Breaking it down...
Here's a breakdown as to the various disciplines that work on the Condemned 2 team:
• Character Art
All game character and enemy models plus numerous weapons and the evidence movies are created by our Character Artists.
• World Art
All environmental shell work and nearly all the prefabs (i.e. individual models of items such as desks, lamps, posters – nearly any objects that are found in a level) are created by World Artists.
o We’ve also outsourced some of the prefabs we need for this project.
• Level Design
All level layouts, gameplay implementation, combat encounters, performance and optimization. This is an immense task as nearly every component of every discipline comes together in a mission or level in a game.
• Animation
Every single animation you find in Condemned 2: Bloodshot has been created by the animation team.
• Principal Technical Art Lead & Art Director
The Principal Technical Art Lead maintains the workflow for all visual content creation. He knows the engine inside-and-out from a creative and technical standpoint and is essential in keeping production running smoothly.
The Art Director is completely responsible for the vision of the game: what does the main protagonist look like, what do the enemies look like and potentially act, the weapons, the UI, the environments – they all fall under the domain of the Art Director.
• Engineering
All primary and secondary game systems are created by the team’s game engineers. They also help ‘evolve’ the game by iterations and suggested changes that come back from playtest sessions.
• CTT
We have a Core Technology Team at Monolith Productions. Our large internal Engineering team updates and supports our engine and tools that we use to create our games.
• Audio
Nearly every piece of audio comes from our internal audio team.
o Most of the voice-acting is recorded by an outside contractor with direction from our Game Designer and Audio Lead.
• Game Design
The complete game design is created internally. Our Lead Game Designer pushes forward with design concepts that are fleshed out by the various teams and the game designer as they implement the various gameplay scenarios and features.
• Multiplayer
The Multiplayer team is a subset team of the C2 team. This team has engineering, level designers and production support. The level designers in Multiplayer have some different responsibilities than the Single Player level designers. There is a different gameplay focus on multiplayer levels and the MultiPlayer Level Designers also do the environmental art for their levels.
• QA
The QA team is always essential but their word becomes stronger, their decisions more final as we approach critical dates such as Alpha and Beta. Their core responsibilities are keeping the team up and running with stable builds and to continue finding bugs that will prevent our game from not only shipping but running properly as well.
• Production
The production crew includes myself, a Senior Producer, an AP (spell out title name) and any support staff I can get my hands on. We’re focused on removing any roadblocks that come up for the team and keeping them set up to succeed with realistic schedules and milestone dates.
• Playtest
At Monolith Productions, we’re blessed to have an internal playtest group and playtest lab setup. They’ve already done some extensive Mission One playtest sessions as well as some playtesting on our forensics systems.
• Publisher
No team is complete without the appropriate publisher support – in our case, we’ve got the long arm of SEGA around us, giving us the support we need. The publisher not only usually pays development costs but they also bring distribution, marketing, hard-core testing and all forms of external playtesting and PR support to making the game sell as best as possible.
There are quite a number of individuals who comprise the teams to ship a next-gen game across two platforms, Xbox 360 and PS3. My job is to keep the schedule real, keep expectations where they need to be, keep the people focused, maintain the publisher relationship (making the Milestone dates with quality drops helps immensely) and support the overall team as much as I can.
With our next posting, we’ll take a closer look at the position of the Art Director and go over some of the types of feedback that he provides and why. We’ll also touch on some of the multiplayer testing that has been currently going on and give you an ‘inside peak’ at what we’re doing to make sure multiplayer is a big part of the Condemned universe
