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:

Laying It All Out

I was one of the first guys on the team for the X-COM pitch cinematic.  While our 2-D animatic and hero characters were being made I was busy laying out our set, and building low poly proxy models for all the objects and spaces our characters were going to exist in and interact with.  I then placed cameras that closely matched the storyboards and 2-D animatic.  This allowed us to figure out the scale of our world, test out our 2D ideas in a 3D space, and create an environment for early animation tests.  The modelers were then able to very efficiently remodel everything in high poly using my models as a template.

Creating this low poly set did not take much time, and paid dividends further in the pipeline since a lot of problems had been figured out before any really expensive work was done.  Everyone could focus on making a visually stunning cinematic.

Take a look at this layout page showing my early low poly set, and stills of the finished set from the final movie.

Pitching A Winning Strategy Game

Every success story has a beginning.  XCOM: Enemy Unknown's involved a small team of incredibly passionate artists that wanted to make a statement about where strategy gaming could go.  So we made a movie.  Half of the shots in this were animated by me, and I will have another post showing some of the process that went into their creation. 

Watch it here:


X-COM Pitch Movie Credits

Lead Artist – Greg Foertsch

Lead Animator – Dennis Moellers

Animators –  Justin Thomas
                   Kevin Bradley

Modelers –  Chris Sulzbach (Hero Soldier/high poly set)
                 Brian Mahoney (Furniture/Room Deco)

                 Ryan Murray (Sectoid/Sectopod)

                 Bryce Homick (items in bedroom)

                 Nathan Gordon (truck/shotgun)

                 Justin Thomas (low poly set model/layout)

FX Animators –  Brian Feldges

                       Mike Bazzell

Concept Artist – Piero MacGowan

Sound –  Roland Rizzo

            Mark Cromer

UI Artist – Steve Ogden

These are the people responsible for creating the original pitch movie for the game “X-COM: Enemy Unknown.”  This pre-rendered cinematic was created over a four month time frame from January to April in 2008. A handful of us had started preliminary work in December of 2007.  It represents our vision for the “X-COM” remake we wanted to develop.  Originally we wanted the title to be simply “X-COM” but that idea changed over the course of development for many reasons. 

Little did we know that we were embarking on a nearly five year development journey that would push us harder, and bring us closer as a team than any other title previously developed at Firaxis Games.

I feel privileged to have had such a large involvement with its creation.