The first in my series of reports brings you an interview with Turbine veteran Sean Huxter. As Lead Artist on Asheron's Call, Sean was responsible for much of what the player sees and monsters that the player flees. Get to know the man behind the (Martine's) Mask! And, if you're really good, I'll throw in a few sweet behind-the-scenes screenshots from his current project: Middle-Earth Online.
Give us a little background on yourself, and how you wound up in the game industry.
I grew up in Newfoundland. When I was 18 or 19, I was working at a Radio Shack, and picked up a Commodore 64. I had nothing to do really in the early mornings, so I would sit around the Radio Shack and read the manuals, that's how I learned BASIC. Just before that, the first IBM had come around, and a friend of mine was programming a flight simulator. Just in text, nothing graphical. He showed me the basic code, and I found I could understand it. I thought I should give this a try, so I programmed a little Star Wars-esque game, where a cursor would chase a little Tie-fighter around, little ACII characters.
I decided I would buy the first reasonably priced computer I could find that could handle programming Q-bert, that is, you know, moving little blocks of colorful graphics around properly, and not slowly. The Apple II was one of the contenders, but has to move the blocks around manually, in BASIC, and this was slow. The Commodore 64 had these wonderful things called sprites, that you could program the graphics for and just move them around as complete objects. So the first thing I did when I got it was program this little Q-bert clone. And my Q-bert had a level editor.
Do you still have the Commodore?
I do actually, I have the Commodore 128, I upgraded. I was in college, working on a computer science degree, I had no money but whatever spare cash I had I would always scrape together to buy another upgrade, disk drive, whatever.
So that was great and from there I did all sorts of cool stuff, and loved it. I started doing concepts of games, too, I did one for a game based on the Dragon Riders of Pern series, and I had it all written out, it was this great multi-level game, and no one had seen this kind of game before. I couldn't program it, but I had a lot done on paper and graph paper. So I was about to send this out to some game companies, to see if they wanted it, when Epyx came out with...Dragon Riders of Pern. Which is the story of my life, but something about doing that game made me realize what I wanted to do for a living. I wanted to be somehow involved with graphics in the game industry.
In the late 80's I was reading a comic book called Shatter, which was the first comic book produced on a computer, it was after 1984 when the Mac came out. So I decided to try doing a comic book using the GEOS operating system, because at the time they'd released a publishing program, for the desktop. I entered Berkeley Softworks' Desktop Publishing contest, and won first prize in the open design category, which came with a cash prize and a bunch of cool equipment. There was a mouse, a modem a 512K RAM expansion...
512...K, right?
Yeah, 512K, but this was for a Commodore 64, which of course has 64K, so this was a huge deal! I also got all the GEOS software, including a GEOS assembler. Now there you go, suddenly I had an assembling program. I bought a book on the GEOS operating system, and started programming little assembler games. Just for fun, for me and a bunch of friends. I also coded a version of Simon, and I decided to send this one to LoadStar, which was a disc magazine for the Commodore 64, and every issue they would publish one game for the GEOS system. They didn't want that one, but they said they wouldn't mind seeing more. I had just programmed a version of MasterMind, just to see if I could do it, so I sent it to them and they bought that, and published it. They requested other games, and for a while I was sending them things regularly, but then college ended and I had to get a life.
So I started a job doing computer graphics. About three years into that job, Newtek came out with Video Toaster, which came with Lightwave, and I started playing with it. We were doing ads at the time for a bread company, mostly scrolling text on a computer-generated background. Scrolling text turned into...more...and we would always propose these wacky things, like having the slogan "Out of this world!", and have a UFO fly in and beam up the letters. That was my favorite. This continued, and we were contracted to do a series of animated ads, fully 3D, featuring little blue rubber balls with hands and feet, and eyes, very emotive, bouncing around the screen. That project provided me with a demo reel.
There was a Lightwave newsgroup that I would go to, and somebody posted an ad for a startup company using Lightwave to do 3D games. I sent them my demo reel and Jason Booth called me, at like, 12 at night or something, loud music in the background, he's shouting hoarsely into the phone (said he'd just come back from a Phish concert) saying that they wanted to fly me down for an interview.
So I went down. Jason sat me in front of a computer and said, "Animate this creature." It was a tusker, so I sat down and animated this tusker. I did a chest thump, I think, and a couple of attacks, and then, I had a few minutes left so I did a butt-scratch. They more or less hired me on the spot at that point. So I went back home (St. John's, Canada), and my wife and I packed up and moved down to Massachusetts, back in May of 1996. Suddenly, I was working in the game industry. I became the Lead Artist for Asheron's Call, then the AC Live Team Artist.
What is your favorite aspect of design?
I really love all aspects of it, but I'd have to say animating creatures is one of my favorites, getting the creature from start to finish. There's a lot of stuff you don't get to see, modeling, texturing, and finally the animating. But then we make a whole bunch of data files out of it. You can't animate a creature unless you have this huge table of data, and nobody ever gets to see that, but that's actually fun, putting the table together and getting it all working. Getting the creature into the game and fighting it for the first time is a LOT of fun.
