Rockstar Games presents Table Tennis
Rockstar Games | 2006
Putting the record straight
It’s always interesting when a game developer, for whatever reason, credits an individual for something they certainly were not responsible for and doesn’t credit them for something they were (draw your own conclusions here..).
I appear within the game’s credits as being responsible for ‘graphic design’, and while it could be argued that I was involved with ‘designing aspects of the final graphics’, I certainly wasn’t responsible for what most would consider the ‘Graphic Design’ of the game, ie, the User Interface graphics etc or the ‘look’.
So what was I responsible for in Rockstar’s Table Tennis for the Nintendo Wii?
The game was essentially a port of the original Xbox 360 version and as such required that the graphical overheads be reduced for the less potent Nintendo Wii. As part of this process character models were necessarily reduced in complexity and my task in this was to reduce the bone count across all characters, including the faces which had been set up for full facial animation/lip sync. I then re-skinned the poly reduced characters to the new lower bone-count skeletons and devised a test-bed within Maya to check that facial and lip sync animation still worked and looked good on the lower bone-count faces.
So my actual role on this title was ‘character rigger’ and I had nothing whatsoever to do with ‘Graphic Design’ in the generally accepted interpretation of the term with regards video game development.
So sorry to everyone out there that’s been pestering me to design their next game UI.. that’s not what I do 😀
