Blizzternship '12 and Reveal

I'm long overdue for a post, but not without good reason. I've been working furiously over the last few months on my game for my online class for SCAD. There's been plenty to post about but, ironically, the more stuff happens the less I have time to write about it. Time spent blogging is, regrettably, time not spent making art, and I am slowly weeding out of my life all the things that are not making art.

I won Blizzard's student art contest! My entry (the crypt from a few posts ago) must have impressed the right people, because me and the other two winners were invited to tour Blizzard's campus and subsequently offered art internships!!!

...holy cow. I was not expecting that. Truthfully, I had long since given up on getting any sort of AAA internship. Blizzard has always been my goal, but a long-term one. I was happy to pour over their artists' work and try to reverse-engineer their techniques. Now I actually get to meet them? Like, in person? Pinch me.

I start tomorrow, working with the environment art team of World of Warcraft. I get to paint rocks and trees for WoW (maybe), and I couldn't be happier!

Now that that news is out, I can move on to what I've been working on since then. I've been building an artgame in UDK I wrote back during my senior year of undergrad. It's called Reveal, and it's one of the most personal games I've ever made.  It's also the very first game where I directed a team on a concept that was 100% my own. I don't want to say too much about what inspired it or what it means, because I want people to react to it on its own merits and I'm still hoping to do some user testing. I'm waiting on the composer to finish the soundtrack, but I'll release a link as soon as I'm happy with the game.

Here are a few screenshots for now:

As a final note, I'd like to give a shout out to Jon Moore for finally graduating from MSU, and to Dan Sosnowski who will be taking his place as president of Spartasoft. I'd also like to congratulate VP Jordan Ajlouni on graduating, and he and the rest of the guys at Adventure Club Games for just generally being awesome and making games. I have a huge amount of respect for all of these guys. They and the rest of Spartasoft are made my time at MSU worthwhile.