We are please to announce that two chilling Condemned 2™ Theme Packs and five Picture Packs are available via the Xbox LIVE® Marketplace for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft®. Developed by Monolith Productions, the geniuses of spine-chilling video games, Condemned 2 is the next chapter in the award winning and critically acclaimed Condemned™ series. The two Theme Packs, “Fight Club Theme” & “Characters Theme” are full of beautifully grim artwork to use as wallpapers, whilst the Picture Packs feature similarly gruesome imagery. The Theme Packs are available for 150 Microsoft Points each, and the Picture Packs for 120 Microsoft Points each.

Condemned 2 thrusts players into the worn boots of Ethan Thomas, the former Serial Crimes Unit investigator, found drifting aimlessly through a society in inexplicable decline. Fighting inner demons throughout his one-man investigation into a sinister conspiracy, Ethan will need to use anything and everything in the environment to survive as he unravels the mysteries shrouding the city in darkness.

Condemned 2 is set for release across Europe on April 4th, 2008 for the Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system.

Want to get those magic 1,000 achievement points on the Xbox 360 version of Condemned 2? Here’s what you need to do.

Single player achievements:

10 points each:
Anger Management - Complete 10 emotional responses
Beat Cop - Complete a mission
Big-Game Hunter - Take out 10 enemies with the antler
Final Word - Complete first environmental finishing move
GOOOAAAALLLL! - Take out 5 enemies with the fooseball piece
Sleuth - Get a PERFECT score in a Forensic Event

25 points each:
Self Medicated - Need to heal yourself for 1000 points of health
Decisive Restraint - Don’t Kill a Single Museum Guard
EPA (Environmental Pwnage Area) - Successfully execute 25 environmental finishing moves
Bloodshot - Complete missions 2,3,4,6,8 to unlock each new FC - Unlock all for Achievement
Flambe - Take out 10 enemies with the flask/taser fire attack
Investigator - Complete Mission (dev challenge mode)
The Plumber - Take out 50 enemies with the pipe

30 points each:
Can You Hear Me Now? - All oro speakers destroyed
Chain Gang - Successfully execute each attack chain 5 times
Detective - Complete Mission (fps mode)
Master Investigator - Earn the maximum amount of investigator points for all forensic sequences
Trooper - Complete All Missions (any difficulty)
Tune In Tokyo - Collect all TVs in each Mission

50 points each:
Chief Investigator - Complete All Missions (dev challenge mode)
Detective / First Grade - Complete All Missions (fps mode)
Gold-Plated - Get the GOLD BADGE for every mission in any difficulty level

Multi-player achievements:

10 points each:
Brick Wall - Complete 5 Successful Blocks
Just The Facts - Crime Scene: Collect the Evidence 10 Times
Punch-Drunk - Kill 10 Players with fists only
Sidekick - Assist in scanning evidence in Crime-Scene Mode

25 points each:
Ala Mode - Play 5 games in all MP modes
Collector - Successfully collect the evidence (as SCU) 5 times in Crime Scene mode
Defender - Successfully defend the evidence (as Infected) 10 times in Crime Scene mode
Magellin - Play each MP map 5 times
Rush Champ - Bum Rush: Eliminate the SCU 5 Times

30 points each:
Bum King - Survive Bum Rush match without firing a single shot as SCU 5 times
Cut-Throat - Perform 25 finishing moves
Restraint (Not) - Win as SCU without firing a shot 10 times
Survivor King - Bum Rush: Survivor (SCU) 5 Times

50 points each:
MP Overachiever - Win a DM match (with at least 15 kills) without dying
Serial Killer - Kill 1000 players in MP
SKX - Kill 9 unique players with the Serial Killer

Ever-eager to show you what goes into video game production; we thought you might like to see how all those voices get put into the games you play. For your viewing pleasure, here is a behind-the-scenes look at some of the voice over sessions on Condemned 2.

Senior Producer Dave Hasle, Monolith Productions

Our Beta was originally due on December 3rd, 2007 but we didn’t complete it until December 21st. We’ve been running about 3 or so weeks late since October but we’d reached that crux where making cuts to pull the schedule in by three weeks would have created more than three weeks worth of work (a true paradox) and would have definitely added more risk to the ongoing project than us just sucking it up, moving forward and getting the game done.