What was your favorite creature?
I love the Olthoi, I've got to say. Scenario's new Olthoi fliers are just beautiful. Scenario's doing a great job, he took over for me on Asheron's Call. It's a good feeling when you know you've passed on the job to somebody who's going to take it and run with it. He just really learns quickly.
What are some of the things that you created for AC?
I created Martine. The inverted Gaerlan Citadel (my favorite). The advocate towers. Almost all of the creature animations, and item icons. I did the Aerlinthe t-shirt, that was one of my first clothing items. Lots of armor after that, the Exarch plate for one.
Did you work on Asheron's Call 2?
No, I didn't work on AC2 at all, actually. At the time, I was the only artist assigned to AC during the live content phase. I'd take an artist's time whenever it was available, and we'd have sometimes 3-5 artists putting out content monthly, but a lot of the time it was just me. Left me very little time of course to work on anything else, so while a lot of the company was starting to do work on AC2, I was on the AC Live team doing that. When the expansion for AC came out (Dark Majesty), I was supervising a lot of that, since I knew a lot of the technical ins and outs, I would help them out and I was always there to give advice on some of the art and animations. Mostly, though, I was on the Live Team, from November of 1999 to November of 2002.
Then, development started for Middle-Earth Online, so I moved on to that project as Technical Artist. As a technical artist, I take art from other people and use our internal tools to make it work in the game, because you can't just take a Maya model and have it do anything directly in the game. We do things like rig up bones on a model so it can animate, and there's a bunch of other technical stuff we add, like the object's shadow casting properties.
So you still keep tabs on what's going on with AC?
Oh yeah. Now and then Scenario will come over for advice on how to get something new working, but once he knows, he just goes and does his own thing with it. I still log in frequently, especially after patch days. I have a 4 year old main character who's still level 37. I do a lot of interacting more than actual fighting.
It seems you also collect toys?
Well, I had toys when I was a kid, like everybody. I loved them, had a huge collection of GI Joes, but unfortunately I didn't get to keep any of them. There came a time when I was "too old to play with stuff like that" and they were all given to a cousin. I went over to his place some time after that, and there was nothing left of a collection that would now be worth probably around $10,000. It was completely destroyed. So there's a lot of nostalgia there.
One day I was down at the malls, and I saw a Galoob Action Fleet X-Wing, and I thought it was so cool, I had to pick it up. That was the first toy I bought here (in the United States). Three or four years ago, my wife gave me a gift certificate to amazon.com. I went to the site to see what they had, and I came across a GI Joe twin set "Then and Now". It was a reproduction of an old GI Joe, it was perfect, so I bought it. And as I held it, all those childhood memories just flooded back. In a month or so, I had 6 toys on a shelf, and that turned into around 600 today.
Did you try to find the old versions you had as a child?
No, not so much. I have 2 vintage GI Joes, but they're expensive. I usually try to collect figures that are less than $20 a piece, try and keep the cost down a bit. A few years back a saw a comic book done online with GI Joe figures, and it was too cool, I decided I wanted to do that. I gave it a try, and really loved it, so most of my collection now is aimed at planning characters, and sets, and clothing for more stories. I've done about a dozen so far.
In light of your own experience, I'm guessing your daughter gets to keep all her toys?
To the detriment of my apartment space! She doesn't have to throw anything out that she doesn't want to throw out. I had to recently rent some storage space for some of that.
I understand you also write reviews for toys. How did that come about?
Well, that's a funny story. When I first moved here, I started reading Science Fiction Weekly, it's the Science Fiction channel's website, they do a weekly online magazine. They had a column called "Cool Stuff", but just about every time I read it, it was a review of a book. I wrote them, saying that they already had a book section, and there was so much other cool stuff they could be reviewing, model kits, things like that. So the next issue was posted, and...it was another book review. So I wrote again, telling them how there was so much they could be doing with this section. A while later, I got an email from the editor, and he said he hadn't been ignoring me, he'd just been really busy. He'd read my messages, and agreed with me, so...what would I like to review?
I figured this was a put up or shut up situation, so I picked an item, wrote a review on it, and they published it. So I thought that was it, I'd proven my point and he'd proven his, he'll probably be happy to be rid of me. Instead I got an email saying, "So, what are you reviewing next?" And it hasn't stopped since, I've been doing it for, oh, 2 or 3 years.
What are you working on today?
Today I'm working on some towers for Middle-Earth Online, that have been modeled by Mark Lizotte. They're very complex, lots of polygons, and it's taking a long time to run them through. And if I notice any problems, I have to run them through again, so that's taking a while. I've got three of these to do. Normally I can get through a bunch of stuff in a day, but when pre-processing for an object takes almost an hour, things slow down.
Will you be able to go inside these towers?
Yes, when they're finished you will.
Great! I'll let you get back to it then, thank you very much for taking the time to share your experiences!
