Staying the course...

I see that I cannot escape leadership and how the way things could be...

It's been a while since I posted and quite a bit has happened. Mainly I attended the Snelling Center conference at Champlain, which for all intensive purposes provided some interesting discussion. Yet I can't help but want to talk about our America's Army production group. Last week was the first real productive week, I found myself immediately engrossed in the conceptual phase. I was somewhat disheartened to see that some of the fellow designers in my group weren't quite as adamant about it as I was. I was happy to see some great impute from Mike and Trevor though, they had some great impute and by the end of the day I had thirteen pages worth of different map concepts. By the end of the week Tim had produced a map for us to consider, and we also looked at a map that I had conceptualized and was, by far, my favorite. My map was picked to continue on in our group, I was extremely happy about this, but also felt sort of bad for Tim, who now had to write the design document for it...

Within my group I'm merely a 3D Artists by title, one of three actually, by I found that I had a much different role this week. I found myself setting the course for this map, and it was a very different feeling. Seeing others in my group using my sketches and building "my map" just felt really cool! In all reality, it's not just my map, it's our map, but I can't help but feel ownership over it. While going through and creating a massive art asset list, which will be used later by Mike, Sean, and possibly Elkin to populate our world I kept getting interrupted by my group... which was great! Elkin (our programmer) had some serious questions about proportion and wanted to know what I thought, Mike was building our first house and wanted some impute in that area as well, and to my surprise Sean even asked for my impute on the terrain he was building for the map. All the while I was still working on lighting and such, I feel like such an intricate member of the group and it just makes me feel very good. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging but GAH it's awesome! It's neat to be able to not only conceptualize the map, but continue on in the design of it. In all reality, everyone could take their section and run with it... Hell the designers could have taken it away and developed their own concept while writing the design doc. Yet it has very much stayed mine... which makes me incredibly nervous for this phone conference we'll be having with the guys from AA tomorrow! I just really hope they like it, nearly as much as we do.

Keeping all of this in mind, I can't help but feel like this is where I want to be in the industry... I wasn't sure a position like this existed until I saw a video documentary about the new Warhammer online video game. The guy talking was the "Creative Producer" on the project. Basically it kind of sounded like what I've been doing with this assignment, sort of the idea man. Working with everyone to ensure that the vision is being followed and even though delegating and leading, is very much still a member of the team. I'm not quite sure how to explain it, but I not only want to be able to come up with an art direction but since working with Lauren I've really enjoyed having a hand in the design as well. This seems to be the best of both words I feel. Anyways, I'm very enthused, very excited, and very happy that my group has sort of placed me in this leadership role.

I've also been able to think a little more about Lauren's and my senior production class game and was able to make some pretty good renders of my glowy Dragon Fly, which I just love =) I'll try to figure out how to embed flash later and I'll upload a good video of them flying around.