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Level
and map building for fun (2000 - present)
After
Wonderfall I was hired by the web technology company and former
game  developer
Destiny Media Technologies to be the primary designer and
artist for their products and websites. For Destiny I wrote
a pitch to be the developers of an add-on pack for the Sierra
/ Impressions Studios city-building game Pharaoh. You can
tell I still love games because I designed Destiny's latest
box to look
like a game box. During this time I kept interested in
games by exploring the mod and level-building community, especially
the amount of free tools and open environments created for
popular games. I've built in Worldcraft, QERadiant
and modelled/skinned with Milkshape. I've made maps
for Sid Meier's Civilization games, and made more than
a dozen scenarios for the popular turn-based WWII strategy
game "Combat Mission".
I even got a nice email from Ken Levine from Irrational complimenting
me on one Combat Mission scenario. During this time I've also
discussed creating games with my many friends in the game
industry, committing many of the ideas to paper.
Mission
to Mars - Wonderfall Productions (1997-99)
 At
the end of my Malaysia effort I was contracted with Wonderfall
Productions, a local house using Telefilm multimedia fund
money to develop edutainment titles. I was contracted to design
and create much of the art for a proof of concept based upon
a Mars property. This became a POC called "Mission
to Mars". We used an animation and AI engine called
MotionFactory to develop demonstrations of the game experience.
I generated the majority of literature, pitches and game design
samples. Although it was shopped to many publishers by management
it never went anywhere.
Malaysia
game studio development (1997)
For
a two year period I struggled with launching a video game
development studio with proper financial backing and business
structure. During that time I visited Malaysia (where I was
born), met with members of small and large corporations, and
was even paid for a consultancy with who would become our
major backers. I had a trip to E3 sponsored. My vision was
to combine a professional team of westerners with local students
willing to learn (and provide cheap but enthusiastic labour).
I picked my team of experienced developers and artists locally
and had time to draft several designs for titles. Unfortunately,
right after we secured our last backers the asian economic
crisis deepened and ended that project. One of the highlights
of this experience was meeting Peter Molyneux (Lionhead).
Cyberjack
(1995)
I
was hired right out of the Applied
Information Technology Program to become a graphic artist
in a "Myst" style adventure puzzle solving game
for the Macintosh and PC called "Cyberjack". Even
though I worked almost two years on it, the project was cancelled
as the engine no longer was up to task. It did teach me useful
skills that have helped me thoughout my career in software
developed. I was thrown into 3D modelling on a Mac program
called Infini-D. I also learned some rudimentary scripting
with its inhouse engine and did a lot of Photoshopping. Since
it was a very bare-bones managed project I eventually became
heavily involved in writing and designing puzzles. The company
was eventually bought up by a multimedia studio called Motion
Works. At Motion Works I worked on pitches, contributed as
a production artist to various of their lifestyle and motion
picture licensed products and then became a 3D
and effects artist for their film and TV department.
MUDding
(1989-1992)
When
I was in university there was no WWW, there was only text-based
Internet. If you wanted to game on the internet, you had to
be on a text-based game like one of many dozens of multi-user
dungeons patterned on D&D or the Zork games. I played
one constantly called FalconDiku (a DikuMUD). I played it
so much one semester that I spent 30 days real time (1 month
out of four month semester) building characters and eventually
becoming a wizard and writing pages and pages of room descriptions.
That semester I made the Dean's list. I'm still not sure how.
Permastruct
instructions (1988)
As
a teenager there was no better job than to be paid for playing
games. This was when I was contracted to write hundreds of
capsule game instructions for inclusion with rented Nintendo
games at 7-11s around North America. The trouble with rented
games is that the games may not come back with the instructions.
The solution was to hire kids like me to play the games and
encapsulate them into something that could fit in the back
of the rental boxes. Eventually, I got very sick of playing
every single crappy NES game that came out.
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