Early in 2009 I created a new online identity – God at play – dedicated to spiritual games and interactive experiences. I created a prototype for an interactive worship tool in Unity, which acted as an interactive music video for my friend Paul Gratton’s band Finn Miles.  See the excerpt below for a brief description.

The general idea is that I could create a game-like experience that allows players to play the equivalent of visual instruments while a band plays live music. The setting I had in mind was during Christian worship, but really it could be used anywhere. In this video, I recorded myself playing through the interactive environment, which I created in Unity.

My friend Daniel Shipton of Impromptu Studio wanted to throw a party for regional entrepreneurs to celebrate what companies in Des Moines have been doing to make the city a cool place.  I wanted to design a poster to promote the event, which I eventually named MOVEMENT BASH.

I talked to Napkin Sketch partner Matt Shwery (pictured at right) about screenprinting the posters, and we went about a long and tedious process of getting the design printed onto to some high quality archival rag stock paper.  It was challenging, but very rewarding.

Dinowaurs was Intuition’s first full game.  It was part of Kongregate’s Premium Games Program.  Along with Greg and Ted, I designed the characters, which were based on Ted’s concept art.  Play Dinowaurs to get a better look at them.  We each took ownership of drawing a character, and I ended up taking the bronto.  After we had the dinos drawn, I digitized them in a way that they could be animated.  Then I created skeletons for each of them, skinned the bodies to the skeletons, and animated them.

Each dino suit had to go through the same process of digitizing, skinning to the skeleton, and of course lots of cleanup. I also developed a script that recorded the skeletal animation so we could attach items dynamically to the dinosaurs. This allowed us to use the same item for multiple dinosaurs and allowed players to really mix up how their dinos looked.

This is a Civil-War Era barn for the Civil War time period in Darkest of Days.  These are in-game screenshots, with the barn arranged as it would look in an environment, decorated with props and using in-engine post effects. Poly count is just under 10k, with small latches and details at the player’s eye level.  Many of these were eventually taken out to bring the count closer to 6k (if I remember right).

Every texture used for the barn was photographed by me after scouting trips to find texture reference.  The barn interior textures were taken from a very old and decaying barn on the outskirts of town.

The original texture resolution for everything is 2048.  One of our programmers was strict on using as few draw calls as possible, so I put all the barn’s textures onto one map.

Here are some captures of my texturing workflow in Photoshop.  The composite image consists of dynamically-linked PSDs and a couple adjustment layers.  When I want to edit a particular section, I just double-click on the layer and once I save my changes, it’s updated in the composite.  Each section is its own PSD, which consists of the photo source with adjustment layers that are masked off.  It’s all non-destructive, so changes can be made very easily without ruining color precision.  Adjustment layers are great for tweaking to get just the right values/colors.

These are radiosity renders to test lighting distribution, and for research.  I wanted to try adding a radiosity-only texture back on in a post process.  To do this, I would bake only the indirect illumination to a map, and then it would be added back on in a shader. Unfortunately, I was not able to take this further.

Photo reference, since this is based on an actual barn.  Our investors/producers were against concept art, so we did the next best thing we could think of:  use photo reference.  Thankfully, I was able to track down the owner via e-mail, who gave me more details on what the barn was like.

Early in 2009 I created a new online identity – God at play – dedicated to spiritual games and interactive experiences. I was commissioned by Lutheran Church of Hope to create an animation, and I used the opportunity to create a prototype for an interactive sermon tool I created in Unity and described on the God at play blog. See the excerpt below for a brief description.

The goal of the tool would be to present an environment that someone on the media team – a “player” if you will – can interact with.  The player would interact with the environment in a way that matched up with the speaker who is delivering the message.  One example would be if that speaker was telling a story.  The player would explore the environment and trigger events to match up with the timing and emphasis of the speaker’s story.  If the speaker was emphasizing a certain part of the story, the player could trigger events to help emphasize that part.  The final result would be an expression of the story experienced simultaneously through the mediums of virtual interactive experience (of which I consider computer games to be a subset) and oral tradition.

Here are a few logo designs I’ve done, either for companies I’ve co-founded or for friends/family.  The Sholdenburg & West logo is the exception; with typography from Wayde Stover, it was created while working on Apertures as part of the 2009 Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project. Wayde also did most of the typographical work for the Napkin Sketch logo.

Intuition teamed up with Pixeljam Games to make the visuals for the Flash game to Comedy Central’s Krod Mandoon TV show. Pixeljam envisioned a Monty Python-esque style, so I took some production photos and photocopied them on an old copier, then colored them in Photoshop, for an authentic look.

I also rigged and animated the characters in Flash. Greg created the interface visuals.

Our same group of friends who made The West Excursion, now officially formed as Napkin Sketch, decided once again to participate in the 2009 Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project.  We were given our character, prop, and line of dialogue. We drew the genre “Drama” from a hat, and then had 48 hours to make a short film.  The result was Apertures, which won Best Cinematography.

In preparation for the weekend, I created a short, simple intro animation involving our new identity, which I co-designed with Wayde Stover, another Napkin Sketch member.

Once we started working on the film, we brainstormed some animation sequences that I could produce for the film.  I spent most of the 48 hours working on those, but in the end they got scrapped since they didn’t really fit the rest of the film.  So with about 4 hours to go, I created the opening sequence.

I was commissioned to design a new website for the Immersion church that I was involved in. The church is targeted to 20s and 30s and tries to teach Christ’s message in a “culturally relevant way,” so I opted for a more creative design where the user navigates content areas spread throughout the 2d plane of a whimsical illustrated world.

Unfortunately, once the design was presented to leaders at the “mother church,” the idea was rejected, and the website sits unfinished (visit it here: http://beimmersed.tcpconsulting.com).  But I’m still glad I was able to design a more creative website and hope to get a chance in the future.

One thing I’m specifically proud of is that I was able to make the site pretty dynamic, considering it’s a Flash site.  It pulled in the BeImmersed Blog Feed, the Sermon Podcast Feed, and uses an integrated Content Management System called Flashblocks.

Flashblocks allows you to right click on the site and Login, then edit objects in the page.  It includes, among other things, a rich text editor that used fonts embedded in the Flash file (note Myriad Pro above) and a built-in image gallery module that automatically pulls in images from a directory on the server.