Blizzcon 2009: StarCraft II has been a long time coming, but for Lead 3D Artist Alan Dilling it’s a labour of love.
What is it like working on a franchise like StarCraft II?We have a great team, a lot of really experienced guys who worked on StarCraft I and other guys who are new and come in and you train them up. But the environment is really conducive to being creative and fun. But we have a lot of long hours and there are a lot of challenges involved - as you can probably tell 'cause it takes us so long to make everything.
StarCraft II has been a big challenge because of the legacy of StarCraft I and changing everything over to the 3D elements has been tough. In some cases we don't have the original source art from StarCraft so we're trying to figure out... 'is that a wing, or a jet-engine or a laser?' And the original guys are a like 'I don't remember' or 'You know what, I never liked it anyway, let's get rid of it'. Sometimes the fans are upset with that, but you know, those are the challenges we get with the legacy and keeping the game intact without upsetting the fan base. But we have to make it new and fresh obviously.
How does the design process work for a game like StarCraft?Initially the Art Director and Lead Designer will come up with some high level ideas, like including Dark Templars or other lore elements that really make sense on a conceptual level and they'll then kick that over to Design. Design will say let's make this a ranged guy, and give some basic numbers and then they'll kick that back over to us and we'll put some concept art out. It then goes from concept to modelling and in that phase things get changed a little bit - as it goes through the production like, things happen, and it might not be what you originally had in mind. You know, we really can't have big egos, working on a game like this with such great artists.
After we've worked that concept it will go over to a texture artist who'll unwrap it all and look at all those cool textures and shaders. We usually use at least three channels, three textures. And then we'll kick it over to an animator and the animation guys rig it up and will put in any animations that Design needs; typically 'run',' walk' and 'attack'. And then we'll put it in the game finally and perhaps redo some of the modelling, textures and animations at least one more time! You can really like something but then look at it again a year later and really wonder why you liked it and decide to redo it. That will often happen when there's a new texture style implemented - and that really raises the bar and we need to go back and rework everything else to match.
It's been a long time coming. What's the progress like?We love the progress we're making at the moment. It's unfortunate that it's taken so long but we're really trying some new stuff with the campaign. The multiplayer has been pretty close to done for a while now, and so we're really anxious to get the beta out there to everybody, but the campaign has been more of a dirty process with the new story mode and in-game cut scenes. So that's really been a lot of trial and error.
Also with the different levels in the campaign we've tried to raise the bar again, we're putting huge doodads in and to really do things that we can't do in the multiplayer. You can go over the top a bit as an artist. That's what we're having fun with and that's what we've been focussing on the last few months.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012