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*** Ion Storm's Finger Server
User name: lee
Plan modified: Thu Jun 11 11:51:28 1998
Lee Perry "eepers"
Lead Artist, Anachronox
lee@ionstorm.com * gabnlee@ix.netcom.com
June 11, 1998
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I'm not going to give my impressions of E3, largely because if you know enough
to locate this plan file, I'm sure you've had more than your share of wrap-ups.
I did get to see the Final Fantasy 8 demo in the back of the booth though,
and it was damn sharp. Later someone sent me the video I saw there, so I've
been staring at it a while now. Good luck to my buddies Joe Black, who's just
leaving Square to work at Westwood, and Nick and Kseniya Hoppe, who are out
of Square to work at Digital Domain on superno... oh, I'm not supposed to
know that, nevermind. Also Tin Chung, lucky bastard who worked with Moebius!
Anox was recieved very well at E3, especially since we showed it to a handful
of press people behind closed doors and left them to make their own decisions
of what they thought of the title so far. Anyone who gives me the "ION is
over-hyping Anox" line can smooch my lily white hiney, all showings were private
and any and all press recieved had nothing to do with us "hyping" it up. The title
is excellent so far, and it's merits speak for themselves. Thanks for all you
late workers for bangin that bad-boy out.
We're down to only about 50 creatures left to model! Yipee! Can't
wait to have a facet of the game actually "completed" so early, barring
revisions later of course. Anyway, catch you guys later, back to modeling!
May 14, 1998
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Hey guys and gals, if any of you are (or know anyone who is) looking for an
animation position let me know. Anox could use another after we've
started the process of expanding our animations considerably in the game.
We're using Lightwave by the way, but any package can be utilized if the
skills are there...
send any questions or info to me (lee@ionstorm.com) as soon as possible.
Thanks!
February 10, 1998
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Hey all you Quake2ers out there! I've wrapped up Rectangular Death (rec.bsp) and
it is ready to be painted with fresh layers of organic matter! It's an arena
best played with 3 to 6 players (6 is frantic enough, more is just loony!).
It can be downloaded at:
ftp://cdrom.com/pub/idgames2/quake2/levels/deathmatch/p-r/rec.zip
(might take an hour or two to update, check back if it's not there)
enjoy! And watch those grenades!
February 5,1998
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Happy birthday/year (?) for all you 23/35 year olds in the Year of the Tiger!!
Well, We are in fact in the super-cool (really, it's DAMN cold) penthouse now of
the Texas Commerce Bank Building (or chase or whatever the hell it is this week).
The Space is really rockin, but it needs some work on a few issues of great
importance such as glare on screens, temperature, and a few people seem to be
bugged by the noise level and the accoustics of the joint. Other than that it is
an absolute palace and I'm damned glad to be here!
I've worked my new deathmatch map (hehe... RECTANGULAR DEATH) to about a 97% complete
level. If any of you were really big fans of Circular death you should REALLY enjoy
this one as well. E-mail me and I'll send it to you for you to give me a bit of
feedback on. Also is a new version of Cir called Dual Circular Death specifically
intended for capture the flag, team play, and larger player number deathmatches.
A note about my design of the arena series I call "geometric death": I love many
many complex maps, and I applaud good ones to no end. The arena maps I've made are
specifically designed for when you've got 2-5 players in a game and are a bit tired
of maps where you run through HUGE areas and can't find anyone to combat enough to
feel like you're playing an action game. Also, I give this series a specifically
simple and usually symetrical geometry in an effort to limit the advantage people
tend to weild when they know a complex map like the back of their hand and wipe
newby ass everytime they play it. I like to emphasize the actual gameplay over the
act of memorizing a map. A lot of people might like a break from corridor hunting
and get down to a frantic-as-hell death shootout, and not everyone has 16 players
around to game at any one time. I hope these maps fill a bit of that void, and I
hope people above all enjoy a more "leveled" playing field now and then.
