Jeff Freeman

4 Comments

1. Bonedead
   Posted May 16, 2008 at 10:28 am | Permalink

   Can’t wait budday! Hope you’re having fun with this.

2. Ole Bald Angus
   Posted May 16, 2008 at 7:33 pm | Permalink

   I’m just saying something so that my silence won’t be interpreted as something negative.

   I don’t really have anything to say but Bonedead’s cutesy comment sitting there all by itself was just totally giving me the creeps.

   I think he’s trying to portray how excited he is but its coming off like he’s talking to somebody with two weeks to live or something heh.

   Well, I could say that I’ve been reading the Spacetime Website and its interesting and actually its very nice of you guys to go through all that work to teach us all that stuff about game design, the stuff I care about as a player is all contained in a bunch of super-vague outlines that could be anything (I’m not knocking that flowchart, the Flowchart Is Awesome heh).

   Then again I’m not really all that worried about that stuff, either, ’cause of the guys you are working with, Jump to Lightspeed is still the most advanced space combat thing I’ve ever seen and Brandon is a UT gameplay guy (I can’t see how you could possibly get more points with me than that).

   Although I’m not really keen on the anime stuff, its kinda robotech looking (and that’s good, I might say I hate anime but I’ve owned all three Robotech series ever since they first came out on VHS), and everytime you guys mention Descent I light up a little bit ’cause that’s my favorite spaceship fighting game of all times (even above JTLs, sorry, y’know, those dungeons they had where you flew through all the ambushes and blew up the reactor core and escaped with all your buddies on the LAN were just unbelieveably awesome, and I LOVE the Descent VTOL-ish Bumblebee of Death controls for a spaceship above All Other Things, man).

   So I guess I did have something to say.

   Mmm, nothing really unusual about that.

   But its pretty unusual for me to be this nice for this long.

   Yah, looks like the part where I picked on Bonedead in the beginning helped heh.

3. Jeff Freeman
   Posted May 17, 2008 at 12:52 am | Permalink

   I don’t think the art is so much anime, as just highly “stylized” (as my masters have programmed me to say). Anime is also stylized, heavily, but the difference is that ours is a different style.

   And that’s not anyone in particular hates anime s’much, but just ’cause our artists are better at doing art in our style than they are at mimicking anime (as my masters have programmed me to say).

   There might be a sense that Western Devs can never out-Japanize Eastern Devs, some of which are Japanese, so we shouldn’t even try. There might be a sense that anyone who feels that way ought to put their big-girl panties on and not give-up without even trying, like that.

   There might not.

   But anyway… I think our art style is unique - and because it is distinct, some people will hate it, others will love it, and we can only hope that the majority of people like it at just the appropriate level.

   I’m just so glad we aren’t going for “photo-realistic” graphics. The other alternatives are “stylized” and “bad”, and I’m not crazy about “bad”, either… so stylized is my personal preference, and if the style is one I especially enjoy (or just don’t hate), that’s a bonus.

   I find myself hoping the IP will take on a life of its own. I’d love to see it in comics, books, movies, television series, and all sorts of different games.

   Random thought:

   I think videogames could be where comic books were about 50 years ago. If they are, then like comics back then, being focused on profit over growing the popularity of the IP is going to seem pretty silly. The Iron Man movie made more money in one weekend than Iron Man comic books made in that same weekend… maybe more than it made all month,

   Random thought:

   But it could be argued that focusing on profit made the comic books that lasted these 50 years into the valuable IPs that they are, while forgiving market disinterest would have resulted in comic book IPs that the market was disinterested in…

   Random thought:

   But if they’d known then what we know now about licensing IPs for toys and movies, we’d have very different heroes.

4. James
   Posted May 18, 2008 at 9:31 pm | Permalink

   nice interview man. Loving the art work