Jason Wilson posted:

MediEvil was originally conceived by Creative Director Chris Sorrel as "Dead Man Dan." The game was to be an homage to the old arcade game Ghosts and Goblins and a love letter to the gothic works of Tim Burton.

Early development - history

Younger readers familiar with today’s gaming technology might find it hard to imagine the time of MediEvil's development, when 3D graphical games barely existed, with no Mario in 3D, no Zelda in 3D and certainly hardly any first-person shooters as we know them today.

I had scratched the surface with 3D graphics on a game called Strike some years before, but that was a very crude attempt at 3D modelling. When the team started work on MediEvil everything was new to us, these really were pioneering days! I remember marvelling at our first animating 3D object that walked across a flat plane, or the time when we got our first textured landscape up and running. These breakthrough moments usually came at around 2:00am, after we had pulled many long nights. All of this was stuff developers wouldn't think twice about today.

Crayons and grids

I was the first person to join the project with Chris. I remember doodling various versions of Dan and even at this early stage I knew this game was going to be a whole lot of fun. Many of the initial concept drawings were done at a time when Photoshop was in its infancy and Maya did not even exist. Therefore, most of my concept art was drawn on paper using crayons. Level designs were created on large pieces of card in biro pen. I would use coloured pencils to draw an object or a section of landscape as a three-dimensional grid and actually colour in the textures on the drawing, so that an artist or coder knew where to apply the textures. This crude method was known as "per face mapping". It was game design by the seat of our pants, and it is a testament to all our ingenuity that the results turned out to be as good as they were.



My role

My job on MediEvil was to design the art and set the visual style. During the project I also became the lead designer owning to my experience in game design on previous titles. I pushed the game (with Chris' blessing) into more of a Zelda-like direction and added a lot of details to the story of the world and its characters, as well as writing the preliminary scripts and working on the VO recordings. It was great to be allowed so much input into the game and I believe the partnership I had with Chris made the game into the success it has become.