I love good map designs and I'm still very very new to it (with tons to learn) so
if you've got cool ideas lemme know and I might be able to incorporate it in an
arena in the future...
Circular Death can be found here:
ftp://cdrom.com/pub/idgames2/quake2/levels/deathmatch/a-c/cir.zip
(and rectangular death should be finalized by Friday...)
I also picked up Final Fantasy Tactics this weekend, coming from an ex-square artist
let me just say "HOLY SH*T" I love the art style of the characters in this game.
Square once again pulled off a beauty and for anyone who enjoyed Vandal Hearts on
the PSX (but might of thought it too easy) will surely enjoy the hell out of
FFTactics... buy it, play it, rent it! BUT IT'S STILL ABSOLUTELY NOTHING COMPARED
TO XENOGEARS!!! We have GOT to get this RPG state-side, best damn RPG engine yet
and a truely fantastic game, simply amazing...
Many of my old friends at Square are shoving off to the Honolulu office this week
to work on a certain project I turned down to come to the Anachronox team. The project
is unannounced but let's just say it's a very well known series from Square and it
comes with a number greater than 7 after it. I wish you gus well, say hey to Akata
for me!
On the Anachronox side. We've cranked out another 45 characters last month for
Anox and are already more or less through the 40 for this month's deadline. I'm
VERY pleased with how they're coming along and can't wait for the HUGE amount of
assets in this title to get to the public. Still no screenshots available so knock
off all that begging. We've got a real treat in the works here, be patient, you
don't want this title half-baked I assure you.
Later for now!
January 1, 1998
*************************************************
Well, I've got some funky ideas for a few deathmatch levels to kick out since I've
caught a serious case of the level making bug. My first map ever is named circular
death (cir.bsp) and is available at:
ftp://cdrom.com/pub/idgames2/quake2/levels/deathmatch/a-c/cir.zip
I'd love to hear any feedback from people, bearing in mind it's quite a different feel
than most maps have and you really need to play it with several people to really crank
into it. Enjoy!
Also, GO SEE TITANIC!!!
December 11, 1997
*************************************************
Anyone unfamiliar with an RPG from Square called Xenogears, it's a PSX RPG and I know from
seeing it running while I was working there that it's a work of art that makes FFVII look
pretty stagnant. Anyway they're not too hip on the importing Idea because it's got some
"questionable religous material" in it. Yeah well, I couldn't care less, it's not as
if games with slightly out of bounds material don't do well over here. I know if I had
to clear every game I play with a Southern Baptist preacher I'd have a damned boring
array of games about now.
Anyway, if you care about sending a message that we want more great imports, I implore
anyone who reads this (and anyone you might forward it to) to go and sign this psuedo
petition Square has set up in order to get feedback on this issue.
http://www.square.net/
Thanks, and believe me, if it gets over here you wont regret it.
December 5, 1997
*************************************************
Just to reiterate, we are looking for some badass texture and skin people for anachronox!
Check out the IonStorm web page under info/jobs and click the anachronox logo for details
and a group of textures in the game that give something of a cross section of what we're
looking for. Please send Jpegs or Gifs, or just mail them, all the info's on the page.
December 4, 1997
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Been too long since I've updated. The team is cranking along as usual, we're going
through a quick change session by getting several of our modelers and texture people
into each other's roles. We've got some really hip creatures in the pipe right now
I'm working on one of the first (god I hate this term) "Boss" characters so it
should be a good test of how the engine will handle some huge detail FFVII-ish
effects and big ass creatures.
WE NEED SKIN & TEXTURE PEOPLE!!! If you are a competent photoshop type, please feel
free to send me a few samples, or if you know anyone who might fit the role do them
a favor and let them know we're looking. My address is (shocker) lee@ionstorm.com.
3D is not a requirement for the texture positions, assuming you're solid enough to
create render-quality art without 3D. Give it a shot, what can you lose but a bit
of your time (and it might lead to something really cool!)
