PACIFICUS: A Practice in Art Direction

Bringing ideas into focus so that we can communicate a vision is something I've longed to become better at. I've had professional opportunities to do so, but have only limited successes.

When I worked for Amazon on the LIVING CLASSICS mobile game I was blessed with a team of peers that all respected each other. We just loved hanging out, joking and having a good time, and it showed in the work. It's rare that every discipline from developer to designer, from artist to tester gets along as well as we did. Well...everyone except the Lead Designer whose background was in TTRPG games and came to the table with a very elitist attitude. Eventually he was removed by being handed lesser and lesser roles.
Anyway...each time I have a chance to Art Direct I still try hard to get it right. Even with friendships involved it's never easy.

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ENTER PACIFICUS

Born from an original concept by my friend David, he pitched this idea to me. He'd been working on the 3D model for months, and by working, I mean he bought models and kludged things together to make a floating city on an aircraft carrier. He's a 3D modeler but he's also one to find the path of least resistance.
After we talked, I could see the story unfolding before me. It started spinning out like a series of webs that created a lot of options for gameplay. I mean, it is a game after all, and character arcs aside, challenges need to be not only character-building but skill-building.

So, I jumped on board to write a narrative. While that is only a part time task, I also wanted to concept out the lead character who was bouncing around in my mind. THIS IS ASS-BACKWARDS. I didn't even have a VISION BOARD yet and already I was drilling down into the character stuff...the fun stuff!

At least I had the wherewithal to figure out where the ART DIRECTION would live. Would we be super-cartoony and stylized with crazy proportions or super-realistic? I created the chart below to communicate that right off the bat. At least that was a step in the right direction.

Still, I wished I'd gone further and started to build out boards, but I didn't. I did a first pass character whose name was SAMARA. She also has a dog in this game named TIKO. He's a waterdog (which I didn't know there was such a thing--dogs that are good on boats). I never did get to draw him before I axed that idea.

The idea was that Samara, while trying to cross the ocean in an effort to raise money for her dying fiancé, gets caught in a megastorm that opens up a rift in time. She finds herself on the Pacificus, a black-market floating city constructed by a wealthy middle eastern tech bro named, Arkady Sulaman. But when she wakes up from being washed onto the floating docks of this fortress, she sees the aftermath of what looks like both a military operation...and a mass disappearance of the ship’s denizens. Something weird is afoot and a mystery before her unfolds.

But first, she needs food and water...and much-needed sleep.

Locking down those initial ideas was important. To keep the excitement to the game in my head would charge me to understand how to build out the art direction. By creating a character, it gave me focus that the game was about her and her experience. I wanted to make sure that I carried the emotional impact of her experiences in both creative endeavors.

Because this was setting up to be an action-adventure game I wanted to make sure that the character was both attractive and powerful. I wanted her to be practical for her sport and the unrelenting temperatures aboard the ship...and eye-catching in both color and charisma doesn't hurt either.

Some things will be kept while others will be thrown out. With only three people on the team, two of which are creatively contributing, it should be easy, right?

Not really. David while I love the guy has very different tastes. And you do run into that no matter how many people are on a team. It's something you have to navigate, as you are a collective. More people, more voices, more opinions, which means more listening. Having to take people's input into consideration is important and it's something I'm still trying to understand. How do you give people enough framework to hang their best ideas on?

I mean that's ultimately how I see it, but I'm not sure if that's as true either. I had one friend basically tell me, 

"It's not yours. It's never yours. It's a culmination of the group dynamic and you have to find the best ideas and make it seem like they came up with it."

It made me think of directing an audio director once. It wasn't much different than directing actors. Instead of using verbs for actors (Do it AS IF you want to PUNISH them) instead they wanted adjectives (I need it to FEEL SOMBER but with a RAY OF HOPE).

Maybe instead of "What should she look like?" I could have said, "What physical build would she need to achieve her objectives?" OR "What aspirational adjectives should describe the character?"

But still sometimes, you'll run into someone whose tastes will be largely misaligned. In such a way that their aesthetic leaves you dumbfounded and not sure where to go. Imagine someone saying, I can only talk to you if you use American Sign Language from now on. At best I can create letters, but the heavy lift of words and phrases suddenly get in the way of actually communicating ideas.

It kind of happened earlier this past year on the Astronomad game. A much higher stakes situation because a real job with real money was on the line.

And as the months wore on with the PACIFICUS project I started to see the fissures forming. Early on I suggested to David that the game was too big. If you want a AAA game it's going to be a beast to reign in...especially with volunteers.

"David, why don't we do a few smaller games. That way we can build team cohesion and get a better understanding of a real pipeline and how we work together," I said.

At some point, he thought that would be a good idea and took online classes to learn game engines and thus, built out templates and created small mini-games based on the finished work. He bought more models and was excited about the possibilities. I offered to help with some concepts and what-not, but as the weeks went on, I realized he didn't want my help. He wasn't trying to make a good game, he just wanted to make a game.

"To what end, David? What's the goal once the game is done. You've bought all these models that look like three or four different styles, you have no time to model and texture everything. You don't have a game designer on board, yet you have this made-up deadline of the end of April. Do you want to make money at this or what?"

What came to pass was, David has a lot of free time because he's been trying to get a job as an Outsource Manager...and it's been a slog. He's getting close to the go-no-go situation where he'll need to possibly get any job to keep the lights on.

Quality aside, he just wanted to complete something. I told him that what you do on a small game is what you'll continue to do on a larger game. Integrity is on the line and as a leader of a collective which was now 8 people, is going to be seen by everyone.

The idea of the collective was that we all bring our games to the table and share resources where needed. If someone needed some concept art, I could jump in and design something. But going back to my first belief: YOU'RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR LEADER …I didn't want to have our friendship tested with every creative interaction. If I wasn't going to work on his games and I only wanted to work on other people's games because we aligned more, then that could mess things up.

My friendships are more important than my creativeships.

So, I left the collective. And oddly enough a relief came over me. So much so, that I wondered if I was done with games overall. I haven't had a lot of luck getting work full/contract since June of 2023. With the layoffs the landscape looks bleak. I read recently that up to 20,000 people in games have been laid off since 2023. Add that to the funeral pyre and you have a lot of game people trying to figure things out...all competing for the few jobs still available out there.

That's why I'm hoping something more will come from Beyond the Process. We've already got some things in the works. I hope we're not too late to the party, and I'm optimistic that Lance and I have the right kismet to see it through. And truly that's half the battle of any collaboration, isn't it?

=s=