Meet the Team: Adam Mechtley

Hello world!

I am the resident technical artist at Flashbang. “What does that mean?” you might be asking. An apt question. I do a little bit of everything. I primarily handle art production for our games: models, textures, rigging, animation, and so on. However, I also do my share of asset integration and programming support. Sometimes I might implement a new feature, sometimes I might finish someone else’s. I also try to keep things pretty anal about historical or scientific accuracy when the situation presents itself. Matt is also a real help in this respect.

How did I come into being? I may have been forged in a great furnace, or may have sprung from a spore in the ground (I’m not telling), but I ended up in the Phoenix area for school. I met Matthew and the original Flashbangers (may they rest in peace) plus Steve through the IGDA while I was working on my art degree. I worked for some other studios here in the valley as a technical artist on some sports and racing games, specializing in character technology, and eventually quit them to go back to school. Two degrees later, I decided to go back to work. My friends at Flashbang were working on small projects that interested me, and so I started work on Raptor Safari as a contractor while finishing my thesis.

I plan to use this space to argue with people about the technical accuracy of our games. Did I model the wrong number of neural spines on Jetpack Brontosaurus? Do you believe that Dromaeosaurids could pronate their wrists? Well I’m not responsible for making all of these decisions necessarily, but I will readily tell you who was at fault if a mistake has been made

Seriously though, I would like to be able to discuss with people why we make certain decisions in our games to balance performance and visuals. It can be pretty easy to look at a game and just say things like “why doesn’t it look like Crysis?” (hint: we wanted people to be able to play it without a computer from decades in the future) without really considering some of the issues we have to tackle. Sure, we have a small team and try to put out our games relatively quickly, but many times there are specific reasons why we do certain things. I hope that by doing this we can get a sense for what all of you really think is important in your gaming experience so that we know where to really focus our efforts.

We want creativity to guide things here, but we also want to hone our art, so feel free to help us out!