The deadline is looming, and we're sort of getting on top of it. It's strange, because if we had a better deadline and a more realistic time scale, this game would be enjoyable to produce. At the moment, though, I've decided to texture the entire level. Itself, the level is a huge 35,000 poly monster split into loads of tunnels and caverns, although different levels will have a different structure. The city for instance will have little or no tunnels -which is something of a bonus indeed...!

So far, we've got almost all of the baddies sorted out. Toks has done a great job on the screaming harpy and the newly-textured ramp demon, which are both going to be bipeded and have small texture sheets of 128x256 to save on texture space. On the level, the monolith cavern (a cavern with a room full of monoliths in the shape of a pentagramic star) is going to have to have it's textures shrunk as well to 256x256. I also managed to tart up the .avi start sequence with more lighting effects, though the temptation to go overboard with particle effects, volume lighting and lens flare is very tempting indeed.

What else? Well, there's the characters to animate, the even newer bike to build and texture (the biker texture sheet is going to be shrunk down to give the bike more texture space) and plus the biker is going to have to be split up and bipeded for animation purposes. Toks assures me that he could be getting a lot of the animation work produced, and that we won't need a full-time texture artist. This has nothing to do with the fact we're all going to get higher bonuses if we don't employ any more artists, but to me this is pretty daft. I'd rather have a lower bonus and my sanity kind of intact.

Texturing the caverns is a very depressing process indeed. I've sung my woes to my ex-work colleagues at the Liverpool office, and they are sympathetic to the point that their lovely PS2 gun game project has a very rough (and therefore more realistic) deadline. I can see late nights beckoning next week, though I am very confident that we'll have our artistic quota sorted out by then. I do feel sorry for the programmers, who are currently having some problems with the new game renderer they're working on. If they have late nights, I probably feel the need to have late nights as well to keep 'em company. Probably.

Feel I have to make an entry here, because I am absolutely and totally knackered, both physically and mentally. Artistically, I have been reduced to texturing tunnels night and day, and this should have a positive effect on the new bike model. The feeling of freedom after such ardeous work will be most definitely welcome. The whole level should be on track to being finished and textured, and all connected by the end of the week, as promised in the ominous meeting I had with the programmers.

It seems that the poor ol' programmers are getting ready for loads of late nights. What I saw on the DC development screen a few weeks back, which to me represented a pretty solid illusion of a game, has been reduced to a strange collection of panicked numbers and swirly Doctor Who patterns. I'm worried. Are we going to get this demo out on time? Well, I'm confident the art side will be ready, and that just shows what a fantastic art team I have. Already, Toks is starting on the animation with the prospect that no extra artist equals bigger bonuses. Nick and I am hard at work on the level, while Andy is getting to grips with building Quake-style tongues on 3DS Max.

Side-on view of the final bike and rider design. It'll do... for about eight months.

One scary thing - one of our tunnels in this huge monolith level is.... 666 faces!!!! Arrrrgghhh! This project is cursed, we're going to get plenty of Omen style accidents and we're all going to burn in the firey hell of damnation!! Then again, it could be all one big coincidence, of course...

We have another week after the end of this week of panicking. I really believe we're not going to have as good a demo as Alfin would like, and I am at least happy that it will have nothing to do with the art side of things. We have made a huge rod for our backs with having huge caverns, because even after preliminary texturing, we still need to actually add more props and make the levels (and of course, the tunnels) look more interesting. I'm pissed off that we have to resort to using stock textures for getting this demo out on time, though for the actual game, I would love to have loads of custom stuff in there.

I suppose this is what happens when you're an artist on the brink of a deadline. We'll see what happens next week, and whether I can even manage to type out my entry on this diary. I'm a lot more content now than I was at the start of the week, and at last I won't have to texture (and dream, and wake up thinking of) tunnels. Hooray!

Thank God it's Friday!!! I really thought at the beginning of the week that we would have utter problems with the whole monolith level, but today it looks as though we're going to get the whole thing sorted out by the end of today - textured and connected!! We still have to get props for the level sorted out, which means basically tarting up the level with additional geometry to avoid the thing looking sparse. Oh, and demonise all those stock textures we've used, er, artistically for getting the level polished for the demo.

