Fiction Fighters was the first ever project I have been assigned to in my professional career. The Project started in 2007 and died in November 2012. Along the line I had many different responsibilities. I started Junior Graphic Artist, went on to Senior and Art Team Lead and finally settled to be Product Manager with art direction responsibilities (we didn't have an official art director position on the project). The goal of Fiction Fighters was to produce an interactive comic that looked like an anime. For the art team that meant, hand-painted backgrounds and cell-shaded characters/objects. The project went through a few iterations on gameplay. The central point remainted true however. That was, everything was rendered remotely on a server with gaming hardware and sent off to the client as completed comic book page. So we really had to stick true to gaming level performance while striving for that real anime look. I guess it was a bit hard to do and a bit too future. Today things would go smoother with HTML 5 and WebGL.

The render-engine that was used originally was Ogre3D. And while the effort of everybody working on that open source engine was really awesome, it didn't do many of the things we wanted it to do. It soon became apparent that getting the engine up to speed was a big production bottleneck. Art-wise we tried to maximize productivity by using a whole suite of custom Maya and Photoshop tools. I did most of them myself. I'm currently porting all of the not totally project specific tools to Maya LT/2015. I'll release them as soon as I'm done! However the project was budgeted really "tight". So, the whole time, the team was terribly understaffed in relation to the scope and the ambition of the original game-design. This stance led to the project meeting its ultimate demise in 2012. It was apparent long before then, but 2012 made it clear. We couldn't churn out enough content to keep the project running in pace with the customer progress. The management didn't want to increase budgets then as it didn't want to before, so the project was closed down. A real shame, but that's life.

Anyway, working on the project was great fun and allowed me to gather a TON of valuable experience, as artist, as coder and as team lead. Below you'll be able to see a selection of the work I did personally. I hope you like it!

3D Work

   

Concept Art

   

Ingame shots

   

Logos

   

Promo Material

   

Sketches