Dark Abyss, Character System Design
The game was cancelled. The systems shipped anyway, in a different game.
Dark Abyss was Snowblind's next game after the Champions series, and it was meant to go further on player identity. Players needed to build a character they recognized as theirs, which means customization that reaches past a color slider, and armor that comes apart into pieces that can be mixed. Doing that without a separate authoring pass per combination is a systems problem before it is an art problem.
As Lead Character Artist I designed the workflow, set the technical standards, designed the shaders, and approved the characters. What I had learned building armor at volume on Champions went directly into the system design.
Character creation and customization. Customizable hair, eyes, skin tone, tattoo style, tattoo placement, and tattoo color. I designed the shaders that switch tattoo designs and change their placement and color.
Modular armor. Every piece removable and replaceable: helmets, shoulder pads, chest plates, gloves, leggings, boots, capes, shields, and weapons.
Procedural ambient effects. I developed the technical method for showing wear and damage, dirt, frost, blood, and water on the player character, armor, shields, and weapons.
Severing. I helped design the sever system and designed the workflow changes that got better results out of it. I worked with John Van Deusen, the Lead Animator, on deformation, severing, and variation.
I also modeled and textured the female dryad player character, and retextured the ogre, the boarhog, the zombies, and several other creatures. I oversaw production of all characters in the game: player characters, enemies, and quest-giving NPCs.
The game was cancelled. Warner Bros. bought Snowblind and merged it with Monolith and Surreal, and development was interrupted partway through. Much of the character system work went forward into The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, which shipped in 2011.
I did a texture pass on this ogre, modeled by John Van Deusen. Normal maps were new tech at the time, so I learned how to make them on him.
None. This work predates the tools by more than a decade.
The game did not ship. The systems did, in a different game. Severing, procedural status effects on characters, and the customization approach all reappear in War in the North, which is the entry next to this one.
A cancelled project is not necessarily lost work, but only if the work was systems rather than assets. The dryad I modeled went nowhere. The customization architecture and the severing workflow shipped two years later under a different title.