Author: Lucas

Star Wars Uncut – My Clips

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Watch the trailer first to understand what this is:

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Then watch the original of the clip I remade:

http://www.starwarsuncut.com/#/scene/428

And here is my version:

Star Wars Uncut – Scene 428 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.

This was so much fun to make. I did it in a few lunch hours, I didn’t stop to change something if it was crappy looking, and I worked as furiously fast as I could. It was probably 3-4 hours start to finish. I know it looks like crap, but that’s kind of the idea with Star Wars: Uncut – having fun and rediscovering your love of Star Wars.

Nick LaMartina here at Mythic did the audio, which I think makes the whole thing work.

UPDATE:

A second clip. This one was not as much fun as the first to make (and not as successful), but still good practice for embracing the spirit of prototypes. I’m hoping this “quick and dirty” spirit will spill over into my game dev. We often learn a lot more about what works and what doesn’t by doing. Once again, Nick went above and beyond with the audio.

Star Wars Uncut – Scene 206 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.

Designing The Warhammer Online UI

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After spending two years as the Lead Concept Artist on Warhammer Online, I was asked to take over the UI design. It was about 6 months before we planned to release the game, we had completed the bulk of the concept art for the game, and Michael Phillippi was ready to step up as the new Lead Concept Artist.

We needed to do a ground up redesign of the UI in 6 months (it turned out to be more than 8). The UI for an MMO like WAR is a huge piece of the game, almost like an OS for the game. Beyond the HUD (which is very complex in itself) it has maps, chat, mail, a social network, maybe 50 windows total. . . basically everything you would find on Xbox Live and more.

The reason I enjoyed this gig was because I had the opportunity to come up with original features. One that made it into the game was the Open Party system. Players in WAR can see a list of groups sorted by distance, and just join up with them in one click. This makes playing WAR’s open RvR gameplay much simpler because you can find people nearby who are playing the way you want to play, be it fighting other players or fighting monsters.

I think there is a lot more we could have done with this system, and there are arguments to be made that it actually reduces community stickyness in the long term, but I think it’s a huge improvement over the old LFG standard, and a step in the right direction. This kind of functionality is a big interest of mine going forward – how do we take players playing cooperatively and help them form longer-term connections? Are open guilds the next logical step?

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