RKTBlog

There’s been a lot of news recently about gay bullying and suicide, so the employees of Electronic Arts put together a video for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project.  I’m proud to have participated in it, and share my stories as well.  I appear a few times throughout the second half of the video (in fact, that’s me in the preview screenshot)!  Check it out here:

Pixar also recently participated in the project, and here is their video as well.

For more information and videos from the It Gets Better project, visit http://www.itgetsbetter.org/

Another concept piece from Merchants of Brooklyn: This monstrous tangle of wires and monitors is the Jumbotron, which hangs above the fighting pit, waiting to come crashing down and let the fighters escape.

Here’s another piece of concept work for Merchants of Brooklyn.  It’s of the same building as my previous post, but from the opposite angle.  The fighting pit is on one end of the building, the casino on the other.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Things have been busy at Pixar, so whatever free time I have is usually spent drawing these days. I’ve got a few things in the backlog to post, however, so over the next few days, hopefully I can keep the entries coming.

Here’s an environment I designed while I was at Liquid for a game called Merchants of Brooklyn.

This concept piece was drawn at the very start of development.  It shows a pit fighting area of a futuristic casino.  At the beginning of 2008, the developer, Paleo Entertainment, was looking to create a demo to build up interest among publishers. A big trade show was happening in the near future, so we had only a month to crank out an entire level. The game was finally launched not too long ago.

The overall look of the game has changed a lot since I worked on it, but I was pleased at how the designs came out. They weren’t drawn in my typical style; part of my job on the project was to help establish a look for the game. It was a challenge, but one that I welcomed!

Here is some video of a game I helped out on last year while working at Liquid Development in Portland, OR. My friend, Jane, was the Character Art Manager on Damnation, and I came on mid-way through production as her assistant to help make fixes to textures, and even paint some historically-tinged digital paintings for cinematics.

Today, as I was checking my favorite video game blogs, I came across a pleasant surprise.  A trailer for a game I created some concept art for at Liquid has just been released.  It’s called Merchants of Brooklyn, and its being developed by Paleo Entertainment.  Liquid was involved in the early stages of its development, as Paleo was preparing a demo.  Since the game’s release date is still some ways off, I can’t share the conecpt art yet, but you get some glimpses of  the casino/pit fighting area, which I helped design, in the trailer below.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved video games, and in ever since growing into an adult, I’ve been trying to recapture the feeling I had when I first plugged my NES into the TV for the first time.  The video game industry has been a disappointment to me in recent years.  As gamers have grown older, most games have also lost their sense of fun and imagination.  Nintendo is one of the few companies that dares to buck that trend, so I always have high hopes for their games.

Animal Crossing on the Wii, which was unveiled today, was one of those which I had such high hopes for.  I enjoyed the game on the DS, although it never quite matched my expectations.  Despite its promises of creating a real-time interactive world based on community and communication, its world always felt a bit static to me.   Read more »