What's In A Pose?

If a picture is worth a thousand words then it stands to reason that a character’s pose speaks volumes.  The entire art team paid close attention to this during all phases of production for "XCOM: Enemy Unknown."  Particularly a character’s silhouette and whether it retained graphical clarity while the character was in motion.  We wanted the player to easily identify, and distinguish between the palette of human and alien characters.  This sort of "at a glance" approach helped us to create more iconic characters.  All of our animations tried to play into this as well.  Providing distinctive personalities, and movement types into each character.

The image below shows a few of the poses I made during the early “round robin” stage of our character exploration.  One or two are poses taken from cinematic I worked on.  Usually the animation team would have a list of “states” needed for the characters and it would be up to us to make these as cool and functional as we could.  There was a lot of back and forth between animation, concept, and modeling to really nail the physical form of each character.  Specificity in the look for each character was a top priority.  The animation team would sit down as a group to make as many poses for a given character as we could think of.  We’d usually do this in a morning posing session.  We’d put all the poses side by side and pick the strongest ones, or combine ideas between poses to arrive at something iconic.  These poses had to be resolved early on because so much animation work gets influenced by them.

I had a blast exploring the plethora of alien personalities, and body types that make up our game.

Pitching A Winning Combat System

Video Game Design by it's very nature requires iteration upon tireless iteration.  This can be both an ugly and a beautiful thing.  In the case of "XCOM: Enemy Unknown" it was beautiful.  Early on we realized that simply bringing the classic XCOM gameplay back with updated graphics wasn't going to cut it.  Taking cues from games with amazing combat systems like Uncharted, Gears of War, and Red Dead Redemption, we decided a more dynamic action approach was necessary.
Thus was born COMBAT 2.0!
What's any idea without a proper pitch movie I ask?  An idea without a strong foundation!
When this idea first came up the animation team decided to create a memorable pitch to illustrate what we believed the gameplay had the potential to look and feel like.  We combined cinematic sensibilities with the needs of design and necessary player information.

Watch it here:


Much of what we proved with this movie made it into the final game. 

Here is a playblast of some of the "Rookie" soldier animations that were used: