Neil Marshall

Trucktown: Smash! Crash!

Truck Town: Smash! Crash! on iPhone and Android is an infinate downhill runner for kids where the object is to smash into as many things as possible while avoiding the obstacles that Craner is dropping in your path. Drag your finger left and right to steer your truck.

Two of us put this game together over a 4 month period from the concept stage to the final product. This was our first project using the new Unity UI and I took full advantage of the built in animation system to move and fade dialogs in and out.

Little Charmers: Sparkle Up!

Little Charmers: Sparkle Up is a free iPhone/Android game used as a promotional product to advertize the Little Charmers TV show. It hit #1 in the itunes iPhone game charts at the time of its release. In the game you can place the charmers and their pets in any of four settings from the show and take pictures of them.

This activity was created from scratch using the show assets in under four weeks by a team of four. After the inital release we added in a whack-a-mole like activity called Magical Mayhem to extend the life of the product.

Oh No! It's an Alien Invasion: The Ruins Below

Oh No! It's an Alien Invasion: The Ruins Below is an iPhone and Android game based off of the TV show "Oh No! It's an Alien Invasion." It's an overhead maze shooter made for children 8 - 12 years of age. The player drags their character around the screen and taps to shoot. You can place bombs or hold up to three weapons which can be swapped at any time.

My task on this project was to implement all of the art with the exception of the levels. All of the characters were poly reduced from the show assets and given unique rigs for the game. All of the UI was coded and animated in Unity using the NGUI UI framework.

Oh No! It's an Alien Invasion: Turret Alert

Oh No! It's an Alien Invasion: Turret Alert is an iPhone / Android / Amazon game based off of the TV show "Oh No! It's an Alien Invasion." It's an on-rails shooter made for children 8 - 12 years of age. The player can either click to shoot or perform a click & drag to select multiple enemies for a combo bonus. After fighting Brainlings and Brainmando's in and around the mall you fight Briiian in his flying pod to win the game.

Working on this over the course of six months I wrote code that runs the user interface and ported the TV show assets into the playable characters/enemies that you can see in game.

Oh No! It's an Alien Invasion: My Pet Brainling

Oh No! It's an Alien Invasion: My Pet Brainling is an iPhone and Android game based off of the TV show "Oh No! It's an Alien Invasion." In this game you dress up a Brainling and keep it happy by feeding and cleaning it. You can earn coins for more clothes by playing the minigames or purchasing them from the store.

Jumping into this project near the end of the development cycle my task was finishing up the minigames. The majority of my work went into Pinball, Skee ball, and tweaking the physics simulation to operate as you would expect it to.

Epic - The official game

Epic is an iPhone (and Android) game that was released in conjunction with the movie of the same name. The majority of my work can be seen in the "Farm" portion of the game and the background of the Battle screens. The buildings were modelled in 3DS Max, rendered out, and then painted over by 2D artists in photoshop before being texture atlased and put into the game. I was responsible for creating the scripts that setup the renders, imported the render passes into Photoshop, and then Exported directly to the texture atlas'.

I modelled, textured, rigged and animated all of the 3D leaves attached to the buildings and in the background programming the normal map shader on the water and on higher end devices the animated shadows that surround the play field.

UNO & Friends

UNO & Friends (Android) is a project that I worked on for over a year. As the main Technical Artist on the project I was assigned a number of tasks. A lot of which made it into the final game and some that didn't. What I'm most proud of are the cards. I got to model, rig, texture, and program the shaders for them. One of the requirements was that the game run on low end iphone devices. To do so a lot of optimizations were required and hopefully none of them are noticable in game.

The game was soft launched in 4 countries and then launched a month or so later world wide. When it did so it made it into Apple's Top 10 free app list in the US.

In November 2014 UNO won the Canadian Video Game award for the Best Social/Casual game of 2013.

Dungeon Hunter 3 Add-on

Dungeon Hunter 3 was created at Gameloft Montreal and once it was released the Toronto studio was tasked with creating add-on packages. Being a complete game, very little new tech was required but I was able to create a MaxScript to help the artists create lightmaps. Beyond that my duties consisted of keeping the artists machines up and running and figuring out rigging issues when they popped up.

Texas Hold'em Poker for Prizes

Poker for Prizes was created at Gameloft Toronto using the Unity game engine. I created the initial deck of cards and slowly over time they were replaced by multiple artists as the game evolved, but the layout of the file remains the same in the release.

The glow shader used on the main menu is also something I worked on. It consists of an alpha mask and an additive glow texture. Based off of parameters that could be tweaked in the Unity inspector, the glow will slide and/or rotate inside of the mask. This allowed us to create a couple different shine effects just by changing a couple of numbers.

Ice Age Village

Ice Age was created at another Gameloft studio, but while they were wrapping up they asked our studio for a little help and I was able to rig three of the characters; Two Gazelle's (Adult & Child) and a little bird.

Fashion Icon

Fashion Icon was one of the first projects for the Toronto Gameloft studio. At the time we only had nine people working at the studio, but that changed quickly. Being the Technical Artist on a new project I got to determine how we were going to handle the characters. Having come from Ganz where I had just written the code for clothing characters in TailTowns, I knew what direction we should go from the start. The characters were modeled in 3DS Max to allow the joints to bend, but they were designed as flat planes. This way we kept the 2D look with all the benefits that come with 3D. It took a little while to lock down how the types of clothes would interact, but a little planning went a long way.

