Reptoid

A Digital Character Study

In nature, creating a lizard is an act of minimalism. Two lizards, a moment of pleasure, a short gestation period, et voila: lizard. In Silicon Valley, the same act is a major production. Consider Crystal Dynamics, a game publisher in Palo Alto, where a team of fifteen--animators, programmers, graphic artists, designers, writers, and marketeers--has kept its collective nose to the digital grindstone for over a year to put a lizard on your television screen.

At the head of this reptilian endeavor is Lyle Hall, producer. Lyle has a buzz cut through the sides of his sandy brown hair, a stylish silver earring on the back of his left ear, and a pallid countenance that suggests the cool wash of cathode ray tubes. He's talking today about somebody green; in this case, a gecko--a small lizard with suction pads on his feet, capable of running up walls and across ceilings. Lyle's about to make him the star of his own video game, Gex.

Photo By Dave Casteel

"Gex comes from Hawaii, which is where you'd expect him to come from," says Lyle. "His mother moves him to California after his father dies in a horrible NASA accident. His uncle Izod died recently and left a whole buttload of money to the family, and now Gex lives his whole life in front of the TV." Gex gets sucked into the TV by his nemesis Rez, the Overlord of the Media Dimension, and is forced to battle his way out through junk TV genres: the sci-fi world, the kung fu world, toonland, a ruined jungle temple, a graveyard--and more. Gex is a lizard with an attitude, a lizard with panache, a lizard with (courtesy of marketing) a detailed press kit.

Gex started life as an inclination of Lyle's. "It wasn't the lizard I came up with first, it was the game I wanted to make. I wanted to retrofit a character into the abilities that I was looking for a character to have. I had a number of characters that would have worked, but what I think was appealing for the most reasons was a gecko. He has a tail, he's a lizard, he's not a cute, cuddly, woodland creature like most of the other creatures you see in character games."

Gex's lizardosity, his reptilian essence, is a challenge to the game team. He has a much wider range of actions than the standard videogame character: He can use his tail to bounce like a spring or to whirl and lash at enemies. He can use his tongue to eat bugs or to spit objects. And he can run anywhere--over floors, up walls, across ceilings. All this requires full and smooth animation to be convincing on the sophisticated 32-bit game platforms that make up Crystal Dynamics' market.

"Gex is one of the few characters in the game who is rendered and drawn in 3D," says Lyle. "We use Alias Power Animator on a Silicon Graphics Indy for the 3D work. All the other characters, because they're simpler, are traditionally animated in 2D."

To create Gex, modeling animator Steve Kongsle used Power Animator to fashion a wireframe Gex, complete with flexible joints. He wrapped the frame with a striped green lizardskin texture, and he now has a digital Gex he can pose in any position. To create an animated sequence necessary for an action such as waddling sideways up a wall, Steve creates several key frames--poses that define significant points in the action. He then lets the Indy do the tweening, the task of creating filler frames between the key frames to create smooth motion in playback. He touches up the animation frames in Photoshop to make sure they blend with the traditionally drawn backgrounds and 2D-animated characters Gex must live with.

Animation is, of course, only the first step. It takes programming to tie animated sequences to the game controller pad you use to make Gex cavort across the screen. Gregg Tavares, the lead programmer, says, "It turned out to be a bitch to program! Most characters, all they do is stand. Gex can cling to the walls in eight different directions. I think the code right now is at about 12,000 lines just for Gex. And more than a third of the code is just for him walking on the side of things." The programming team uses the Indy for debugging and compiling their C code. "We were using the Macintosh," says Greg, "but it was just way too slow."

Now that Gex struts his stuff on the screen, the game team is putting together the rest of the pieces. There's a voice supplied by comedian Dana Gould, and a storyline by comedy writer Rob Cohen. Lead artist Mura Ross and lead designer Justin Norr are creating more detail for Gex's world. And marketeer Scott Steinberg is adding to Gex's formidable press kit. Delivery should take place in video game stores this Thanksgiving weekend. Watch for a 3DO CD with a tendency to climb the walls and ceilings.