Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M) announced today that it has based its entire game production pipeline - from 3D animation and environment creation, to level design and testing - on Maya software. In a few short years, A2M has grown from a small startup to become a 180-employee strong developer and publisher of games based on licensed content, including Bugs Bunny: Lost In Time; Monsters, Inc.: Scream Team; Scooby Doo!: Mystery Mayhem; and The Grinch. In 2004, A2M released its latest original title, Scaler featuring a shape-shifting-kid-turned-lizard, who jumps, climbs and slides through adventures.
Putting Game Design and Programming Under One Roof
Moving like its latest action hero, A2M has spent the last few years nimbly scaling the walls in the way of game development success. Maya has been there every step of the way.
"We're putting our entire production pipeline, including game design, inside of Maya," states Martin Walker, A2M chief technology officer. "While A2M initially used Maya exclusively as its main tool for artists and animators, the software has shape-shifted within the company to become not just an artist's tool, but a mission-critical hub for multiple phases of game development. Game designers are using Maya to build levels, and game programmers are using Maya to do AI programming and path finding," Walker says.
A Scalable Solution
As with all game developers, A2M's greatest challenge is meeting the ever-increasing demands for high quality and innovative entertainment, while minimizing the time it takes to get work done. In a "time-is-money" world, there's no room for wasted effort. "Maya has made us much more efficient at producing good games and actually focusing more on the quality of the games rather than spending the time just doing the work," adds Walker.
Standardizing on Maya
A2M has tested many different 3D applications, but a primary consideration in A2M's company-wide standardization on Maya has been the application's high degree of flexibility. A2M has relied heavily on Maya's extensibility to solve the specific problems faced in production.
"The flexibility and extensibility of our development software has always been a key issue, and will continue to be so with the next generation of titles and consoles," states Walker. "Given its SDK, MEL scripting, and so-on, we can really customize Maya to our own needs."
A2M has customized tools with Maya Embedded Language (MEL) scripts and Maya plug-ins that positively impact its production pipeline. A key objective for the development team was for artists to work in parallel on the same game levels and assets. For example, A2M has harnessed the Maya referencing system to allow the work of different artists to be combined and re-combined without having to redo the labor-intensive tasks of binding, weighting and UV-mapping characters. More importantly, Walker notes, levels are now designed and assembled entirely inside of Maya, with the capability to view and play them in real-time on the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and other platforms for which A2M's games are developed.
A2M is thrilled with the outcome. "Everybody has the flexibility to change pretty much anything at any time," enthuses Walker. The Ultimate 3D Interface
A2M's adoption of Maya as a hub for game development is based on its strength as a 3D authoring tool. "Everything is using a common UI -- Maya," says Walker. "Everybody can exchange ideas around the common user interface; everybody can manipulate the same tool. It's not necessarily a specialized tool for one discipline within the organization."
"Maya is a big piece for us, because we are not in the business of writing a 3D manipulation UI," Walker explains. "Maya is very sophisticated in that regard, and Alias has a team that focuses on UI and usability, so we don't have to. It all comes down to a simple objective: "The work we should be concentrating on is making good games."
A2M can be seen on the Alias main stage (booth #230) at the Game Developers Conference discussing how they customized Maya for their production needs. |
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Artificial Mind and Movement Standardizes on Maya
