Hi there, I’m Neil “nobby” Barnden, co-founder of Stainless Games, Head of the Art Stuff on the original Stainless Carmageddon titles, and international man of mystery (ret’d).
Along with Batwick and a small core team, we are in the very early stages of planning what Carmageddon: Reincarnation will be.
The team assigned to the project began as an initial core of just 3 full-timers – myself, fellow old-timer and Carma 2 veteran Dave ‘Trifle’ Hosier, and young whipper-snapper game designer Simone ‘Sim’ McDermott.
Because we wanted to carefully time the announcement that we’d got the IP rights safely back into the fold, the initial phase of work was carried out in top secret, without even the rest of Stainless being aware of it! We worked in an office with the windows blanked out, and moved about the place in a small pack, for safety.
If any one of us had been captured, we had the place wired up with enough explosives to take out half the town.
Ah no, wait – I’m getting my notes mixed up again there. Sorry!
The explosives would have only taken out our secret squirrel Carmageddon office. And half the building.
But I digress. Top secret shenanigans aside... The early project planning has involved kicking initial ideas around for fundamentals like, “what do we call it?”, “what’s the new logo going to look like?”, “am I sober enough this morning to run a meeting?” and, “am I still drunk enough this morning to have any decent ideas?” We also had to work out a rough idea of the size and scope of the game, staff requirements, and budget for development. Ugh.
Beyond that serious stuff, there’s also been other fun tasks, like coming up with goodies to give away to potential publishers and investors, and designing the new website.
And amongst all that stuff, occasionally discussing the features we want in the game.
In order to get a better idea for the sort of thing we might expect from the new game, we needed to start getting someone to visualise how it all might look.
So, I asked super-talented concept artist Doug Telford to begin by re-imagining some of the classic features of the original games, as if they’d been updated for the current generation of gaming platforms.
The first example of the work Doug has done for us is currently in use as the website background image. It’s a classic scene set in a Magnachem Processing Plant, depicting an updated Eagle firing a bunch of baddies through the air: The Plow, Twister, Annihilator and unfortunate unidentified exploding car.
The process of getting to this image was kicked off with a set of thumbnails, so we could decide on a perspective and general look for the scene:
- concepts01-large.jpg (191.25 KiB) Viewed 74 times
In the end, we decided that a viewpoint close to an in-game view of the action would be best.
From there, a few more sketches got us to the final view:
- concepts02-large.jpg (194.65 KiB) Viewed 74 times
What Doug did for us here combines the Carmageddon 2 feature of player triggered power-ups – the Opponent Repulsificator – with a scene inspired by Carmageddon content:
- concepts03-large.jpg (189.19 KiB) Viewed 74 times
So there you have it – a brief overview of some of the stuff we’ve been up to ‘til now, and a small insight into the concepting process. Of course, we’d like to hear what scenes, vehicles or characters you’d like to see visualised for Carmageddon: Reincarnation. So join us over in the forums and let us know. NOW.
Next time, I’ll be revealing another Brand New piece of concept art, showcasing an Opponent Character... and their Car! So keep ‘em peeled for that!