A Look Back
Shortly after finishing work on the baseball games and on my way to E3 in Atlanta, I was asked by my boss if I would be interested in working on a game for the Spawn licence. I immediately said yes, not caring what my role was going to be or what platform it was going to be for. I was a huge comic book fan and Spawn was one of my favorite comics. I had action figures all over my desk and all over my bedroom walls. It was really a dream come true.
Not long after, they announced the project and what my role would be: Lead Artist and Game Designer. This was an amazing amount of responsibility I was given and I really felt clueless. Here I was, only 22 years old and still the youngest person in the studio, being given control over an entire product. I had never designed a game before, never managed a team, never built a production schedule, but I couldn’t say no. I just bared down and got to work. I was lucky enough to have a large pre-production cycle with just myself and a programmer to figure everything out so I could learn enough to look like I knew what I was talking about by the time the other artists joined the team.
All my previous work had been 3D based and now I was working on 4-bit pixel art. The tool I ended up using for animating was a program developed by EA in the mid-80’s and no one in the studio had ever used it. We were developing for the Gameboy Color, which no one had developed for, nor had anyone built a platforming action game. Part way through development I took over a lot of the producer responsibilities and ended up having to fly down to LA every milestone to present the game to the head of MacFarlane Entertainment. The funniest part of this was the fact I had to get special permission to be able to rent a car to drive in LA as the general rule is you have to be 25. Needless to say, I felt in way over my head, but I never lost my head. I am very happy with what I was able to accomplish, but having played this game to get all this footage seen above, it is not a very good game.