Sid Meier's Pirates

To this day, this is the game I am most proud of. I came in as lead in a time of development crisis. The project was being redesigned from the ground up and needed a visual design to reflect the new direction, but we also wanted to salvage all we could from what had been done to date. I had a very short time to re-vision the project, work up a style, re-organize the art staff and get the project back into production ASAP.

Talk about wearing a lot of hats! I was the art lead, the concept artist and the user-interface designer and implementer -and I still got home in time for dinner!

I didn't know it at the time, and I took some flack for it, but I was on the same design-philosophy track as the Team Fortress 2 guys were. I was trying to find ways to get over a classic illustration look in our pallette and rendering, while working with friendly, stylized forms. We did pretty well considering this was Firaxis' first real foray into real-time 3D, and we knocked it out in record time with a lean staff. I still feel that this game is a great example of what solid game design and hard-nosed determination can get you.

Here's a heavy dose of Pirates!