One of the areas of high risk in the development process was the user interface. Before Condemned 2, our UI system was our own creation. Even though it was sufficient for past products, we needed something that would allow for greater artistic expression and would be able to be updated more quickly and efficiently by artist types. We eventually settled upon the Flash-based Scaleform solution. We also expanded our UI team to include 2 Flash-based UI Engineers, 2 C++ UI Engineers and we had our Art Director cranking out assets for the UI as quickly as possible.

An area of concern was getting enough of the core gameplay locked down so we could focus on the UI support. One of the new features of the game is the Attack Chains. When we first worked on the UI, we wanted to get Ethan’s rage across so we tied the meter into a face graphic of Ethan. Once you hit a new Attack Chain level, you’d see the second face and have a 2-part meter. Once you hit the third and final level, you’d see the face on the far right and you’d have a 3-part chain attack meter (see image 001) It was a bit large and sucked up some screen real estate – but was quickly ignored by the player as they were more focused on the action on screen.

We then tried to find a way to pop the face further through a colour variation (see image 002). We had hoped the player would see their progress made by noting the updated coloured graphic. Again – the player didn’t seem to care.

At this point, we decided to make some fundamental changes. We moved the icon out of the player’s way to the upper-right corner. We also wanted to use Ethan’s iconic chest target icon as the basic design element (see image 003). We found a much stronger success with this image. The rings would pulsate to let you know that a meter section was full and we’d add more rings based upon your Attack Chain level status. We also ‘dirtied’ it up more. We also included this grunge pass to all the UI elements.

Another HUD element that proceeded through a similar iteration pass was our Weapon Stats box. This is a carry-over from our Condemned 1 days. Going inline with our first style, we tried a clean but loose interlacing approach. It not only felt too clean but the 1 to 3 pluses or minuses per stat had the playtesters counting them. We needed a new method of showing the amount of disparity between weapons.

So this time we tried using a size and colour value change. This worked well in usability. But the style still wasn’t sitting that well with us overall – and we really liked the ‘dirtied-up’ approach…

So we brought not only the ‘dirt’ but we also brought the blood splat mess that we’ve incorporated elsewhere.

So here is a quick mock-up of the original UI. It looks pretty strong, visually clear – adequate… But then it does feel too clean, too techno – and also too large.

Here is the final UI style. As you can see we repositioned and resized nearly every element. The player’s health went to the upper left corner. The weapon and stun gun stout scions were reduced dramatically in size – plus we bloodied them up. The attack chain icon was reduced in size but is more realistically visible now. Also you see representations of nearly every icon that can show up – breakable weapons, liquor timer, spectrometer alert, and a holstered weapon status icon. There is also a radio communication icon that pops up when someone is speaking with you.

Overall, we’re very satisfied with our final HUD. It actually took 4 to 5 iterations to get to where we are today – and this was over the course of 5 to 6 months. With a completely new UI system, new resources and a new approach, there were some major challenges to face – but we pulled it off. We hope that you find the HUD and menu system in the game to be a strong improvement in Condemned 2 as we feel it is.

We’re literally a few days from getting our release candidate ready and pushing the build into the certification process for both PS3 and 360. Many of us on the team have been pulling some long hours since September of last year – and we’re ready to wrap it up. Even though we’re still dealing with numerous last-minute issues, we find ourselves starting to reflect on how we got to where we are today on the project; what went well, what went poorly, and what we promise ourselves that we won’t do to ourselves – yet again.

One such issue that we dealt with, as any team has dealt with, is called ‘feature creep’. This is that feature or set of features that come up during development that just sounds so cool that we can’t imagine shipping without it. Feature creep can also be the ultimate schedule killer – a gallon of gas poured on an already raging fire out of control – but it can also be that emergent feature that cements a product’s success and even the excitement the team needs to keep together for that final push to get the game out the door.

