Battalion Wars Wii (2006)

In 2005 I completed work on “Battalion Wars” for Nintendo on Game cube, following its success Nintendo commissioned a sequel to come out in 2007 on Wii.
Battalion wars is a blend of 3rd person action and RTS style strategy. The art style is cartooney with super deformed units and environments; it is colourful and bouncy but retains grounding in reality. Influences include Metal Slug, Advance Wars, WW1, WW2 and contemporary military equipment.

Source from IGN - "Drive tanks, command ships, pilot planes and direct your troops into the heart of the action in the return of the popular tactical action game. Tricked into believing that the Solar Empire is developing a devastating super-weapon, Commander Pierce and Colonel Windsor of the Anglo Isles launch a pre-emptive strike on the Coral Atolls. The world is once again at war. The game features a series of online multiplayer modes, including Assault (instant combat), Skirmish (tactical depth), and Co-Op (Work with friends.)"

The overall art theme of the game was the same as Battalion Wars, loosely based on real world locations, theatres of war and the armies of real military powers.
Additional stylistic influences (graphic novels, games, toys etc) using them as a foundation to build a new art style. There is a fun element to the designs which makes a lot of the vehicles almost toy like, chunky, bouncy, indestructibility.

Footage: This footage shows gameplay taking place in the "Corral Atolls" location which was one of the environment styles we revamped from BW1.

Improving the original

Battalion Wars was a good first attempt however I felt that it was by no means our best work and that view was also shared by the team. The style was inconsistent in many places, being more stylized and cartooney in one area and then realistic in another. I found that having a large team of artists meant that colour palette and tonal contrast varied throughout. Additionally the technology was starting to date and some serious upgrades were needed. All these issue are fairly normal when creating a game with a unique style. There is no reference point apart from concept art and everyone interprets 2D to 3D differently especially when numerous people have contributed to the artwork over a long period of time.

Battalion Wars Wii had also suffered from a "too many Chefs" senario in that I had taken over from a previous lead artist who had left and also the original concept art had been led by the Creative Director. Luckily the second game was a chance to wipe the slate clean with me directing the artwork.

This was our chance to get all these issues right. The team were experienced in the art style and knew how to interpret the concept art.
I was able to start from scratch, taking what was good in BW1 revising it for new console specs and then reinventing the rest of the art style from scratch.
I paid much closer attention to getting consistency in style, colour and tone while also pushing the use of more advanced technology to add better rendering and environmental effects..I also set about making a selection of benchmark assets and levels myself to set 3D examples for the team.

For BW2 I wanted a more "beautiful" look, every screen shot to have a pleasing colour palette and contrast ratio. I wanted to create rich, almost painted looking, environments as well as introducing a range of new technologies like light bloom, depth of field effects and a sophisticated water rendering system.

We also worked on software emulated normal and specular mapping which looked superb if not quite mathematically correct. Below is an example benchmark asset I created for a revised WF Heavy tank using bump and specular maps plus a 25% geometry detail increase.

The danger here was that by adding more realistic surface rendering we could have ended up losing the cartooney style of the title. Because of this we decided only to use bump and specular mapping on vehicles to make them look like solid military hardware and to stand out from he environment.

When we initially started work on BW-Wii, we had no clue as to the hardware capabilities as the project was signed in 2005 and even Nintendo didn't seem 100% sure on what the console would be. We initially presumed it would be a fully fledged next gen console and so I stared investigating tool sets such as the Crytek engine and Unreal3.

I investigated all the new tech that came with the then new DX9 technology but later when we found that the Wii was very similar to Gamecube this work was unfortunately sidelined. However my knowledge gained on this project led to me spearheading Kuju's next-gen push shortly after this project.