During my time at Namco Bandai Romania I had the privilege to be part of a wonderful project that consisted in adapting a great licensed game from PC/Playstation to mobile (Java-Brew) platform. We were a very small team. Only a few artists on this project. Adrian Ichim was the artist in charge of the level design (tile art) and icon design, FX, UI and we worked together on porting, doing resize in the production pipeline. We were directed by Dan Oprea (Senior Art Director) and Daniel Horia (Junior Art Director). We had 2 game designers at some point which were very fun to work with: Alexandru Borcanescu (Lead Designer) and Daniel Ciocilteu. We had just two developers in our team at first: Cristian Boghina and Bogdan Bodistean.
The game was an arcade dogfight simulator. Here I will showcase some of the work done on Ace Combat Northern Wings. I learned a lot of things related to modeling, rigging, animating and rendering in 3DsMax. Cosmin Genete was also a big help on the 3D rendering side of this project although he was not in our team.
Water Boss 3D render model.
The workflow was pretty complicated but I liked it a lot. I modeled 3d meshes, made materials and textures, rigged, animated and rendered them. I took the renders and indexed them at 16-32 colors BMPs and cleaned them up pixel by pixel to be "pixel perfect".
Finally I created animations and static frames to use in the game with the help of a wonderful in-house sprite editor called Momonga (the mascot/logo was the little squirrel for which I created just the blinking animation - I take no credit in the character design :) ).
I`ll update this project with more sprites and animations soon. Until then check out this boss fight! Thanks for watching!
You can also read a wonderful review for this game by Harry Slater for pocketgamer HERE!
Just a sample: "This is a great example of a mobile shooter done well, full of action, explosions, and fun. [...] There's a great variety of planes to unlock, and the backdrops and scenery you'll fight over all look pretty impressive. Giant bosses and refueling ships punctuate the levels and keep things feeling fresh."
Cannon fire special FX.