We had such a feature creep with the ‘Bloodshot Fight Clubs’ in Condemned 2. Our game designer created a demo ‘fight club’ for SEGA PR purposes so they could load up enemies and weapons from a list for demoing purposes last June. It worked out really well. Both the game designer and SEGA got very excited about the Fight Club concept. It was messaged as ‘using a section of the current levels allowing a player to grab an enemy or two and some weapons and allowing players to practice.’ Seemed simple enough… but it then quickly grew in June and July to not only a Practice Arena but to also include five different environments with five unique challenges, and a slew of unique UI work that was needed to pull it off. It all seemed simple and straightforward enough that the payoff was worth the risk – plus, people were really enjoying them. I always kept the Fight Clubs on the CUT list in case we ran into issues with the schedule – just in case.

We hit our Alpha with the five unique Bloodshot Fight Clubs in place. The game designer created the subset environments and did all the wiring himself. This took some of his time away from the core combat experience and the single player experience but probably only a few days at most. In addition, one of our multiplayer Level Designers found some ‘free’ time to go through the Fight Club levels, where he spent time heavily improving performance, fixing bugs and tweaking the environments into shippable states.

The Fight Clubs are as follows:
1. Practice – a general purpose practice arena that lets you try various weapons, enemies, combos, attack chains and so forth.
2. Riot Control – You can only used ranged weapons for this fight club as you try to protect the police below as long as possible.
3. Smoke ‘Em – This one is my personal favourite. Your goal is to kill three enemies as quickly as possible.
4. Deadly Day Care – You’ve got to blow up 100 of these little toys, er…uh, ‘dolls’ as quickly as possible.
5. Streets of Rage – You need to keep yourself and 5 guards alive while killing as many thieves and vandals as possible.
6. Lockdown – This one is my second favourite. You’re locked in a demented-looking cage and you need to kill as many enemies as possible in 5 minutes.

So here we are, running a few weeks later than originally planned. We were originally going to be on the store shelves in late February but now we are currently scheduled for end of March. In the course of a multi-year schedule, being about 3 weeks late is probably considered early by most developers working on quality titles in the industry. Was it worth it? Was it worth taking on the ‘feature creep’ of the Bloodshot Fight Clubs? I let you be the judge when we get Condemned 2 on the store shelves next month.

We chat to senior producer Dave Hasle and primary lead artist Matthew Allen from developers Monolith games about the game’s cinematics.

Senior Producer Dave Hasle, Monolith Productions:
I work with a Primary Lead Artist, Matthew Allen, who is pretty much a hardcore fire-fighter for anything content-related. An issue pops up – technical, pipeline, aesthetic, whatever – Matt will jump on it and put it out quickly and efficiently. As a Producer, I don’t close out games at Monolith unless I’ve got Matt Allen helping keep it all under control and fitting in memory.

One of our issues was with the production schedule of cinematics. We had a certain quality bar that we wanted to hit but the schedule wasn’t allowing for it to happen. In stepped Matt to establish the pipeline and help render out the final frames. Of course, our cinematics could not have been done without Rocky Newton, our cinematic director, and Nick Kondo, cinematic guru, being as dedicated as they are as well.

Matthew Allen, Primary Lead Artist:
My job has covered a whole range of things, but my major focus over the last three months of the project has been getting the final cut-scenes into the game.

One of the things we identified as needing a lot of work at the end of the first Condemned game was the cut-scenes. We had spent a good amount of time developing a new process to get them into the game with consistent movement and camera animation, all controlled by the animators. However, as it was our first real console title we ran into a couple of issues; the biggest two being memory and frame-rate. As we were working with a limited amount of memory, and the cut-scenes needed to be rendered real time in the same streaming region as the rest of the game, we were forced to cut back on both texture resolution and animation fidelity. This led to some of the camera cuts and positions, which the animators choose based on how well the models looked in Maya, to look very pixilated and ‘last gen’. Frame-rate also became an issue. Since all of our lighting and shadows are dynamic, being generated real-time, our frame rate is greatly affected by the amount of lights we have in a scene. So, we were severely limited by that factor also.

Early in production on Condemned 2, our cinematic director, Rocky Newton, and I sat down and brainstormed possible solutions to these issues. For the greatest flexibility form an animation standpoint we decided that we were going to pre-render all of our cut-scenes in Maya, using Mental Ray. This solved a number of our original issues, but created a few more – plus, for a number of folks it was disappointing. We all know that our engine can do some pretty amazing things, so there was some push for us to figure out a way to get the cinematics back in game.

