Saturday, April 13, 2013

Spyro love - Part 1

I'm organizing content for a series of small books I'll be publishing. The process is providing me the opportunity to go through my old portfolio and assess a wide array of art I've created in the past. These are among the images I found of special interest. It's hard to believe but at one point in the early development of the project this is what the character that became Spyro the Dragon looked like. 



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Spyro's concept arts! I was waiting for this! Thanks Charles. Can you describe your work with Spyro and Insomniac? I hope it was better than the ND one.

Unknown said...

Hey Charles, in your opinion, what was better franchise to work on? Is it Spyro, Jak or Crash?

Charles Z said...

I liked working on them both. I'm hard pressed to pick a favorite. As far as the design experience goes go I'm partial to Spyro since he was pure. I had him by the second day of work. It wasn't a situation with several people all jumping in and telling me what to do. It was much more free and I was able to deliver to Insomniac with a minimal amount of interference during the development process. They'd look at the drawings, discuss them, give me feedback and I'd go from there.

Nobody else could say they had a hand in the design of Spyro. Crash was different since I was working in association with Joe Pearson and had to go along with ND's decisions. Insomniac was a more mature group and very easy to work with. I didn't get much longevity out of it unfortunately like I got with Crash but at the same time they never kept it a secret that I was the character designer for Spyro. I got credit on several versions of the game as I recall which I appreciate. Its different now but I the time they were good about it.

Jak was the most ambitious of all the big 3 projects. In a league of its own since I created a vast amount of work for it over the course of a year. The other projects were short term gigs. Sometimes lasting only a few days. Jak was different. The most grand and the most disappointing of them all considering how ND behaved afterwards.

Still the opportunity to create on all 3 projects is something I value highly and my memories are all good when I think about the creative process and how the characters emerged.