The Making of ModNation Racers
with United Front Games
June 29, 2010
SPEAKER SESSION
Tuesday - June 29, 7:30 PM
The Making of ModNation Racers
with James Grieve, Lucas Granito & Clint Hanson
Vancity Theatre
1181 Seymour Street (@ Davie)
ModNation™ Racers is a new approach to kart-racing games, based around user customization and improvements to existing kart racing game play. It is heavily influenced by games like Little Big Planet® — which incorporate the mantra of Play, Create, Share — as well as the beloved kart racing games of our past.
As opposed to developing pre-designed worlds, vehicles and characters, the team had to provide a deep level of control to the user and more importantly, the ability to share creations quickly and easily. This panel will present the story behind the game's development at United Front Games, the lessons learned in creating a user-generated content title, and the technology that was created in the process.
The first part of the talk will focus on the story of the studio, some the hurdles the team faced in creating MNR and the approaches they have taken to deal with them.
The second part of the talk will discuss some of tech developed, including:
- Making Accessible User-Generated Track Creation Tools
- Terrain & Cliff Tech
- Dynamic Procedural Sky & Clouds
- Lighting Models
- Customizable Characters & Karts (Texture Stamping, Ornaments, etc.)
All these systems exploit the GPU/SPU in the PlayStation®3 and allow for complex user-designed creations in MNR.
www.modnation.com
SPEAKERS BIOS
Clint Hanson
Technical Art Director
Clint is the Technical Art Director on the ModNation™ team at United Front Games. In this role, he was primarily responsible for all the shaders used to execute the visual look. A long-time member of the graphics community, he has worked in both film and video-games during his career at studios such as Sony Pictures Imageworks and EA Black Box.
James Grieve
Technical Director
James was Technical Director on the ModNation team at United Front Games. James has been working in the video games industry for the past 13 years, most of this time as a graphics programmer. He has worked at several studios including EA Black Box, Valve Software and Maxis.
Lucas Granito
Technical Artist
Lucas played a key role in the graphical conception and execution of ModNation™ Racers. Before joining United Front in 2007, he worked as a lighting and technical artist in film and video games for 8 years. A Montreal native, Lucas also moonlights as a DJ and electronic music producer.
www.unitedfrontgames.com
© 2009 · Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH · info@siggraph.ca
|