Regardless of the final “how” of the rendering, Rocky Newton was able to move forward with storyboards and animatics. He used a very early draft of the script, along with pickup voice acting from the Yeti team and various Monolith employees. This was the first time we had ever done full animatics and storyboards for our game cinematics, and Rocky’s unique drawing style was perfectly suited for the task. Very early in production the team was able to see a number of very high quality timed animations, and the excitement level was high. At the same time, we began exploring mental ray and the pipeline for moving things back and forth between the game and mental ray. While we did get some excellent results, it was a very cumbersome process and both the mental ray rendering time and turnaround time for game assets became problematic.

Around the same time, a number of folks seemed to have a “Eureka” moment. So why not use the engine to offline render the cinematics? This way we don’t have to worry about frame-rate, so we can add as many lights and as much shadow casting geometry as we want… and we also don’t have to worry about memory, since we were rendering it on a beefy PC. The memory stuff allowed us to up the resolution on all of the textures so even close-ups on people’s eyes could look good. Our Lead Engineer Brian Legge worked with John O’Rorke, our Principal Software Engineer, Engine Architect, and very quickly implemented this for us and the results were very strong.

Since we were now using the engine to render the cinematics, I could now use the latest in game art assets for rendering, including effects. This freed up a lot of time in our schedule which allowed us to focus on some of the cooler animation stuff. Most of my time could now be spent on lighting and tweaking effects rather than moving things into mental ray and trying to replicate our in-game shaders. We could also now do a bunch of stuff that the engine can handle, but modern consoles can’t - like turning up the real-time velocity based motion blur, and running with 30 to 40 lights per scene. We can also use a ton of our in-game special effects together: things like depth of field, full screen color mapping, film grain, sharpen, and a whole host of others, that the console aren’t powerful enough to use together in real-time.

There is still a number of workflow issues that we will need to solve for next time, but for the most part our experiment has been a resounding success and has really allowed us to produce some of the highest quality in game cut-scenes I have personally ever seen. It has been very exciting to watch this whole process unfold, and to bring to life all of Rocky’s initial storyboards, while being able to highlight the great amount of talent of both our artists and our engineers here at Monolith.

Matt Rice, Software Engineer, AI : We originally started off Condemned 2 with a key goal of adding more variety to the combat.  We did this in a few ways - by expanding the players potential attack options, by expanding the sheer number of AI types and by expanding the base AI’s behavior set.  A “behavior” is an atomic action that an AI may make, be it swinging a pipe, recoiling in pain or running to hide.  At Monolith, one of the AI Engineers’ main responsibilities is creating, assigning and managing the many behaviors for each character.  The technology we’ve created has made it a simple process to move behaviors from one character to another.  Want the dog to block melee attacks (we don’t…but if you did), just drag and drop that behavior into his behavior list.

The base AI, which from here out I will refer to as simply the “Thug”, is the typical character the player fought in Condemned: Criminal Origins and is still the bread and butter of Condemned 2. He may have many looks (he may even look female), he may be carrying different weapons, and he may play many different attack and recoil animations, but from the AI Engineers’ point of view they are all the same character. The thug was pretty solid in Condemned: Criminal Origins and we found that engineering didn’t need to do much to him for the sequel. He got an entirely new animation set, new character models, new sounds, but not many new behaviors. What new behaviors he did get came as a direct result of the expanded player options.  The new thug needs to respond correctly to broken limbs, being lit on fire (in numerous and fun ways) and how to throw things at the player.

Creating entirely new AI types is really the fun part of AI Engineering and it is an incredibly collaborative endeavor.  The process typically starts with our Lead Game Designer (Frank Rooke) riffing off a piece of concept art he has received.  He comes up with a few baseline actions he wants the character to make. He then sits down with the Lead Animator (Richard Lico) and me to see what can and can’t be done.  While looking at the concept art for the Burning Rioter, it was pretty obvious what we needed him to do.  The dude is on fire, he isn’t going to make it and he knows it.  The Rioter is simply running after the player and attempting one last grapple attack before his own fiery demise.  At this initial meeting, we agree on a core behavior set and see if we can find any holes in his design.  What happens if the player avoids the attack?  What happens if more than one Burning Rioter attacks the player at the same time?  Can he attack other AI as well?

