NTE: Strike & Retrieve was a first person action game we developed in 2005 at Whatif Productions in partnership with the advertising firm Campbell Ewald and the US Navy.

In the game you pilot an armed remote submersible through deep ocean canyons in search of a downed spy plane. The game was designed to help drive traffic to the US Navy's recruitment website, with unlockable upgrades integrated into their site. The project was under a very tight schedule; we finished the game in about six months.

I spearheaded the art technical issues, worked with our small programming team to implement the art features we needed, created the canyon wall assets and various effects, directed two artists in creating the rest of the game assets, and converted Campbell Ewald's interface design into an interactive 3D model so it would work in the engine.



Terrain was made of canyons underwater, so I created a set of U-cross-sectioned canyon pieces that all tiled with one another. I tiled the textures on each piece in whole numbers along the length of each piece, so the canyons would tile seamlessly together. I also had to make sure things mirror-tiled at the edges... when a texture is mapped onto a U shape, as it goes across the U to the other side it changes to upside down. This means when another piece is rotated 180° and snapped to the first piece, the two pieces will meet with their maps upside down to each other.


The Whatif engine uses a morph-like technology for blending multiple meshes, so I created four variations for each canyon tile (basically four morph targets). In the game the walls were then randomized in a blend between the four shapes, to add variation so no walls were ever exactly the same. I used the same morphing technique to create lava fissures that open up as the player gets near, with flowing lava in the cracks. I used the transition to fade in baked lightmaps that splash orange lighting across the mesh.


We laid out the entire game level and all the entities using 3ds Max. Max's Xref system wasn't production-ready yet, so we made our own lean-n-mean exporter-compatible Xref system. Scene scale becomes really important if laying out a scene that stretches for miles, because the precision gets really bad at small vs. large scales, seams stop snapping together if the unit scale isn't correctly accounted for at the start.