.dan_peavey//therealdanpeavey

If for some reason you have been following my posts up to here, you’d know I am currently participating in the high-profile game art competition, Unearthly Challenge 2009. In addition to this, I am about a month into the preproduction phase of Requiem for my senior team thesis for my final year of Champlain College.

Starting off with UC2009, you can visit Team T*shiba and the BEAR! ATTACK‘s contest thread here over at Polycount. The team is my good friend Mike Fowler and I, and we are currently moving into wrapping up our white-boxing of our environment. With the inclusion of cgtalk.ru and leewiART thrown into the old rivalry between Gameartisans and Polycount, there is some stiff competition this year. With only 7 seats to aim for in the top spots, the only way I can currently foresee winning this competition is to learn faster than I ever have at a grueling work pace. That, or we can always drive 200-tonnes of dynamite into a building on fire. Either way, I don’t intend to stop until I feel this piece can win.

I’m happy to say that we have a strong idea for a focal point and a composition – we’re just going to have to see how it feels once we get the orange box down.

Then there is Project Requiem, for my senior team project. I am the only artist on the team working with creative director and engineer Auston Montville, as well as game designer and LD Joel Pelletier.  I couldn’t have joined up with a better team. I have worked with Auston last summer on Always Forever nearly side-by-side for three straight months without break, and Joel on a level design process with America’s Army over in Emeryville, CA with the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College. Working on a game with people I know well helps immensely, especially in these crucial early stages where we have to set the foundation for the second semester team expansion. Without going into much detail, I’ll leave this game’s description as follows:

Requiem is about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
You fly a spaceship.

Its a great tag-line and we’re keeping it.

As it stands now with Requiem, all of our mechanics are programmed and ready to go. We just need art and level-design to fill the space. Our design doc is practically complete, and I’m going into the texturing of our biggest most risk-heavy art asset in the game. With that said, we’re clearing all the major roadblocks as soon as possible, and it seems this approach is working so far. Though we could be sleeping more, its worth it. If all goes as planned we’ll make the IGF submission with a few hours to spare.

Poke around the journal, feel free to critique and comment anything you see or like.

Peace.
-pv