With plans in place, many departments may begin working on the same character at the same time.  Character Art starts modeling, animation gets someone in a funny suit for motion capture, our FX artist starts looking at burning Tibetan monks for fire reference and the Audio Department will start screaming in combustible pain into the microphone.  I will start out by creating the base framework for the characters behaviors.  As AI Engineer, I start by copying a relatively similar character and trimming behaviors he doesn’t need, like throwing weapons or hiding, and adding behaviors he will need, namely, a single sprint to player that results in either a potential deadly grapple or a painful to watch burning for our friend the Rioter.

This part is fun not only because it is both challenging and rewarding to see such plans come to fruition, but also because…well…it can be quite entertaining.  After my initial implementation, I need to verify as much of the code as I can so that when final assets are delivered from the other departments they will simply drop in with no problem.  So I have to pick the best (or not) of the currently existing assets to use as stand-ins.  At this point, the Rioter looked an awful lot like the thug.  Animation wise, he “ran” towards the player with the limp of a broken leg and if he failed to grab the player he would not so much writhe in pain as much as jump and down as if he was at a hip-hop show…then die.  If he succeeds in grabbing the player, he would invert himself upside down and seemingly try to hug the player to death.  Instead of being on fire, he became a fountain of puke, an effect that we have so many variations of.

Along the way we will continually test the character to make sure he is fun to play against and fits the theme of the game.  When near-complete, the character is given the green light to be placed by the Level Designers in their levels.  What once seemed like a slam-dunk in our test levels may end up playing not so well within the context of a full production level.  More than once we’ve had to re-visit characters that were mostly done and had to re-design, scale back or simply cut them altogether.  This can be painful for all involved, no one likes seeing days or weeks of their work scrapped but characters that are no fun to fight can really bring the player down and generate distaste for the game.

Right now, we are pushing hard towards final Beta and I find myself splitting my time between fixing mundane but import bugs and making exciting last minute revisions to characters before we lock in the code and finalize the game.

We’re continuing to push through Alpha and make the iterations that we feel the product needs. Two of those areas: world art and character art, will give you a brief taste of what our artists look for as they progress and what kind of changes they make artistically to strengthen the content.First, Eric Kohler (Art Director for Condemned 2: Bloodshot) will give you a peek at some early model work and how he goes about providing feedback and paint-overs to iterate on the models.

1. Before the Character Artists begin to work on a model for in-game, they first generate some concept work. The cute fella you see here above is a generic enemy that you’ll run into fairly early in the game. Eric first meets with our Game Designer to understand the needs of gameplay for the character.  He’ll then start to crank out some concept pieces.  Once the final concept piece is agreed upon, Eric will meet with the specific Character Artist to go over any particular needs for the model and creation will commence.

2. While the model is being built, Eric will swing by and review it with the modeler in progress. Once the model is complete, in this case - the high-poly count model, a screenshot is provided for the paint-over process.

3. The Art Director now makes his paint-over pass, tightening up the proportions and accentuating the muscular and bone structure of the model. The image above represents a typical paint-over that Eric Kohler would give to the modeler. The Character Artist would then move forward with the changes, again getting feedback from Art Director Eric as they continue forward.

4. The next phase will be the updated model now with the textures in place. Eric will now provide feedback to the Character Artist on the revisions that he’d like to see made.

5. The Art Director will now do another paint-over showing what areas he’d like to see touched up. Even though he can convey the feedback in words, images and sketches can bring across so much more feedback. Key points that the Art Director wanted to see modified in the case of this enemy are:

a. A few extra tuffs of hair to counteract the balding look, helping him read more as a younger guy.

b. Thin out his chin and jaw to help make him look thinner. Maybe the neck as well if necessary.

c. Reduce darks in the face and the rash along his chest and back.

d. Crank up the red throughout his body to give his skin a more ruddy, irritated look.

e. Add the belt to his armf. Add a few tattoos above the elbows.

