Dare 2007- Part 2

I spent the first 5 weeks of Dare To Be Digital designing, creating and animating the characters in the game. I was then going to spend the final 4 weeks creating the game environment models and the last week cleaning up and tying up loose ends. However after 1 week the other artist had done nothing. His knowledge of 3D art and animation was minimal to say the least. He also wouldn’t ask for help and would not admit he didn’t know what he was doing. His major task was to model and texture a house. On the first day I ask him to design the house. He never did it and said he would model it without sketching and designing it first – this was his way of working. However, he did not have much modelling experience. When I asked him if it was going well – he always said yes and that he would have it ready in a few days. I gave him time to do this, even though we were behind schedule. Probably a bad move on my part but I didn’t want to boss him around. I just made the team know that we would have to scale the environment down, as he was taking too long on the house. This was how the first 5 weeks went on.
To cut the story short all the animation, art and promotional art in relation to the game was completed by myself. After 5 weeks I had enough, as a team we highlighted the problem to the organisers and they done nothing. As we only had 5 weeks left it was now my job to complete the art for the game on my own and leave the other artist to - pretty much do what he liked.

To put the problem in perspective the team that went on to win the competition and a BAFTA award had 3 artists. We had 1 – me. I don’t want to bad mouth the other artist but he had very little experience or knowledge and was a member of the team before I was – as mentioned in the previous post I joined the team only a week or so before the competition started. I joined Emergence Games in the understanding that, as the other artist had pitched the idea, he knew the game and had an idea of what he was doing. Turns out he showed the team a portfolio which had artwork that he never created. He joined the team on the backing of the folio and he hadn’t produced all the work in it. I had my work cut out. The organisers of the competition would do nothing as the artist has signed a contract for the 10 weeks and he was prepared to honour the contract.

In Part 3 I’ll talk about why the characters I created are hardly seen in the game.