Top down view of bike and biker.

Again, the programmers are looking at blank screens, or screens with whizzing textures all over them. I'm glad that we've kept to our side of the bargain of getting everything artwise produced for the demo. I am extremely happy with my art team - it seems like everything might just be finished for August! Toks' motivation for the fact he's going to get a nice fat bonus for his troubles has given him the incredible feat of producing loads of quality animation in such a short time. It's unbelievable!! John's city level is looking amazing as well - there is going to be a treat in store for this first level! (Looking back at this statement, that's a lie. pickasso_reborn)

I was hoping today to learn about bones plus getting them to magically move the wings on the bike, but now it's a case of blind panic and hard slog. We only have three weeks to go before our Tokyo deadline, and I really want the game to look lovely. Basically, though, my balls are on the chopping block if it goes pear-shaped, and I don't really want to see my balls go pear-shaped.

I had a look at the script for the FMV last night as well - and although with Queen's One Vision playing in my head, I can imagine some pretty amazing FMV, it looks as though timewise it'll be a stretch if we did the FMV. I would absolutely love to do the FMV, in a kind of "great, the game's finished, let's relax and produce some FMV", but it looks like it'll be shipped out. I suppose we could always go the easy route and re-use the in-game level geometry for the FMV location (a la Gran Turismo). Ah, well.

The only downer to the level is that there is a missing tunnel, which means building another tunnel and linking it to somewhere. Arrrrrrgggggghhhhhh! Oh, and texturing it as well... still, suppose it could be worse. Plus, I've got some invaluable research from Rich - Carmageddon, Rollcage, Wipeout 2097, etc. I think it'll be pretty cheeky if muggins decides to play those games in the name of research.... hmmmm. There's always lunch!

Crazy Taxi is out today... yaaahahahhahoooo!!

My computer at home went down yesterday night - the second time it has done, and the first time was 01/01/2000. I think we have a Millennium Bug!!! It was inherited from an art geezer in the Liverpool office, and it looks like it could be cut in half and have its rings counted to see how old it is. I'm actually surprised it isn't made of wood.

I've just finished texturing (with some spot textures still to place) of the third and (hopefully) final bike. I am extremely happy with the result, because it's slimmer (good news for collision detection) and more work has been put into the back end of the bike. I do want to put some animation on the bike over the weekend as well - an animated tail, air brakes, etc. We managed to get the entire level into the Dreamcast, and it runs like a dog. We're going to split it up into seperate parts and see where we go from there.

Toks has been working his animation magic again, this time on the demon biker and the superb animation of this demon. You could just imagine chasing this guy down tunnels... if we could see them properly on the Dreamcast. Artists (including myself) are getting some flak from the programmers over reversed textures and scale problems with the bike and environment, though I do think it's their problem. Number one niggle - programmers blaming artists for their problems. We have enough problems with emotional hang ups and other artistic things...!

Three-quarters view of the biker and bike with temporary boosters. Note the bike looks like a huge demonic chicken. *bwarrrk!*

John is officially starting work on the city level (first level) today, even though he's practically built it all! It still needs to be optimised, but it should look incredible when it ever gets onto the Dreamcast. I've still got to light caverns for vertex colour (we are going to have real time lighting for weapons as well, thank gawd) and add props to them to make them more interesting. Poor ol' Nick's getting started on props. I've also invested in a Zip drive (parallel port, because I'm a cheapskate..) which will be our back-up for the project. We're using SourceSafe, though I'm always worried that we never see physically where our files are going, plus the programmers had some SourceSafe-associated problems. I'm the only artist who has SourceSafe at the moment..! I'm not too joyous that the Zip is crashing 3DS Max, though. Why?!?! Oh, the wonders of technology...

Still, I will be so glad to get this monolith level out of the way. I'm guessing that this is the most complicated level of the proposed six, so it's good we're getting it out of the way, but bad that we STILL have to do it. Arrrrrrghhh! Life should be easier than this..