There have been three DLC packs, a bunch of patches, a mod community and most of all, plenty of time for repeat visits to see how it feels now we know how all the pieces fit together. The picture's a little different now we're here in July. XCOM 2 was a big huge hit at release, and mostly very well-received - although, variously, there were complaints about performance, difficulty, time-wasting and the opacity of its complicated systems. By the end they were proud of the work but certainly keen to get a change of style on their next project!Īnd if you’re looking for something more notorious, in the very early days of Atomhawk a few of the team worked on ‘Ride to Hell: Retribution’.Five months and one day, in fact. The final piece took the art team over two months to complete. The file itself was gargantuan, sometimes causing the artist’s PC to crash as it struggled to handle such a massive document.
This meant that the art had to be ultra-detailed and interesting at every piece of the canvas. However, the challenge came down to scale the final piece needed to be printed at over 20m in height and run the entire width of the park. The piece itself was incredibly cool basically visualising the entire vista of the characters’ island. One that springs to mind was for a mural at a theme park called "Angry Birds World" in Abu Dhabi. But each project is ultimately different, so it’s all about finding the process that works for the best end result, and not being afraid to pivot as the project evolves.Īnd the most difficult piece? That’s a tough question! We’ve been lucky enough to work on some incredible projects over the years, but there are certainly some that land on our doorstep which provide unique technical challenges. In those cases we hop into the role of art director and create the visual look and rules. Maybe they have an awesome game prototype but need a visual look to wrap it in.
In some cases, clients come to us because they are looking for our guidance on the creative vision. Verbal communication is also super important, so having regular calls between the art team and client allows both sides to ask questions, throw around ideas and also convey enthusiasm (or concerns). More often than not that vision comes from our clients and typically comes in the form of a written brief backed up with visual reference. Having a clear brief and vision is typically the foundation of fun, constructive and creative projects. As we work on a wide variety of different projects for a variety of clients, there’s a good chance we may have contributed to some of your favourite games, with recently completed projects such as Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, Mortal Kombat 11 and FIFA 20 to name a few! With so much cool stuff going on across our two studios (UK/Canada) at all times, life at Atomhawk is never dull ?Ĭlick to expand.Great question! I’ll tackle this in two parts:įor any project, large or small, the preparation phase is key. When Atomhawk approached with the opportunity to focus exclusively on that area of development on a wide variety of games for some of the biggest developers/publishers in the industry, the hardcore gamer in me was left with just one question… “Where do I sign?!”.įor those of you who are unfamiliar with Atomhawk, we are an art and design studio that for the last 10 years, has had (and continues to have) the privilege of collaborating with many highly successful studios in the video game space. Over the course of those years I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with every department involved in the game making process, but seeing design ideas formulate and then come to life through art in the coolest of ways was always the biggest buzz for me. Hi PC Gamer! I’m Chris, Director of Atomhawk’s Canadian studio here in the beautiful city of Vancouver, Canada ???īefore joining Atomhawk in 2018, I spent the previous 10 years working in the trenches of game development as a Producer in studios such as Midway, Ninja Theory, and Capcom.