Gears finally got released last week, this was a game I was commissioned to to the artwork on in Jan 2008 for Chris Hughes who jointly founded Flash Game License. The basic game play is just connecting a load of cogs together to get them all to work.
It was one of those projects which I never actually thought would see the light of day, the problem with long projects is you cant be subjective about the game and the artwork, initially I reskinned Chris’s temporary artwork which was all vector based so the cogs could be rotated. This looked okay but after 3 months I came back to it and decided it all looked really rubbish and wasn’t really something I wanted to show as my own work. So i suggested we render all the cogs rotating because that way you would get a nice 3d feel, I also suggested using a robot to power the initial cog just to add a bit of interest.This did require a bit of a recode to turn rotation into frame numbers, it was pretty tricky to render as we didn’t have the file size to render a full 360 degrees for each cog so i had to make them loop, which didn’t quite work but its hardly noticeable.
The overall look came out pretty well, it wasn’t entirely what I’d had in mind when we started but judging by the reviews the graphics is one thing which people generally seem to like.
Anyway go and have a play of gears, you can even deign your own levels for your friends to play.
Tags: 3d artwork, flash game, gears