November 6, 1997
*************************************************
Movie Review: Gattaca
Freakin well done movie in my opinion. I've been waiting for so long for someone to
take a solid story, put it in a sci-fi environment, and let the sci-fi aspects
take a back seat to the story, well here it is. Well concieved, nicely written,
extremely nice cinemetography and design, and an excellent performance all around by
a well picked cast. I'm a crtical bastard when it comes to movies and I am hard
pressed to find a serious flaw with this film. The scenes were a classic almost 40's
style, which lent a nice change to the concept that in a few decades everything is
going to be made out of stainless steel, crome, and neon. Ethan Hawke, who I've been
quite down on since a few recent crap trendy grunge-movies, did an excellent job in
the lead and made me remember why I thought he did such an excellent job in swing kids
and dead poets society. Uma Thurman, who I've never found particularly atractive
(although I did get to sit next to her at an LA screening of "Crash" [dont see it!])
was absolutely stunning in the style of this movie, and generally turned my opinion
of her around 180 degrees.
Bottom Line: very solid movie, brings to mind several well written books (such as
Squirrel and I's favorite "Ender's Game" series and the about to be slaughtered
great storyline of Starship Troopers) that I'd like to see this team turn into films.
Well, our demo for Anox is off to Eidos, and was very solid for such an early alpha stage
in the games production. I hope to hear solid remarks from Eidos on it upon Jake's
return. As a gamer I'm looking forward to what this title will accomplish, it's going to
be great fun and hopefully a real trendsetter.
November 3, 1997
*************************************************
Did the wedding thing this weekend with Pmack from Rogue. My brother's buddy Steve
married my brother's sister (who's not my sister... don't ask, your head will explode)
so now his best friend is his brother in law... odd. They had a Karaoke reception, I
knocked off a killer solo rendition of Elvis's Suspicious Minds, my bro did a bang up
job with Minnie the Moocher, lot's of fun!
Went to Waco (wee, Davidians everywhere, get em off me!) for the wife's homecoming at
Baylor. Some fun to be had there. Saw an old friend who plays Warhammer 40K a bit,
and he had just picked up the series of lead miniatures called "the Sisters of Battle".
Check these out if you get a chance! Most of them a chicks in powered armor, some with
jet-packs, and they all have a very militant-nun kind of look about them that is hard to
describe, but trust me, they are very hip. They're some of the sharpest figures made for
the game in my opinion, and yet another example of Games Workshop's amazing work in
the field of non-computer gaming. It's too bad these guys have a bad reputation with
most distributers and shop-keepers, they are an amazing group of talented gamers...
Well, Anox is getting some VERY cool functions emplemented that I can't fully discuss
right now, but they're definitely some of the things that will make this engine
usable for our RPG needs. Catch you guys later!
October 22, 1997
*************************************************
A correspondence with Tom Hall, submitted for your dissapproval:
ME: (to our game addicts list) Is Ghost in the shell out yet?
TOM: The game? If you're wondering if you missed the film, man, you are BEhind
the times
ME: No, I meant the game. I was wondering cause a few web sites were posting
codes, but I was pretty sure it wasn't out yet... odd.
TOM: The Breakfast Cereal? (OK, this is where it all just went awry)
ME: No, that was O's in the shell, wait, or was it choco-ghost-in-the-shellula with
real mar-Shirow-mallows?
TOM: Whoops, I meant the Breakfast Serial-- the TV show shown at 7 a.m. Each show ends
with some hot robot chick falling through the air slow, saying something dumb about
"the Net".
ME: What? There's a Saturday morning version?
TOM: Wait, I meant the Breakfast Serial Bus, which takes early morning downtime to
upload.
ME: AARG! I'M SOOO CONFUSED!! There was no bus in Ghost in the shell was there? And
I think cyborgs eat Oil-O's for breakfast out of a pan, I might be wrong on that
one though.
TOM: Oh, No, I mean a Break-Faster reel, which allowed a runaway kite to be curtailed
Sometimes, the reel could be used with Oil-O's, which is how you can oilpanfish.