6. We now finally get to see him in action in the game with his new, improved form…

Secondly, in the area of world art, we set out with some loftier goals than we had with the environments of Condemned: Criminal Origins. We strived for more diverse environments. We also pushed harder for what we deemed as ‘medium detailing’.  There are the large aspects to creating environments such as the scale of structures, interesting shapes while keeping them realistic, even compositional approaches using lighting. In the fine details, there is the richness of textures, the realistic feel to prefabs such as chairs, tables, windows and the polygonal count. In ‘medium detailing’, Courtney Evans, World Art Lead, and the World Artists worked to get a stronger realistic cohesion between the large elements and the fine details: how the wiring from an overhead light runs along the ceiling, how the molding works with the architecture, how the outlets built into the walls fit into the time period of the environment.

Courtney Evans, a very impassionate man when it comes to world art, takes you through a series of images and shows you the progression of the development of an area in a level of Condemned 2: Bloodshot

Courtney Evans, Lead World Artist

At this point in development we’re starting to add a lot of atmosphere to our levels. Atmospheric touches are pretty quick to make - it’s not as if any one thing takes a lot of time but added together they can have a big impact on how a level feels. Here’s an example of how we’re approaching a factory level.

1. Here’s an area of the level before we start our pass. It was initially modeled by Senior Level Designer Derek Chatwood and textured by Senior World Artist Geoff Kaimmer. There’s a nice cool feel to the first-pass lighting, but you can see there’s no sky beyond the windows, and the railings are pretty square and rough.

2. We’ll then add the sky. The sky is pretty warm in tone, but it needs to be that way to stay consistent with the previous level, where there’s lots of stuff on fire, so we’re going have to change the lighting around in here to reflect that and keep that sense of cohesion.

3. Here we’ve changed the lighting and the fog to better reflect the color of the sky. We’ve also made the primary light in the room more directional, more downward with very little light hitting the ceiling to better simulate a skylight.

4. Now we’ve added some volumetric beams of light simulating dust and smoke being illuminated by the skylight. This effect uses a new shader & shading method our programmers, Principal Software Engineer, Engine Architect John O’ Rorke and Senior Software Engineer, Graphics Greg Seegert made, that pre-calculates a volume’s density (using…  science) so it can render quickly but accurately from any viewing angle. This lets us fill the room with a nice, thick dusty atmosphere that works from on the catwalks looking across or looking up from the floor below

5. Now here’s the level as it currently stands. The railings and catwalks have been remodeled by Geoff, putting in bends and curves, and the lighting’s values are tweaked a little. Further atmosphere will be added when we put in screen overlay effects, more wear and tear to the walls, and more trash. (Almost any level can be improved in our game by adding more trash.)

After that we’ll fix bugs, like the window frames that are vanishing in the distance. However, by then we’ll probably have thought of six more things we want to do to the level to make it better… we’re never done until they rip the game away from us and tell us to stop.

…And it is usually me who has to rip the game away from the content guys and tell them the time is up and that they need to stop. It’s part of my job as Producer - the luckless individual who has to yell STOP so we can make sure we make our dates and budget.

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be bringing on some gameplay updates through Alpha from our Lead Game Designer Frank Rooke and also some animation highlights from our Lead Animator Rick Lico as we continue to work on putting out Condemned 2. Thanks for your time!

-    Dave Hasle

The Deform

Brainstorming:
Approaching this project, the character team really wanted to push the enemies much further than we had done in the first Condemned game. We wanted them to be much scarier, weirder, and more grotesque than anything we had done before. We started by taking a look at all of the enemies we did in the previous project. We created a survey that was distributed to the entire company asking a series of questions about each of the various crazies you ran into in the game. Which ones were your favorites? Which ones were the scariest? Etc. etc. We then took this data and pulled out the strong and weak points of each and went to the drawing board. World Art and Game Design were busy coming up with all sorts of creepy locales for the game to take place in, so we took the most likely of these locales and started brainstorming characters to fit them. We took the data we had from the survey and pushed these ideas towards enemies we felt the players would enjoy fighting against and something we would enjoy making.  We explored lots of ideas during this phase, but the goal was to create a direction (or two) to steer the vision of the games enemies in, not so much specific characters. However, in a few cases, an idea just stuck with us from start to finish.

