Viva la Shantytown

Let me tell you about a little project called Splatterhouse and the ghetto where I made my home.

When I first got hired on to work at BottleRocket back in June 2007, we were only just starting to put together a prototype for Splatterhouse. If you're somehow unfamiliar with the IP, just do a quick search on Gametrailers or something and you'll figure out the gist of what it is.

Ready to continue? Cool. The prototype came together nicely and we were given the green light to begin development on the full game, which began later that fall. And almost immediately, I joined a team of three or so working on the first act of the fourth level... Shantytown.







Now, I DID work on other areas of the game (most of that work doesn't survive in its current form, sadly) but Shantytown became my personal responsibility. It was my albatross, in a way. The environment artists were spread pretty thin across the entire game, so each person was in charge of their own little thing. I got Shantytown.

Shantytown wasn't so much designed as it was assembled. There was never any concept art in the beginning, only style guides, and the level stub was a gray, linear corridor. After the initial month or two, the other people I was working with got moved off to other areas of the game, and it was up to me to take a handful of tiles and build a full-scale level with it. The dictates of the level design were constantly changing and evolving, so I had to be prepared to tear up completed sections and rebuild them on the fly. The whole level was probably rebuilt from scratch at least four or five times. That's how fucked the situation was.







Despite everything, I'm proud of what I was able to accomplish. In addition to assembling the level, I created about half of the smaller repeated shanties and a couple of the larger ones. I also made the majority of the incidental props and items that are continually reused, as well as nearly every unique (non-repeated) element or landmark in the level. But I don't deserve all of the credit. Several people contributed assets and textures (and from time to time, concept art) including Kip Carbone, Jason Touchman, Ed Magasino, Roberto Zavala, Dave Wilkins, and Jeff Merghart.

I lived in that bit of headspace for a year and a half. Now that I'm no longer on the project I'm a little sad to have lost that familiarity.

But only a little.

It's Been a Weird Week

Hello and welcome to the inaugural post of my own little slice of the blogosphere. If you're here, that most likely means you already know who I am, otherwise you probably wouldn't have found me. But if that's not the case, allow me to introduce myself: my name's Devin Larson, and I'm an artist. I work in video games, creating 3d artwork for environments. Or at least I did until a week ago.

I'm based out of San Diego, CA. The first thing you need to know about the development community in San Diego is that this whole recession thing pretty much killed off a lot of the diversity that used to exist here. Concrete Games shut down a while back, High Moon Studios lost about half its staff during the Activision/Vivendi merger last year (including my roommate, who is still looking for work), and a number of smaller studios had to close as well. I worked for BottleRocket Entertainment, which lost its one and only project last Friday when our publisher, Namco Bandai, pulled Splatterhouse from us. It seemed to come out of nowhere, although there were very clear issues on our end from a number of standpoints, none of which I think it politic to get into here. But suffice it to say, everyone knew something was going to happen, just not necessarily that the project was getting pulled at this late date.

So I'm out of a job at the moment. I've spent the last week gathering some assets from the project and taking screenshots, and I've followed up on a couple of job opportunities. This will be an ongoing process in the weeks ahead, which is one of the reasons I've finally caved and created this blog to post work on. However I think it should be said up front that I've never really embraced the "connected" lifestyle, so the likelihood is high that posting will be pretty infrequent. The plan is for this blog to be semi-professional in nature, so some of my day-to-day discoveries and personal obsessions will leak in as well. But all of that is forthcoming... I just wanted to get this introductory post out there.