IP Stewardship & Narrative Continuity
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League - The Announce Trailer
This was the world's first look at Rocksteady's Next Big Thing after the Arkham series. Since a key USP for the project was the unique camaraderie among the four members of the Squad, we focused on that for the trailer – with a sprinkling of action to show what the game could feel like.
As one might expect, the script went through a LOT of iteration. At one point, Captain Boomerang drove an ice cream truck. There was a version that was synced up to "Party Hard" by Andrew W.K. And there were a lot more jokes. I was rewriting from the floor of the Goodbye Kansas mocap set in Stockholm until the last minute, and beyond. But everyone was proud of the finished product.
Marvel Super Hero Squad Online - VO for Iconic Characters
Early in the development of Super Hero Squad Online, we pitched the idea of voiced characters to Marvel. They raised the stakes: if we were going to have VO in our game, it should come from the heavy hitters who were voicing their TV show counterparts. But The Amazing Society wasn't exactly Naughty Dog – we couldn't afford unique voices for everyone.
My solution was to take the major characters of the show and get voices for over 100 heroes and villains out of those 13 actors – preserving unique voices for the stars that needed them, and using more general performances (with unique dialogue) for the others.
Complete VO Recording Script (Google Sheets)→
Never Alone - What Went Right, What Went Wrong
Collaborating with (and learning from) the Iñupiat and Tlingit peoples to tell the thousands-of-years-old story of Kunuuksaayuka through a puzzle platformer was certainly the most unique experience I've had in my career.
But the processes we created, the lessons we learned, the successes and speed bumps along the way – I carry them all forward. So it was a pleasure to write about it for Game Developer, and honestly document the project's development. It would have been a disservice to the dev team, storytellers, elders, and games industry at large to sugarcoat the bad, or inflate the good.
Postmortem (GameDeveloper.com) →Interview (Pixelkin) →