LFP

In 2005 LFP lost two of its founding members, one of them the art director. LFP had offered me a job in 2003, after they saw my work on the Travis Pastrana Pro-MX project. LFP would go on to eventually take over that project and ship it as MTX Mototrax. They made me their first offer around the same time Infinity Ward did but I choose IW for multiple reasons. Now, several years later, LFP was going through a number of changes and needed an art director to "help create new game IPs, rebuild their art team and help them successfully make the transition into next-gen game development".  I was offered this AD job and after much deliberation I accepted. It was difficult to leave IW because I loved the games we made, I respected the company and culture and have friends there. The LFP opportunity to create and direct new IP and the challenge to succeed seemed too fun and potentially rewarding to pass up. It offered me an opportunity to prove I could successfully lead and art direct a professional dev team. It was my chance so I jumped on it.

They hired me as "art manager" until I delivered results and earned the art director title. My primary objectives were to conceptualize and create new project IPs, put together presentations, pitch to publishers and build a next gen capible art team. My secondary objective was to oversee the final weeks of art completion on the first nearly completed world series of poker project and ensure five sku's shipped on time. I had zero involvement or responsibility in the art style or the lack of quality of artwork on the first title. It was mostly done before I arrived. World series of Poker shipped all five sku's and we went onto rebuilding LFP. Unfortunately several artists did not make the cut and we had to let them go. The art team that remained after the cut was Axel Ortiz, Joanne Lee, Matt Silverstein, Allan Hayburn, Tracy Iwata and Milton Mariscal. I then went on a wide search for appropriate top talent. Over a period of a couple months I tested and hired five awesome artists and animators: David Donze, Adam Lawthers, Matt Genovese, Damien Brown and Rob Blanchard.

I went on to create multiple pitch presentations with the new high potential art team. We also made art demos/videos for five game concepts that we quickly created and shopped to publishers: a Snowboarding/snowskating game, an Off Road racing game (dirt and watercraft), a toon style Cops and Robbers game, a FPS game and a Bike racing game. Publishers liked the snowboarding concept but no publisher wanted to compete with SSX3 at the time.

Crave was interested in the Bike racing game. After they were rejected project approval by SONY "PEG" (product evaluation group) they flew me up north to SONY San Mateo to pitch the game. I received SONY's project approval on the spot after my presentation. SONY was excited about the project concept and gave us the green light. On the drive back to the airport, Mark Burke, one of the owners of Crave told me, "I'm excited about this game, you did a great job today. I think this is going to be our first fully priced game". (Crave usually markets lower budgeted, lower priced titles). I went back to the office and got busy with our concept artist, Axel, on further directing and defining the vision of the games levels and environments.  The unique racing concept, the trick system, animation style and main gameplay hooks were already well defined in my presentation. Below are a few pieces used to convey ideas along the way while developing the game concept.

  

Meanwhile Activision had not been happy with the art quality in the first WSOP (as I would have guessed). They were not going to renew a contract for a new next-gen 360 Poker game until the studio could show that it could produce good next gen level art. Well, I already had that under control. We had all been working to get the newly formed team up to speed to show what we could do. We presented Activision with an example set of next-gen art; mainly a Max Pescatori character fully animated with facial animation and a bit of environment art. It was the first batch of next-gen game art ever completed by most of the team members. The five artists I hired were all first time game developers and were real good at the work they did. Activision was pleased and gave LFP a contract for WSOP, Tournament of Champions for the new XBox 360. Around this time I earned the art director title.

Here are some early wip's we created while the team was working on first assets to get project approval:

See what IGN reviewers had to say about the shipped game here:

WSOP 360 IGN Review  

"...With its second release, World Series of Poker: Tournament of Champions, the company has completely reversed its standing from last time around and has released what may very well be the best poker game on the market".

Due to a specific uncontrollable circumstance, I decided to part ways with LFP a little over a year after I'd helped the studio rebuild and secure two projects. It's too bad because I really enjoyed working with my art team and the programming team there. I think we, the art team did great work together. As a director I really enjoyed seeing the work the team was developing, especially from Axel, David, Adam, Joanne, Matt and Rob because they were realizing my vision and direction with fine precision, yet still including their own style in their work which is very rewarding. I won't post any dirt here but If you want to know why, what or who the problem was causing me to leave, ask any of the art team members or a number of the programming team members, or maybe we can talk in person one day. But it doesn't really matter now. In all honesty I had hoped working there would be a long term deal but pretty early on, because the way the studio was "managed", I felt in my gut that it was probably a stepping stone along an unknown path.