Work on ZOR

Work on ZOR: Pilgrimage of the Dead is being done by people who used to work for EA.

Clint Jorgenson and Gavin Yastremski talked to Game Rant about how they got to work on ZOR: Pilgrimage of the Slorfs after working at places like EA.

One way to get noticed and a chance at bigger roles in the industry is to work on fan projects and small indie games. Toby Fox got his start working on things like the EarthBound Halloween Hack, but after he became famous with Undertale, Nintendo gave him the chance to work for them officially. He got a Mii Fighter costume in Super Smash Bros. and made music for the Pokemon games.
ZOR is a mix of different types of games. It is a deck-building roguelike with survival and crafting elements that is set on grids that look like tabletop games. Righteous Hammer Games is best known for Solitairica, a roguelike-RPG version of Solitaire that came out in2016. It is a small company for the size of its current project. Clint Jorgenson, the studio's founder and creative director, and Gavin Yastremski, an artist, are the only two people working on most of ZOR from their garages (with some contractors pitching in). But Game Rant talked to Jorgenson and Yastremski about their past work at companies like EA and how those skills have helped them in the independent space.
Plants Vs Zombie Garden Warfare Zombies in sports
In the 1980s, Jorgenson got his first computer, and he said he became interested in graphics and programming right away. He couldn't do this as a job when he worked at a lumberyard in the 1990s, but the dotcom boom made him realize that he could make a living doing digital art. After failing out of electrical engineering, he went to the Vancouver Film School and learned how to use programs like ActionScript and Flash. Then, for a short time, he worked in movies. One of his first jobs was making the fake computer screens for Scooby-Doo, Live!, which came out in 2002. (a practice he called "fantasy UI").
Soon after that, EA's Def Jam: Fight for NY gave Jorgenson his first job in the video game business. Jorgenson worked for the company for 13 years, during which he made every Skate game, a few SSX games, and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. Jorgenson met Yastremski while they were both working on the PvZ spin-off. Yastremski also went from a short time in film and TV to a nine-year job at EA thanks to a connection with a professor at the Art Institute of Vancouver who had worked on SSX.
Yastremski said he was "blessed" to learn about 3D software in high school, which gave him a taste of video game art. He said, "It blew my mind." "I knew I had to do this when I graduated from high school." During his time at PopCap Games, he worked on Garden Warfare, GW2, and Battle for Neighborville. After that, Yastremski worked on Apex Legends for about nine months as an environmental artist for Respawn Entertainment.
Jorgenson said he was happy at EA and "lucky" to work on a lot of great games, but he started to feel tired. Kevin Ng, who worked on Bully and Skate, started making his own mobile games a few years before he started Wonderful Lasers in 2014. Jorgenson was inspired by Ng's success, and he said he wanted to move away from AAA development's focus on specialization and become more of a generalist. He started Righteous Hammer Games in 2015 with Joe Van Zeipel, who also worked on Garden Warfare.
Before leaving EA, Jorgenson and Zeipel "jammed on ideas," but they decided to start by making a new version of Solitaire to learn Unreal Engine. During this time, Jorgenson came up with the "mechanical mash-up" of Solitaire, which uses the same kinds of features that iPad games like Puzzle Quest have. Rob Blake, who worked on the audio for Garden Warfare and is also known for Mass Effect, helped make the game's "over-the-top and unrestrained" energy work.
"We were so happy to be doing our own project for the first time that we decided to go crazy with it, which made it a lot of fun. But, yeah, it was a bit of a fluke. Not everything was planned out."
Shortly after Solitairica, prototyping for ZOR started, but Zeipel left Righteous Hammer to work on Dauntless as a user interface designer for Phoenix Labs. After seeing other people get government grants, Jorgenson "threw his lot in" and asked the Creative BC organization in British Columbia for money. He could only hire people with the grant, so over the next few months, he worked with concept artists and 3D animators to make a "vertical slice." Yastremski left Respawn soon after hearing about this project because he was "always blown away" by Jorgenson's UI work on Plants vs. Zombies and wanted to have more creative freedom away from the constraints of a "giant, well-polished product."
Yastremski helped ZOR solidify its artistic vision, which was influenced by the works of Jim Henson and Don Bluth, especially the "dark, kind of creepy, and cute" worlds of The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and The NeverEnding Story. With a more complicated 3D style and more money for roles like quality assurance and sound thanks to Epic Games' MegaGrants program, ZOR's scope grew. The project was supposed to take two years, but it has already been going on for four years and won't be ready until this month. ZOR was first shown off in a teaser trailer in October2019. Jorgenson said, "We definitely showed it off too early," because the game's big goals made it hard to figure out when it would come out.

more: drift boss 

0