I think I've gone way off into the area of half-puns, so though I thought my ideas
were vast, I found they were half-vast.
ME: (After realizing the subject was now "Shows in the gel") I prefer the patented
Popeil Pocket Rocket Fisher Launcher to the reel of which you speak, it makes jerky
too and still makes Julian Fries in just nano-seconds!
TOM: How did you know I just ate jerky? You are a vision in the chamber, you are the
wizard in the keep, you are the... Ghost in the Shell! Stick a fork in the f**ker
it's duuuuuun. Ah Ron Popeil, Show me again how to spray paint my head
ME: Slim Jims are just wrong, though they contain lactic acid, something your body
needs anyway...
TOM: Ever try "Fat Jims"? They're really wrong. Then the "Way the hell obese jims"
go too far.
At this point I must break off, Tom revealed the meaning og the universe to me and I
can't just go around spouting that off can I? I'm so confused now...
October 8, 1997
*************************************************
Weekly game update: The Anachronox D&D game has moved to the apartment of Indigo and
Deadhorse (thanks muchly guys). Much fun was had Monday night by most of the party
(those who could actually attack without dropping their weapons). I'll be running the
adventure as soon as we finish off the local ruffians, got fun stuff planned!
Anachronox is moving along briskly, workin hard to get everything together by the end
of the month to show the big wigs at Eidos. Code is beginning to be merged and we're
finally going to start seeing the fruits of all these animations. I'm really really
excited with all the possibilities of our title based on the flexibility of our game.
I've hardly been able to sleep the past few nights because new ways of implementing
cool shit just keeps flooding my brain! Man, this is going to be soooo cool!
October 1, 1997
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D-Day... dum dum duuuuum!
Welp, several people on the team are out of whack with various illnesses (illni?) which
makes it a bit more difficult on the Eidos deadline, I can hardly bitch though when I
was out last Monday as well and having had several days in the past few weeks where I got
out of bed, felt like taking the plunger to my nose so I might actually be able to breath
through this Sinus nightmare of Dallas. Nevertheless there's still quite a few things
to do, including one of the main characters who is exponentially difficult to animate due
to a large amount of hair all over his body, so I'm going to let this go and get the hell
back to animating.
On a side note the Champions game went well last night even if running later than usual.
My little martial artist had quite a fight on his hand taking down an opposing brick with
relatively minor injuries in the melee. The highlight of my evening was my little asian
kid walking up to the game equivalent of the Hulk with a large sledgehammer and knocking
the weapon (which I'm not even strong enough to lift) from his hands. Of course after
he retrieved the tool, the majority of my time was spent dodging my ass off so as not to
get thumped by it, but it still felt good to overpower a brick with a str 15 character.
(anyone who plays the heros system can surely empathize)
One of the construction workers for our upstairs office renovations chatted in the lobby
with a few of us about how well everything was going. Most of the walls are up and being
"textured" as we speak. I hope they vis the thing well I don't want to get any slowdown
when cruising to the watercooler. Apparently we might just be getting in the cool new
suite a bit earlier than previously thought. WooHoo!
September 29, 1997
*************************************************
In the last stretch of the mass deadline so this will be short and sweet:
Found a cool mag (The official US playstation magazine) with an oh-so catchy title, ahem
yeah... anyway, it comes with a cool PSX demo disc on it (which is a first for the PSX)
including a demo of Parappa the Rappa (which is SOOOOO hip it is not to be believed!) and
a demo of another rockin little puzzle game called Intelligence Cube (Which we had as a
japanese version back at Square but I never played it, bummer) which I highly reccomend
as well. Fighting Force looks pretty cool if you're into slug-fest titles as well.
Played D&D Sunday at Toms again and basically it amounted to us sitting around for some
6 hours counting gems (after the guys discovered my handy appraisal skill) and realising
for some reason we weren't 1st level anymore! It was altogether a waste of a playing
session, but I did get to roust an old man so it wasn't a total loss of that special brand
of Lee charcater humor.
