Year 7 2006 (Continued)

After NFL Street 3, I immediately got reassigned to the Tomb Raider Anniversary team. They had already been working on the game for a good 6-10 months, having started on it pretty soon after Tomb Raider Legend. Buzz Monkey was working with Crystal Dynamics to create the game, just as they had done with Legend. Crystal worked on the majority of the game design and characters, while we did most of the levels and all of the port work to other platforms, such as the... sigh.... PSP. I should also mention that we ported the game to the Wii and redid all of the characters ourselves to work with the Wii's much different graphics limitations. My buddy Jon Rush did a lot of that work.

As for me, I was 99% of the time porting the main PS2 levels to work with the PSP, much like I had done with Street 3. There's not a lot to say about it really. I pretty much ported about 50% of the game to the PSP. This isn't as easy as simply saving a file to another file format. I had to go through and decrease the polycounts of everything by a significant factor as well as create new, smaller textures to create the same effects as the larger game.

For the main game, I created myself 2 environments from scratch. A small underwater tunnel and a very large cave environment. I also created the art for a Challenge map that was eventually cut from the game. The cave and challenge map can be seen in my website portfolio for those interested.

It was during this time that I met my wife. We dated long-distance for over a year and eventually, I knew that my time at Buzz Monkey had to end. I started looking for a job closer to her and, one day, found one!

Year 8 2007

After about 8 months of working on Anniversary porting the game to the PSP, I sent in my two weeks notice and prepared to move to Washington, one state north of my location in Oregon. I had gotten a job at a small casual game startup. It was risky, but it got me to where I wanted to be... with my future wife!

NEXT: Casual games!?