2003 - 2008
CLOSED
(Before It Even Opened)
Born out of
a marketing strategy rather than creative inspiration, This Is Vegas began as a list of bullet-points designed to take down Grand Theft Auto, an open-world franchise that had already dominated the market for several years. Midway Games, the parent company of producer Surreal, were fully committed to the project, despite it’s extremely vague premise, as they were desperate for a giant-killer to save them from bankruptcy.
"And with great anticipation
comes great disappointment"
-Some Idiot
An Open-World Adventure
Five Years In The Making
As Midway’s
flagship project there was enormous pressure on everyone to succeed, and it required a strong lead designer to establish a clear vision and hold on to it while navigating the meddling forces of marketing and corporate interests. Unfortunately, that person barely lasted a year as he was unwilling to give up so much control, and a series of ineffectual “managers” followed. As a result, the project never really coalesced.
Featuring Four Unrelated
Major Game Mechanics
And The Wrong Game Engine
While game design
floundered throughout the development process, the world design and art teams managed to build a rich and detailed world – twice. Generally unaffected by the stop-and-go engine development which tended to wreak havoc once a twice a year due to Epic code drops, we managed to build out over a hundred unique city blocks, in addition to dozens of casino and club interiors.
Brought To You By a Failing Company...
Midway Games
-R.I.P. 2008-
And A Deluded Studio...
Surreal Software
-R.I.P. 2008-
Eventually...
Midway went bankrupt, and sold Surreal Studio to Warner Brothers. The game sputtered on for another year with a reduced team, but after an uninspired attempt to tie it into the Hangover film franchise, it was finally cancelled, a fitting end to a party long over.
But It Was Fun While It Lasted!
Welcome To
Here's Your Map
World Maps
It was only
a small part of my job, but I feel like I spent half my time redesigning the world map. Because I was making constant updates, its evolution is a fairly good record of the ebb and flow of the project through its expansive highs and reductive lows. Below are a few I’ve selected to give a sense of this process.
Maps 1-9 reflect the planning phase for the overall map before layout begins. Individual locations and sub-levels were also in beginning of design phase at this time.
M10-17 represent the first build-out, before streaming was locked down and its impact on design standards and memory budgets was fully understood.
M22-23 are last snapshots of build before it was all torn down.
M18-21 cover the overall redesign, including boundaries (and beyond) for first time.
M24-30 illustrate the rebuild process and the development of more detailed content relating to neighborhoods and communities within the city.
Casino Design
The first goal
was to develop a working casino interior that would wow the guys upstairs, with fully-functioning gameplay and A.I. With the cart placed well before the horse, gambling and NPC behaviors were undeveloped and still years out, and as a result several casinos were built before design was fully understood.
Modular Sets
Faced with
a staggering amount of content to produce--maps, interiors, thousands of buildings--with limited time and resources, art teams will still push for custom over standardized asset-creation every time, even if it means missing deadlines and working abnormally long hours. The need for artists to receive meager validation notwithstanding, there is an inherent belief that by not making custom creations, the artist's role is somehow diminished, a fallacy that always leads to disappointment. Eventually you find a balance, and in our case, I think we managed it well, having finished our part in building the world to completion.
Content Design
One of the
fascinating aspects of this project was the almost fractal-like nesting of content-within-content that we had only begun to explore; in my case, beginning with a physical world divvied into functional sections, each of which became a thematic neighborhood with its own subsets of common and unique characteristics. These would be expressed in the environment and characters design and then down through their specific choices. The "communities" diagram below, shows the different zones where free-roaming characters would gather based on their pre-assigned behaviors.
Design Direction
The large scale
of the project required multiple art and design teams to build and implement content. Each team worked independently--one per map--but they also needed to coordinate to insure continuity across adjacent maps. Since managing twenty or thirty people directly would leave little time other than to field questions, I created a series of live documents that would anyone could reference for information, guidelines, tasks, feedback, and so forth.
Wiki Map
An interactive map that began as a message board to post artist assignments, it quickly involved into a communications hub for the entire project team. Loved by all, it became a vital tool for eliminating unnecessary meetings.
Style Guide
This was an extensive 60-page guide, intended for artists building and propping out neighborhoods throughout the world. Like everything else on this project, this doc was a work in progress meant to be prettied up after shipping.
Game Over!
Too Bad. Better Luck Next Time.