games. Where’s my vision implant, cerebral reader, and other bionic interface devices!?

Shanda Talk Investment Strategy

A quick but interesting link to some insight coming out of Shanda at the Game Business Law Summit in Dallas: Speaking on a panel about games in Asia during the Game Business Law summit at SMU in Dallas, Shanda’s deputy general counsel, Jerry Zhang, discussed three keys that his company uses to invest in the future. Read the article to learn what those three keys are.

Episodic Development with UE3

Grimm Production Timelines

Grimm Time Lines

Develop Magazine is running an article highlighting the episodic development of Grimm using the Unreal Engine 3 technology. From the article:

McGee’s core team explored several engines before settling on Unreal Engine 3 and ultimately found that they were able to integrate content and achieve the visual results they wanted faster and easier with Unreal Engine 3.

“This was primarily attributable to the superior reference materials, tutorials, and content pipeline and tools. Once our decision was made, attracting other team members with UE3 experience and gaining critical knowledge on our own was easy,” explained McGee.

“Because Grimm is such an experimental game concept, rapid prototyping was essential to proving our new ideas. Being able to quickly build a world from near-final content allowed us to focus on the challenges of implementing original ideas.”

If you’re interested in how we pulled off on-time development and distribution of 12 hours of episodic content, while building a studio from the ground up, AND being in a foreign land – then you’ll want to check out the full article. I will say a lot of our success is owed to the robustness of the UE3 toolset.

Attached to this article you’ll see a time-line which roughly illustrates the cycles our production went through in order to accomplish our development goals. This time line only gives a broad picture and a little detail related to Level Design production. There were in fact many similar time lines running concurrently through all departments, including Concept Art, Asset Production, Animation, and Programming.

Soon we’ll release a Post Mortem on the Grimm project which goes into more detail about the development of Grimm. Keep an eye out for it!