BryanMcPhail.com

Professional software development, amateur BMW tinkering, old arcade game stuff

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Unreleased Game – Drift 2015

Drift was an internal prototype from around 2010 on Xbox 360 and PS3. It was a fun stunt based vehicle game and later led to the commercial development of Hot Wheels Worlds Best Driver. In 2014/15 though, I used this code-base as a test-bed for updating the Octane engine for DirectX 11 (all previous released titles on PC were DX9) and PS4/Xbox One. (PS4 used GNMX on top of GNM). The art team used it as a test-bed for creating PBR textures and materials using packages such as Substance Designer and Quixel Suite.

Of course, in the days of Unreal and Unity providing PBR there’s nothing particularly technically advanced here, but doing everything from first principles as it were is quite satisfying. I took some screenshots at the time which look quite nice. I also re-used some ‘last gen’ effects such as crepuscular rays and per pixel velocity blur, but with the more powerful hardware was able to ramp up the number of samples per pixel so they look so much nicer!

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Unreleased Game – Machine

This game was an internal project on Nintendo Wii circa 2009 that never went anywhere after the initial prototype.  I thought I would post some pics of it here in case anyone that worked on it would like to smile and remember it.  Or maybe grimace.  The hook of the game was driving and destruction and your vehicle would power up during the level from bike, to car, to truck to flying machine.  Even though the flying machine was the fastest it usually felt the slowest – because you weren’t connected to the road, and things weren’t moving past you at close distances.  Sonic All Star Racing Transformed done the exact same thing in 2012, and although the game was very popular, I felt the flying sections there were also very boring compared to the driving.

Looking at the screenshots now, there seems to be an amazing lack of contrast in the level lighting – maybe we all had our monitors set super dark and it seemed ok at the time!

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