Projects from Handheld Games

Working at Handheld was a whirlwind where I worked on more than dozen games over the course of just two years. While there I worked on Pixar, Nickelodeon, Marvel, and Disney licensed products and games.

On Vmigo Spiderman, I served in a leadership role, coordinating environment artists for creating backgrounds on the game.

One particular win on that project was when there was re-organization in the publisher’s company. Our team took the opportunity to work with new point of contact to dial down the quantity of content – so that we could dial up the quality of content. We reduced the amount of levels in the final game, and used that extra time to refine the content and make it really shine.

Although the console didn’t end up getting a lot of traction, the game itself was actually pretty neat. With the additional time, the art came out lovely – even having a faux-3d minigame. And the game mechanics were pretty interesting too: players could play mini-games on the handheld controller, which would earn them in-game benefits for the main console game.

I learned a lot about production and efficiency while working at Handheld. So many of the consoles that we worked with had strict RAM and ROM limitations that it was a constant battle to leverage as much as possible into the available space. I recall one programmer bringing in “rom ‘splode cake” to take the sting off after hitting a space issue at a particularly inconvenient time.

We used tricks such as ‘palette swapping’ – where we change the palette of a scene dynamically to change the aesthetic from day to night.

We also had strict limits on how many colors could be seen on screen at once, as well as how many 8×8 or 16×16 tiles could be used. Being clever, we could have big elaborate scenes – reusing the tiles subtle ways.