As the studio grew, another Technical Artist was hired and I switched off of this project onto another one for a while. When I eventually came back, the team was focused on reducing the size of the game so that it could be downloaded to the iPhone over 3G. I noticed that the backgrounds were repeating patterns of building facades, and with the exception of the store windows on the ground floors, they could be tiled. The tool I created was a MaxScript that took a parallelogram spline and used it as a cookie cutter that could divide up any mesh. That way we could use a texture atlas to compress the textures and at the same time create isometric tile pieces.

E3: Fashion Icon, the best game of the show hands down - Destructoid

Asphault 6

Asphault 6 was another Gameloft game where the Toronto studio's artists were contributing to a game being made in another studio. If our 3D modellers ran into troubles in 3DS Max, I helped them solve the issues.

Virtual Canada

Expo 2005 - Virtual Canada from Neil Marshall on Vimeo.

This MMO was created by Immersion Studios for the Canadian Government's pavilion at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. It was both a console in the pavilion and a downloadable game using a highly modified Torque engine. Originally available from www.expo2005canada.gc.ca people could download it and walk around any one of 23 cities in Canada to experience a little of the architecture and the inside of some specific sites, such as the Ontario Science Centre.

I was originally hired on contract to create generic houses and buildings to fill in the cities. With three months left in the project I was brought on site and eventually found my niche creating the ambient animations in the world.

• The spinning icons
• Importing and cleaning up the mo-cap data in the science center pavilion
• Getting the street car to move down the streets of Toronto
• Having the snow angels fly in formation
• Creating the mist on Niagara falls
• Animating all of the camera flythroughs that displayed on the triple monitor setups in the pavilion
• Level design for the city of the Niagara Falls
• Modelling and texturing high rises in Toronto
• Modelling and texturing houses in Niagara Falls

• Rodney Hoinkes video of the game. Rodney was the CTO at Immersion.
• Adventarian
• 2 Plus International

Pokémon the Movie 2000 Adventure

In late 1999 AOL Time Warner asked the start-up that I was working for, Cyberworld, to create a game for their upcoming movie release using their specialized web browser. The browser could display web pages on one side and simple "Wolfenstein" like 3D worlds on the other. The 3D world could communicate using JavaScript with the web pages and we were able to create an original trivia based game.

This project was my first foray into Technical Directing. I was in charge of determining what was and wasn't possible to do with our game engine and also had to make time estimates as to how long everything would take to complete. I'm proud to say that my estimates were correct and the game launched on time along with the movie. Unfortunately due to a contract dispute, the game was pulled after only being available for four weeks.

Not much is left detailing the game, but there are still some traces of the Cyberworld web browser left on the web.

• Siggraph discussing Cyberworld
• Youtube video part 1/4
• Youtube video part 2/4
• Youtube video part 3/4
• Youtube video part 4/4

Modern Combat: Black Pegasus Port

I can't say much about this project, but I spent two months optimizing a port of it for an unannounced platform.

Modern Combat: Domination Port

Being a cancelled project, I can't say much about this port. I worked on it for 6-8 months.

TailTowns

Tailtowns was a project at Ganz that I contributed to for two years. The game was written using Unity C# and it was a MMO designed to appeal to women ages 13+. Six months after I left the company, the game was scrapped but the core idea behind it still lives on as a 2D facebook game. Unfortunately none of the code from the original incarnation of the game was kept.

I was responsible for a lot of features over two years, but the part I'm most proud of is the clothing system which you can see the results of in the trailer. With one other developer and the help of the art department we constructed a system that not only allowed all types of clothes to be downloaded and swapped on the fly, but it also allowed for different character weights and heights.

In order for the artists to preview their work, I also programmed a stand alone model viewer. You could open characters on a plane and then position them while triggering animations with any number of properties. It also helped when creating the rest of the animation system by simplifying the testing of complex animation blends.

Other features of the code base that I was responsible for were, creating and maintaining the core code base that the other programmers used, the code to sit on chairs, and emote animations such as bouncing a soccer ball on the players head.

Telus: #AllHeartCanada

For the 2015 Junior Hockey tournament taking place in Montreal and Toronto Telus contracted me as an artist to design an 8' tall 3D heart that would sit outside of the arena. It glowed in various ways depending on tweets, the score of the game, and based off of the loudness of the crowd. When Canada beat Russia to win the tournament it turned gold and sparkled.

For the most part the design parameters were pretty straight forward, it had to be asymmetrical with between 20 and 30 facets that were either triangles or quads. Although asymmetrical internally, the silhouette had to be mirror-able so that the manufacturers could build two copies and just attach them together.

The internal electronics were designed and built by Brent Marshall and it was manufactured by LairdFX

Monster High Dance Kiosk

I was contracted in 2012 to create this Monster High kiosk for a mall display to entertain kids. It was a quick turn around project of 30 days and uses a Panasonic camera that was similar to the Kinect but designed to handle a little more UV light (The mall had skylights). The models were created in 3DS Max and displayed in realtime using the Unity 3D engine. All of the user interaction was setup using simple gestures that could be achieved by anyone, such as waving your hand.

Left 4 Dead 2 Skin: Zoey

I still play Left 4 Dead a lot with the people at work. When the Steam Workshop was opened up, I looked into it and over the course of two evenings I created this simple alternative skin for the Zoey character. You can download and check out the skin for yourself on the steam website.