Line of Fire PC (2004)
Line of Fire was a high production value, RTS title that I provided art direction and management for as Head or Art at Black Cactus games (2003 to 2004)
Black Cactus was an RTS specialist company and following the success of their first title, Warrior Kings, they signed Line of Fire with Take 2.
The key vision behind the game was to create a Pacific theatre WWII title that was to the graphical and cinematic quality of similarly themed console titles such as Medal of Honor and Call of Duty that were new IPs at the time of LoF's initial concept. The game was a very similarly specced product to "Company of Hero's" but was to be released 2 years earlier.
I was hired due to my console experience and the cinematic work I had done while at Computer Artworks (The Thing 1&2). Line of fire had some unique visual ideas not previously seen in an RTS, for example being able to move the camera in close to units, so close in fact that the camera could be viewed at a similar angle to a third person game. The game also featured detailed cut scenes and complicated story narrative, all of which were a big challenge for this type of title especially as it would use the real-time game engine rather than pre-rendered FMV like most RTS games of the time.
I was responsible for the overall art direction of the game, the story boarding and camera direction for the game cut scenes as well as the management of the art team and acting as the art representative for steering the studio.
Art style
Unlike "The Thing 2" which was the project I had just worked on before, Line of Fire was based on real locations, real units and real historical events. Because of this it made little sense to hire concept artists for the project and we relied heavily on history books, vehicle blueprints and early colour film footage for our reference.
The early colour footage also served as a great stylistic influence. The film used a subtractive color (cyan, magenta, yellow) process like Eastman Kodak's tripack color film which incorporated three separate layers of color sensitive emulsions into one strip of film. However this early film was unstable and tended to heavily tint the colours and well as suffer colour degradation and hue shifting over time, giving you that very obvious 1940's Kodachrome look that we today associate with that era.
I decided that this look was something we could use as an influence in our choice of colour palette as well as the colours found in posters of the period.
The artstyle was overall
fairly realistic due to the subject matter.
The art had an element of subtle stylization in that the character's feet, hands and weapons were oversized, this was due to the high RTS viewpoint, we needed the fine details of these features to be more visible at a distance. Vehicle animations and VFX were also exaggerated to make them visible for the same reasons.
We also stylised the unit movements so that the US troops moved in a very casual almost cowboy style as was true to the footage we had seen. In the heat the US soldiers were often sweating and lethargic with their uniforms undone or shirts removed. The Japanese were to be seen in contrast and so wore relatively smart uniforms and moved in a precise and focused manor.
Textures were hand painted as the main details of the characters, buildings and vehicles had to be embellished so they could be seen easily. A selection of Line of Fire vehicle models can be seen here
