My co-worker/roomate/old school friend, Chris Stewart, just came by and told me of a little easter egg in the Star Trek Online website. Just 404 (404 is a HTTP code for page not found, just type in some random garbage after www.startrekonline.com/) any page and you’ll find something nifty.

The easter egg is sad/funny because it’s true.

Following up on the Star Trek Online spirit, nerds and scientists rejoice! Warp travel is possible! An article on Discovery.com describes how. Talks about bending physics, a bit about string theory and how it is all possible without breaking currently known physics. Interesting read.

“It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn’t travel faster than light.”

So we finally announced it with our press release and website today. Star Trek Online is one of the secret projects we’ve been working on. We acquired the license after Perpetual bit the big one.

We had to keep this one a secret during press events showing off Champions Online we had on site, I mean literally we had to scrub the building of any trace of Star Trek. We took down posters, hid DVDs, stowed books and was told to keep our mouths shut. In fact almost any sound near the presentation room during the press events was met with a “talkin’ to”. Let’s just say our studios felt unnaturally and eerily quiet during those days. In my opinion it gave the press a feeling of an oppressive atmosphere when a game studio is THAT quiet.

Well the official STO site is up, and my work is on the front page, yay! Although I’m not on the STO team, I did do a little bit of work for it for a couple of weeks. I ended up with an environment which they completely terraformed later and made that communications relay tower in the first screenshot. It was mostly work for the STO demo.

It’s nice to be able to talk about this project after many many months. I mean there we’re quite a few leaks months before the official announcement, but it was mostly just speculation. I think alot of the leakage came from ex-Perpetual employees, but nothing hard that the public could use, well until the figured out that the background of the “count down timer” was the same concept art Perpetual had. D’oh!

For those who don’t know, there’s a countdown timer on our company website and our game’s website.  It’s been there for about a month and a half. It’s a rather interesting little gizmo, all it does is cryptically count down. No other info given.

It’s entertaining to watch the wild speculation that happens. Sets our forums ablaze and gets a few more eyes looking over in our direction that we didn’t previously have. Nice little PR stunt eh? Oooh the mystery, the intrigue, the suspense!

Well theres only 2 days and 10 hours left till we make an announcement, and I’m going to jump the gun and tell you that the announcement is none other than.. HRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRGHHH…

Here you go, enjoy it.

To be honest, I wasn’t all too impressed with the video. I know our game looks way better than the video portrays, I also know from personal play testing that our mobs don’t lag like that when they get knocked into the air.

My main problem with the video was the range of camera angles and the lack of dynamic movement while in combat. The camera needs to be much closer to the action in most of the shots, it would give it much more of a dramatic point of view. All the characters look tiny and ambiguous from the high angles and the scenes that actually did have lower angles showed a guy standing still blasting a power over and over. Bleh.

I wish we would get some people experienced with machinma or with a bit of cinematography experience to do these, but I guess it is a bit our fault for our artists being too busy to partake in much of the video creation process.

To make up for that, here is a pretty cool video with our Lead Designer on Champions Online, Randy  Mosiondz, over at E3 talking about Champions Online game play.  Go Randy!

Finally, this is the Champions Online Trailer video we released a few months ago. I did work in the jungle (the Volcano) and a bit in snow areas.

I do a bit of photography on the side as a hobby. My girlfriend has a very photogenic niece and I can’t help but to snap a few (Ok, a few dozen) shots of her whenever I have my camera around. This shot was from her cousin’s birthday party. She’s such an angel, tell me watch you think!

“Jaylen”
Nikon D200
SB-800 Flash
90MM Tamron Macro
Exposure 1/60
Apeture F/5.6
ISO 200

Here’s another I shot on the same day.

“Jaylen II”
Nikon D200
SB-800 Flash
90MM Tamron Macro
Exposure 1/60
Apeture F/3.0
ISO 250

The people at my company, Cryptic Studios, were crazy enough to give me my own profile on the news page! It was a month ago when it went up, but if ya missed it, here it is:

 Meet the team: Avery Wong

Unfortunately, most of us developers are not allowed official forum accounts to prevent leakage or misinterpretation. That also means I am not able to respond to any of the comments left by my apparent legion of temporary fans. I am however able to communicate here since this is my website. Bwa-hah-hah-hah.

As a side note, they actually thought “Ting” was my real name. I don’t actually have a middle name, I use Avery Ting Wong as a joke. For those of you who don’t get it, if you say it with a Chinese accent, it sounds like “Every Thing Wrong”. Har har har.

Incidentally, I’ve also started using Twitter via Twinkle on my 3G iPhone. Thanks to Sam Rucks (one of my fellow environment artist cohor– er, co-worker.) for getting me addicted to this thing. Feel free to add and follow me or even be brave enough to say “Hi!”. You can find me as “AveryTingWong”.

Also, push email, calendar and contacts on my iPhone is fricking awesome!

So, Cryptic Studios is currently in “quality week” for one of our games, Champions Online. This is a time where we take a hard look at our previously finished environments and do nothing but improve upon it. We can literally watch a semi-finished-but-not-quite-there zone, and over a course of a week or two, see it turn into a very polished and fun area.

While I dislike crunch times in general (I’m sure most people agree with me here, unless you’re a self masochist), I think this is an awesome system. So let me tell you how this sets itself apart from other similar systems.

First, this is a focused period of time where everyone drops what they are doing and just focuses on improving a zone. This is not a crunch time where everyone is panicing to get all the work done and turned in.

Second, everyone is a critic and everyone is humbled into a quasi-QA position. We all look at each others work and /cbug (cryptic bug) report everything we think is off, or wrong, or broken. We try to file as many as these as we can a day and we try to burn through and fix as many as possible a day.

Third, morale is generally high compared to a regular crunch peroid. This is a time where we sit back and reflect on ours and others work. This is a time where we can make things shine and be proud of a finished product and know that everyone else around you is working towards the same goal. This is definitely not a time to rush things and turn in a pile of crap, like we often see in generic crunch times.

End result, a really polished product that we can play through and say “Dude. That fricking owns.”

Hello, my name is Avery Wong and this is my story.

So thanks to the spammer from my last post, I’ve actually decided to do something with this site! A bit of a blessing in disguise, but whatever works. I have decided to write about two major focuses I have in my life, which encompasses an artist’s point of view in game development and my hobbies, basically, work and fun, sometimes the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

As some of you know, I work for Cryptic Studios. We are known for our game City of Heroes and our “expandalone” (Don’t ask me, I’m not the one that coined it), City of Villains. I worked directly with the latter and indirectly through free expansions on the former. As for what I did on the projects, I was an environment artist on it. If you are a fan of the game, you may recognize the skyscrapers in City of Villains, which I did. Or perhaps you have seen the Rikti mothership or Rikti shuttle. Also the Rikti Heavy Ass. Suits (Heavy Assault Suits) are my onetime foray into some minor character work. I was also responsible for a large portion of the Arachnos environments and also chunks of what went into the player bases, wither you loved them or not.

Now, I say I “was” an environment artist on those projects because COH/COV or COX as we like to call it, was recently sold to NCSoft. I can’t give out a figure, but the official term we’ve been bandying around is “a boatload of cash”. Since then I have moved onto one of our current projects, Champions, I am an environment artist on there as well. So now that I’ve thrown out a little background stay tuned imaginary fans! I’ll be trying to post here on a regular basis!