Patrick English

I started learning 3D modeling back in the mid/late 90’s. At the time I was still in highschool, but the software fascinated me and the drive to create ever more realistic 3D models compelled me to keep at it and learn more about computer graphics. After High School, I attended an accelerated Computer Animation course and produced a demo reel that got me hired at a feature animation studio in Toronto called CORE. After a couple years working in the film VFX industry, I opted to move to the gaming industry to find improved employment stability and more compelling projects to work on. That journey ultimately brought me to NLG, where I got to join the wonderful team to create some fun sci-fi environments for Federation Force.

As a product of the 80’s I was mostly familiar with Metroid’s original offerings on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I remembered it fondly as a pretty challenging platformer with creepy spacebugs all over the place, that I never did finish.

When it lands on my desk, most of the game design and level layout is already greyblocked by a game or level designer. This leaves me responsible for only the visual aspects of scene development.

Tutorial levels often feature very simple unobstructed paths for the player to navigate, and require striking visuals to impress users during their first foray into the game world. My favorite aspect about this level was sending the player through the airlock and into the void of space as they navigate their way across the surface of the ship’s hull. It was fun to design a vast outdoor experience with large sections of the ship looming over the player.

Most of our process was standardized, so with all levels I would be presented with a few concepts that established the mood and general surface qualities, along with a grey block level design layout. So most of my work would entail interpreting the concept artwork and finding creative ways to distill the overall vision into texture sets that can be used throughout the scene without looking overly repetitive. It was also important to have a texture array of “pipes, panels, vents and trims” that allowed me to mix and match these various visual elements in order to create unique content throughout the level to keep the player interested and provide a sense of discovery.

Smokestack: This level starts in a maze of exhaust tunnels, so for expediency sake, it was key to build out a modular set of tunnel segments that I could assemble into various configurations in order to build out the entire maze. Having all these components instanced throughout the scene allowed me to create iterative art updates without having to rebuild the entire maze time and again.

Deeper in Smokestack lived the generator. This structure was tons of fun to build as it was mostly a chaotic mess of sci-fi pipes and cables. We worked to ensure the space felt like an angry and dangerous area, with extreme hazards not suitable for organic life. Red emissive designs of alien origin ensured an otherworldly feel while still feeling like a familiar industrial setting.

Phantom: The landing pad and the toxic fan at the start of this level were really fun features, but in visual design, they were quite common with most of what we were doing on Talvania. What I liked most about this level was the contrast between the grungy outdoor rooftop area, with steel fencing and oversized pipes, versus the clean-paneled white interior you find as you re-enter the space. The white paneled interior was such a departure from all the industrial grunge we had in the levels I worked on previously, so it was a refreshing change.

The Core: Absolutely loved working on this level! In particular, the starting corridor, with diagonal slices of emissive alien graphics crisscrossing their way throughout the space and missing panels featuring exposed wiring and hardware. Such a great atmosphere of impending doom!

Building little “dioramas” of alien hardware into the walls for extra detail was a treat and added a good deal of depth to an otherwise relatively bland corridor.

Typically, as a game gets late into production, environment artwork housekeeping tasks and visual bug solving becomes the bulk of the work as the final push for quality and polish comes into play. Typically this would include seaming up gaps in geometry, cleaning up stretched texture and lightmap UV’s, trimming away extraneous triangles or set dressing various areas that may have been neglected during the standard production process.

Most of the visual design language was well established by Art Direction and the Concept Art team, so there wasn’t much guesswork required in this regard. This allows 3D environment artists to be creative in other ways more directly related to their specialized skill set. Texture efficiencies, clever 3D modeling methods and creative solutions to the constant challenge of making simple structures with limited polycount look complex and interesting. For me, this stuff is as satisfying as creating the base artwork itself, as the technical aspects provide a deeper challenge and overcoming the limitations of a platform becomes the real prize.

As previously stated, we were well supported by effective Art Direction and Concept Illustrations. In most key areas, we’d have a concept illustration to indicate the visual goals for a given space. The craft as a 3D artist is translating those highly detailed illustrations into low-polygon equivalents as closely as possible. Furthermore, spaces between these key areas aren’t always as explicitly depicted. So it becomes the 3D artists’ responsibility to carry the visual aesthetic established by the concept and spread it throughout the level. This will often include work on corridors, doors and passageways, wall features like exposed pipes and machinery etc. These are all areas where an environment artist can flex creatively and have agency in design.

I loved it. I’m not a huge fan of single player experiences, and in my opinion there are always too few co-op experiences in gaming.

Having these mechsuits roam various planets allowed us to toy with scale quite a bit. Your being was a humanoid operating a massive mech, within an even more massive world. One thing that I feel was extremely challenging to convey was a relative sense of scale. Typically in environment art, we try to leverage intrinsically familiar real-world features in order to establish a sense of scale for the user. Whether it’s a light-post, sidewalk curb, or other familiar structure, these give the audience a familiar basis to compare all the other visual elements and provide a relative sense of scale. In Federation Force, we were building primarily alien worlds with few real-world references which made it extremely difficult to convey relative scale. In the end, to me the mechs felt like human-sized mech-suits with tiny-sized people operating them.

Truly one of the overarching challenges to this production in terms of environment art, was conveying relative scale within the extremely restrictive texture and triangle budget that the Nintendo DS platform imposed. “Human sized” details just weren’t possible given the expense they would incur, and their omission left us a bit ambiguous about how big or small our playable characters actually are.

I did not.

I was gainfully employed, actively 3D modeling awesome sci-fi content for a famous Nintendo franchise. So the negative internet drama didn’t bother me in the least. I was stoked!

Pretty much every game I’ve worked on throughout my career had some kind of internet-borne drama come with it. When I’m working, I’m working for the art to be as best it can possibly be within the constraints of the platform. As long as the artwork looks awesome and it gets done on schedule, I’m happy and I don’t concern myself too much about the public impression.

As an Environment Artist, I didn’t have much insight into the development of the narrative structure of the game. When I heard you’d be fighting Samus at the end, I thought it would make for a cool twist.

I haven’t thought about it much since your team reached out to me for this interview. I was delighted to hear that the game still has a passionate fan following. After you reached out to me, I reviewed the game on YouTube and it was a nice stroll down memory lane. I certainly remember the content production fondly and NLG was truly one of my favorite studios to work for as they always had a wonderful team culture.