We came up with the concept of having some sort of security camera in the game. But when we really started thinking about it we thought “okay but what would a Condemned security camera look like?” Some sort of disfigured, deformed person bound and suspended from the ceiling, obviously. We wanted to bring elements of characters or mechanics that have worked in other games, but we wanted to do them in a completely unique and Condemned sort of way. This is a quick preproduction sketch illustrating that concept.

Concepting:
When it comes time to concept a character, we hold a meeting involving the Art Director, the concept artist, the lead character artist, the game designer and the level designer responsible for the level the character will appear in. If this is a character we discussed during preproduction, we bring any materials or ideas we had generated from that time. We then talk with the level designer and game designer to see what kind of gameplay they are looking for out of this character. What does he do? Where does he live? Then we all sit around and throw out ideas of what we can do visually that takes advantage of the gameplay, the strengths of our technology, and feels at home in that environment. The concept artist then leaves that meeting with a bunch of ideas to explore and a list of goals to accomplish with this character.

One of the ideas that came out of the meeting for this character was that he was actually blind and used sound to track you. The original idea was that they were harmless and when they detected you, they simply screamed as an alarm bringing in other bad guys. The game designers felt the character should also have an attack, so we incorporated that into the design (though I’m not telling you exactly what it is). Chris Alderson concepted this piece and did a fantastic job of taking a rough idea and bringing it to that scarier, weirder, more grotesque place we all wanted to go.

Model Building:
Once the concept piece has been approved by the art director and looked over for any technical risks, the task is then handed over to the Modeler (who in this case was the same artist who did the concept) The process from here is standard model building stuff. We create a highpoly mesh, and a low poly mesh and generate normal maps to transfer all the detail.

This high poly model was built in maya and then detailed in Mudbox. Once the normal maps are done the character gets put into the game with a flat color on it. The game engine shaders are more complex than what we see in maya, so all other texturing work is done directly in the game, on the console. Our tools allow us to paint in photoshop, save the file and it immediately updates the character in the game world. The finished result is what you see below. After this, it’s off to the animators where the character really gets brought to life…

(mad respect to incredible Character Artist Chris Alderson for creating the concept and Model you see above… — Scott )

The butterflies start to grow in my stomach around this time in every project cycle - and it’s a good thing. It always happens with every project - no matter how much planning, schedule updating, and iteration on features has been completed; time is rushing quickly by when you’re ‘pushing to Alpha’. If any Producer says they’re not feeling any butterflies, or strain for that matter, during this time, then they are either lying or don’t care about the game they are producing - so I’m glad to feel those old familiar flutters.

The halls tend to get rather quiet as everyone starts to get their ‘focus-face’ on. We’ve just recently completed our internal Engineering - Content Alpha. This means all primary and secondary game systems have been implemented and a primary amount of content has been created to allow the Level Designers to create their core gameplay experiences in the levels they own.

We’re now pushing forward with our Game Design Alpha. It’s at this phase that we’ve turned our attention more closely to the specific needs of the Level Designer. All the models, animations, engineered systems, audio files, world art prefabs and environments are now coming together to hopefully give us that gameplay experience that we all want so badly.

If the Level Designers find themselves with a blocking issue (i.e. an animation doesn’t play properly or an engineering bug prevents a feature from working properly), we all do whatever we have to so they aren’t blocked. There are occasional verbal blurts as a blocking bug may pop up or a final implementation of a sub-feature isn’t quite working out and a decision is needed quickly - but the focus remains strong and people continue to move forward as we all know our dates can’t, and won’t, change.

Keeping the balance in the tasks on everyone’s plate becomes very critical. For example, Michael Drummond, the Lead Level Designer on both Condemned: Criminal Origins and Condemned 2: Bloodshot, had a last moment request for two thrown weapons to help further flesh out some gameplay on a garbage scowl: a skull with a skull pile and some metal trash balls for any AI type.

