CG Illustrations: Perry Rhodan

After 14 months of heavy design and development, 3d-io has released the computer game "Perry Rhodan – The Adventure" (published by Braingame/Deep Silver). I am extremly proud of this adventure game, especially since nobody believed we would make it to the end. But finally – we did it! And even more: Perry Rhodan was for 4 weeks in the top 10 charts and collected countless awards and review scores beyond 80%. The majority of the press announced it as "one of the visually best 3D adventures ever made". My favourite slogan is still from gamebase.at: "Perry Rhodan is the ‘Unreal’ of adventures games!".
Needless to say, the design of the game and the work on it was both very creative and extremly painful: we spent almost a year on over 300 shots, 500 3D objects and 75 characters. Not to mention 30 minutes of full CG videos. Near the end of the production time we announced "RedAlert" stage, working 14 to 18 hours daily. In the last 30 days, in order to save each hour (12 artists spending each day an hour to cook leads to 84 wasted hours a week) I have brought mum and dad here, as irreplacable support, converting our company kitchen into a canteen. Without them, we would have never made it!

As with every other game production, there are millions of stories to tell about the time spent. Some are very funny, others rather horrible. About 300 hours before the Golden Master, the car of our lead artist Sven Sauer exploded in the middle of the street due to overheating. Or in the last 24 hours we needed to rerender a few frames of a video, and due to some obscure bug in 3ds MAX 9, each saving of the scene resulted in a doubling of the file size. After saving the scene 10 times, it occupied 500MB (although it consisted of only 1 simple character) and the render farm started skipping data during the scene load which resulted in crashes.

The reward for all the work came 3 weeks later, in form of excellent review scores, top placements in the charts and great comments from the gamers. I am especially grateful for all the support to the great Perry Rhodan community during all that time.

Now, I would like to share with you a few of the shots I designed for the game – of course with style designer Sven Sauer backing me up . Enjoy the images!

All images copyright by Deep Silver | Braingame | 3d-io, from the Perry Rhodan Game, 2008
visit the Perry Rhodan – the Adventure Homepage here