Lighting Artist Portfolio - The Walking Dead Definitive Edition
The production finishing up The Walking Dead - The Final Season was short but sweet. The game was a hit with the fans and we passed all the benchmarks of success that we were aiming for. However, this game wasn't the end of The Walking Dead for me. Skybound Games had more plans...
As we wrapped up the final episode of The Final Season, Producer Brodie asked if I would be interested in staying on to take on the remastering of the entire The Walking Dead series for Skybound. They wanted this new collection to have every TWD game with upgraded lighting, materials, and the "graphic black" post effect treatment that we used for The Final Season. Also, there was a lot of lingering bugs across the games that could be fixed.
Of course, I said yes!
So myself and the 13-14 remaining devs of the Still Not Bitten team were moved out of the old Telltale offices and into a brand new WeWork office in Marin (which was a surreal and ridiculous experience on its own). We had about 3-4 months to pull off the remaster, as well as, create a whole slew of bonus content. We used poorly received The Walking Dead Collection as our foundation to build off of for the definitive remaster.
The old collection was a poorly executed "remaster" that had been outsourced to a studio in Eastern Europe as a cash grab for Telltale Games (who were bleeding money back at the time). There wasn't enough budget to do the game right, especially with a bunch of devs who were unfamiliar with The Tool, so what ended up being released was a broken-ish ensemble of the TWD games. A lot of the art side was unfinished which completely ruined some of the mood and tone established in the original releases.
Using the version of The Tool that we used for TWD: The Final Season, I got to work re-lighting Seasons 1, 2, 3, and the Michonne mini season. Like The Final Season, all the games were now going to use dynamic lighting. My first task was re-lighting Season 3, which was the first game I ever did lighting for! It was really satisfying to go back and fix things I wasn't fully satisfied with. The game looks really good now! Furthermore, "fixing" the lighting for Season 1 and 2 was kind of stressful. Those two seasons are precious to the fan base so I was mindful as possible to bring the lighting closer back to how the originals were (given how off some of it was in the "collection").
Im still kind of shocked the game turned out looking/performing as good as it does given the short amount of time we had to make it! And the fans overwhelmingly love it - so that was a relief!
