Marc Holmes
Golden Axe: Beast Rider was an action adventure game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 released by Sega of America in 2008. It was developed by our company Secret Level where I served in several roles over the course of the project including; Art Director, Lead Artist, and even Producer (for a brief time), with concept art, modeling and texturing thrown in for good measure.
Unfortunately Golden Axe suffered from several development issues which hindered the final product, but regardless, a great deal of high quality concept art was produced for the game. I am very proud of our concept team, and the work they put into the project. The original preproduction phase where I laid out the intended visual themes of the game was also very rewarding personally, and I greatly enjoyed collaborating with Production Designer Silvio Aebischer.
This required huge new departmental growth which kept me busy. As well, a new Producer and Lead Artist were then in place on the project and finding their own way forward as a team. They did the best with the constraints they had, however, I regret not being able to take a more active role for the duration of the project.
I would like to share some of the assets we developed during my role as Art Director for the project at that time. By mid 2007 my time on Golden Axe was only fleeting, as the studio was directed to work on Marvel’s Iron Man game simultaneously.
The early visual development had three goals:
- The Art Styleguide. An assemblage of ideas and concept art defining the core game assets. Core characters, beasts, and environments.
- The Vision Video. A short CGI video intended to show the core gameplay and the intended visual style and fidelity of the final product.
- The Engine test. The first view of the game assets using the new Riders game rendering engine. First playable would come later.
I painted the image below for the game pitch to Sega in early 2005. It was among the first images created for the project.
Preproduction took place between mid 2005 and mid 2006 and involved several artists beyond Silvio and myself. Marc Holmes, Matt Butler, John Hayes, George Rogers, and the guys at Massive Black, Blur Studio, and Gentle Giant Studios all contributed to the early look and feel of the game.
The original Golden Axe dates from the arcade version of 1989. Versions started in the arcade then were seen across all Sega hardware products thereafter – Master System, Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast. Versions were also produced for the C64, Amiga, Wonderswan, Tapwave Zodiac, and PC.
The similar/competitive products we were drawn to included the first God of War and Shadow of the Colossus.
Golden Axe: Beast Rider is a combat game about controlling and riding large powerful beasts across a vast landscape full of adventure. The game design represented a shift from original games of the series to focus on the mounts rather than pure dungeon crawl mechanics.
When we started the pitch, only George Rogers and I were able to work on it. Most everyone at Secret Level was preoccupied with wrapping the America’s Army project. I knew we would not be able to generate everything we needed ourselves given that the timeline was urgent, so I contracted Massive Black to help with the concepting. I worked closely with their artists to develop the look of the early beasts and characters, including Tyris and the Lodath. Below is a small selection of the work with Massive Black. Coro, Nox, and Wes Burt all contributed.
We eventually arrived at a set of concepts to take to both real-time game assets and the pre-rendered Vision Video.
This was a roughly 50 second CGI showcasing a brief gameplay encounter. Being well beyond the scope of our art department, I contracted Blur Studio to create the video. It was not the typical project for them to accept. We provided the above concepts and storyboards, and took their feedback as well. The tremendously talented artists at Blur were a real joy to work with and delivered a phenomenal final result. The video was very successful at providing a focus to work toward and exciting everybody involved with the project, both on the team and at Sega.
Below is the final Vision Video, which was completed in December 2005.
Toward the end of 2005, the Riders rendering engine was up and running and we quickly needed a good looking Engine test. Below are a series of screenshots from the partially interactive demo running on the Xbox 360. It featured a beast running along a path in a large sunlit valley at dawn.
I designed the scene/presentation and built the environment, did the skybox, materials editing, and lighting.
Chris Kniffen rigged and animated the beast. Eric Chyn modeled it, and I provided the textures and normal maps for it. We tried to get an animated mane for it, but ran out of time.
Soon afterward, I produced the image below specifically for a Forbes magazine article on gaming in December 2005. It includes a custom render of the Blur character model against the backdrop of the engine test world I created (with some digital painting). Unfortunately we only had about a week to turn it around.
In early 2006 I was able to hire Silvio Aebischer, formerly of Oddworld Inhabitants, as the project’s Production Designer, and he started to generate a massive amount of internal concept work. Below is some of Silvio’s amazing work. As mentioned, I very much enjoyed collaborating with Silvio, and appreciated his patience during the constant redesign of the later project.
Silvio and I even explored a more stylized look for the characters, with slightly exaggerated features. We were inspired by Lilo and Stitch’s style and other sources, but in the end it would have been riskier for the project. There was internal pushback from the team and marketing, as it looked too cartoony.
Tyris Flare proved to be a very difficult character to design. Every male team member (and executive, and marketing director…) had an opinion on what she should look like, projecting their own fantasy ideal onto the character. I think she was redesigned so many times we all got sick of her.
Beyond the early project’s Art Direction, I contributed artistically to numerous items in the preproduction phase of the game. Below is the initial texture pass, included normals, that I did for the in-game Tyris. Model built by Kern Nembhard. I used Photoshop, Maya, and ZBrush.
Below is the initial texture pass, included normals, that I did for the early in-game Lynth. Model by Eric Chyn.
I produced this poster image ahead of E3 2006 using several custom renders of the Blur models, Maya renders of the environment, and a fair amount of digital painting.
We created a souvenir art book toward the end of preproduction. It was meant for executives at Sega as a thank you for believing in our title. The theme was “a field guide” to the world of Golden Axe. George Rodgers and Silvio Aebischer did most of the work putting it together. It was even leather bound and debossed.
Gentle Giant sculpted full versions of some of the game’s creatures, and displayed them at their booth at GDC 2007. Pictured here is the Krommath.
We were offered an opportunity to appear on the cover of PLAY magazine in November 2007. The image below left was collaborated on by Silvio, myself and Massive Black (Wes Burt I believe), and was essentially a paintover of a Maya pose I did. Later we were offered the cover of the Girls of Gaming Vol 5 issue and contributed three more images to it. The right image was the GoG cover and was painted by Jim Murray. The centre image was another collaboration between myself and Massive Black (again Wes).
The final Golden Axe: Beast Rider box art. Silvio Aebischer and I worked with Sega on many, many versions to reach this one (nearly 100 I believe). We actually wanted something much more bold and graphic in nature, but the marketing group desired a more traditional look. I did most of the digital painting for the final image.
A small, limited run art book called The Art of Golden Axe: Beast Rider was made by the marketing group near the end of the project. Thankfully it was able to capture some of the tremendous concept work which was produced for the game by all of the artists. Thank you to Mike Schmitt for finding budget for that. I am really proud of the great concept team we had on Golden Axe, and all of the artists who worked tirelessly through the ups and down of the project.
©2008 Sega of America. All rights reserved.