Of course, once the skull is created, there is a push to have it as a player-side weapon. Even though, as a Producer, I want everyone’s final weapon requests to have been done by our Engineering-Content Alpha, there is always going to be needs for assets and iterations for ongoing gameplay creation and tuning. It really becomes a balance between ‘art’ and ‘business’The ‘Art’ is finding that compelling, beautiful, strong gameplay experience that is fine-tuned and enjoyed by all and the ‘Business’ is keeping it on track and within budget - and many times these two goals collide. So this means trying to leave some schedule room for iteration and evolving the gameplay experiences - even though usually the schedule is tight already at this phase.

As we move into Alpha, and then through Alpha into our final Beta, we’re going to give you some ‘inside views’ as to what each team is working on here at Monolith Productions and how we strive to bring it all together into one product. We hope to give you some insight as to some of the common issues that creep up and how we deal with them.

Here’s a breakdown as to the various disciplines that work on the Condemned 2 team:

Character Art

• All game character and enemy models plus numerous weapons and the evidence movies are created by our Character Artists.

World Art

• All environmental shell work and nearly all the prefabs (i.e. individual models of items such as desks, lamps, posters - nearly any objects that are found in a level) are created by World Artists.

• We’ve also outsourced some of the prefabs we need for this project.

Level Design

• All level layouts, gameplay implementation, combat encounters, performance and optimization. This is an immense task as nearly every component of every discipline comes together in a mission or level in a game.

Animation

• Every single animation you find in Condemned 2: Bloodshot has been created by the animation team.

Principal Technical Art Lead & Art Director

• The Principal Technical Art Lead maintains the workflow for all visual content creation. He knows the engine inside-and-out from a creative and technical standpoint and is essential in keeping production running smoothly.

• The Art Director is completely responsible for the vision of the game: what does the main protagonist look like, what do the enemies look like and potentially act, the weapons, the UI, the environments - they all fall under the domain of the Art Director.

Engineering

• All primary and secondary game systems are created by the team’s game engineers. They also help ‘evolve’ the game by iterations and suggested changes that come back from playtest sessions.

CTT

• We have a Core Technology Team at Monolith Productions. Our large internal Engineering team updates and supports our engine and tools that we use to create our games.

Audio

• Nearly every piece of audio comes from our internal audio team.

• Most of the voice-acting is recorded by an outside contractor with direction from our Game Designer and Audio Lead.

Game Design

• The complete game design is created internally. Our Lead Game Designer pushes forward with design concepts that are fleshed out by the various teams and the game designer as they implement the various gameplay scenarios and features.

Multiplayer

• The Multiplayer team is a subset team of the C2 team. This team has engineering, level designers and production support. The level designers in Multiplayer have some different responsibilities than the Single Player level designers. There is a different gameplay focus on multiplayer levels and the MultiPlayer Level Designers also do the environmental art for their levels.

QA

• The QA team is always essential but their word becomes stronger, their decisions more final as we approach critical dates such as Alpha and Beta. Their core responsibilities are keeping the team up and running with stable builds and to continue finding bugs that will prevent our game from not only shipping but running properly as well.

Production

• The production crew includes myself, a Senior Producer, an Assistant Producer and any support staff I can get my hands on. We’re focused on removing any roadblocks that come up for the team and keeping them set up to succeed with realistic schedules and milestone dates.

Playtest

• At Monolith Productions, we’re blessed to have an internal playtest group and playtest lab setup. They’ve already done some extensive Mission One playtest sessions as well as some playtesting on our forensics systems.

Publisher

• No team is complete without the appropriate publisher support - in our case, we’ve got the long arm of SEGA around us, giving us the support we need. The publisher not only usually pays development costs but they also bring distribution, marketing, hard-core testing and all forms of external playtesting and PR support to making the game sell as best as possible.

There are quite a number of individuals who comprise the teams to ship a next-gen game across two platforms, Xbox 360 and PS3. My job is to keep the schedule real, keep expectations where they need to be, keep the people focused, maintain the publisher relationship (making the Milestone dates with quality drops helps immensely) and support the overall team as much as I can.

With our next posting, we’ll take a closer look at the position of the Art Director and go over some of the types of feedback that he provides and why. We’ll also touch on some of the multiplayer testing that has been currently going on and give you an ‘inside peak’ at what we’re doing to make sure multiplayer is a big part of the Condemned universe.