At the beginning of 1999 the entire development staff were put into small groups and given the opportunity of putting together a game design pitch that could become a brand new IP for the studio. The pitch ideas would then be presented to management who would choose a few that would be allowed to be developed to a prototype stage. Of the few that became prototypes, one of more may become a new IP to go to full production.
I take my hat off to the management at Sony/Psygnosis for allowing every one of its development staff to participate in this creative process. I think a lot of value came from it.
Sadly for me and the small group that I had been involved with initially, Our idea didn’t make the next round.. Our idea was a bit of a creepy cartoon horror thing going by the terrible title of ‘Mouldy and Skelly’ (a disastrous attempt at a humourous play on words from the X-Files characters Mulder and Scully, with our two heroes being a lump of mould and a skeleton 😀 ) It was all kind of a bit Scooby Doo 😀
Of the dozens of original ideas a small few (I think it was 3) were chosen to go through to the prototype development phase, one of which was a 3rd Person action game idea that would go by the working title ‘Missionary’ which I then ended up joining.
Missionary would star a military trained female protagonist and the game would be open world in nature.
Here’s a few snips of key-framed animation that I created for the prototype pitch. Softimage3D was the 3D animation tool used and all animation is hand key-framed.
The first 2 clips are from a promo video that was created.
The seconds 2 snips were from in-game actions used in the prototype gameplay.