Last Tuesday my Champions game ran late supposedly because my bro was "making maps for the
adventure". The joke came later when we realized quite quickly that all the enemies were
strickingly similar to the cast of FFVII and his idea of map research basically came down
to getting into FFVII and not wanting to stop to play the champs game.
Welp, I'm back on the job, later!
September 15, 1997
*************************************************
Well we're in the midst of animation hell about now. I can think of a few things I enjoy
a bit more than deadlines, like root canals, frontal lobotomies, getting to be cell-mates
with a man named bubba...
Had an amusing game of D&D this Sunday, we wound up with the entire party beaten like a
red headed step-child in the middle of a large lair (we're only first level for the most
part) and were actually given the choice of wether we wanted to just create new characters
or deal with the consiquences of being beaten unconcious and locked in what amounts to a
Rancor mosters pit. We chose to continue and woke up completely stripped of all our
goods, except tattered loin clothes (those generous kobolds, wee!). It was great fun
about the time we had to start binding wounds with the only cloth we had... I won't get
into that though.
It wrapped up with two loin-clothed guys escaping from the lair, hauling my naked gnomish
ass and our heavy duty fighter's as well on their back while the remaining kobolds shot
volleys of crossbow bolts at us from behind... luckily I make a nice shield and absorbed
a great deal of the bolts... I was pleased at a job done well, I'm considering strapping
some leather to my butt and changing my character class to "light shield" :-P
September 5, 1997
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Yeomans log: oh, wait that's not right... The artnachronox modelers have had a rockin
week. With a horde of character models we've managed (in a week and a half) to produce
easily 3 times the characters most games use in their entire title. Not to mention they
are some of the coolest models and designs I've ever had the pleasure of working with.
And hell, we're only about 15% or so through the design document... er bible.
Next week will begin the first massive animation effort as we begin to breath life into
the ungodly massive hordes of polys that lay before us. Wee hee! I think I can safely
say we've pulled off a level of productivity I've never seen at Square.
As a sidenote: I played FFVII until about 1:30 last night, and let me say DAMN! That's a
smokin game! Lookin forward to playing FFVII all weekend, well except D&D at Toms House
of Horror all day Sunday. Should be a hoot, especially after my Tuesday night Champions
game with my Bro, Pmack over at Rogue, and a cast of regular playing buds fell through
due to unforseeable circumstances. I'm Jonesin for RPGs BABY!
September 3, 1997
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Been a busy little monkey! Saw a page of my images from Square in this months GameFan
on page 112. Apparently I'm destined to be buried with that damn monkey/mechabo image.
I'm not sure where they got the story information though, they claimed Square was running
our Chocobo De Battle game at 80 million polys a second (Hey! A monkey flew out my ass!)
when the most we ever optimistically expected was 5 million a sec. Not to mention that
was on a 1.25 million dollar Onyx2 SGI with some 2 gigs of RAM, it would be ungodly hard
(not to mention cost prohibitive) to get performance like that in an arcade anytime soon.
On the Anachronox side, well, Tom & Jerry (if you'll forgive the pun) have picked a lead
artist for Anachronox and apparently it would be me. I hope to get a load of rockin high
res images of the type Square was using for Chocobo De Battle, but for now we've got a
Chicken McShitload of poly models to get done ASAP, so high res will be on hold for a bit.
Final Fantasy VII, early released should be available today if you kiss the right ass, so
all you pre-ordered junkies get on the phone and start pestering for an early copy NOW!
August 28, 1997
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Introduction: Lee Perry, I've been with IonStorm for around 2 months now. I'm fresh from
SQUARE USA in the LA R&D division, and prior to that I worked at Black Ops Entertainment in
Santa Monica. I guess it's about time I do my part to clog the ungodly number of plan file
sites, and since it's my B-day today, what better gift can there be but a shiny new file?
I'll be updating pretty regularly in the future, giving away lots of industry secrets...
oops... wait that's not right!
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