Playable Demo Now Available!

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:16:28 +0000

The wait is over, The Infinite Journey demo is now available! Click Here

You will need Google’s O3D plug-in to play the demo. Click Here

The game is currently supported on-

Windows XP and Vista – Chrome, IE8, Firefox
Mac (Leopard 10.5.7) – Firefox, Safari

Have fun and let us know what you think by leaving a comment in our Global Conversation!

New 3d Concept Character: T-Rocks

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:39:04 +0000

Here is another 3d concept character! T-Rocks is an old fossilized skeleton who spends most of it’s time lying dormant under the earth’s surface waiting for a hapless creature to come along. The enemy stands twice the size of our hero once he bursts from the ground to engage in his ravenous rampage.

T-Rock’s achilles heel is the slow time it takes for it to recompose itself once it takes a bite. Three jumps onto his head will dispatch this enemy to a clump of dirt and bones.

New 3D Concept Character: Mudmuck

admin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:15:37 +0000

Here is one of our latest works demonstrating what a concept character might look like in game. The low poly model was created and then exported to a sculpting tool to generate a normal map. Once this step was completed the model was textured to look like wet mud and the leaves and grass polys were added.

“Mudmuck” is a character consisting entirely out of mud who hurls large chunks of himself at the hero character whenever he is provoked.

New Concept Art

admin — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:17:29 +0000

We are currently working on concept enemy creature sketches for the game. Here are some of our current ideas. Our next step is to prep a handful of these by creating front and side renders as reference for the 3D modeling stage.

Enemy Designs

Behind the Scenes of a Work in Progress

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:20:55 +0000

Hey there,

Welcome to the Infinite Journey blog at largeanimal.com. We’ve had the idea of creating Infinite Journey for a long time, so when Google approached us about creating a platform game using their O3D technology, well… we jumped at the chance!

It’s important here to mention that this game is not finished! It’s still very much work-in-progress. This blog provides behind-the-scenes information on how we got to where we are, and what our plans are for the future.

What you see here is the result of 5 weeks of sweat, blood and binary. Starting with a blank piece of paper, our team of 4 hungry, full-time staffers (and 1 starving intern) worked to cram in every cool element possible before the Google I/O conference.

The name “Infinite Journey” comes from the idea that in the next version of the game, all levels will be created by the player. As more users join the game, the world will get bigger and bigger, giving each player plenty of fresh levels to play each time they return.

Anyway, we hope you keep checking back to this blog – as well as walking you through the different aspects of production we’ll also let you in on some of the larger, more grandiose game ideas that we hope to implement in the future.

All the best,

~The Infinite Journey Team

Infinite Journey game demo

Google I/O Interviews

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:12:41 +0000

Here’s a short video of Henry Bridge interviewing Large Animal Games’ Wade Tinney and Bob Paradiso from last week’s Google I/O Developer Conference:

And another panel discussion with Henry, Bob, Wade, and Brian McRae from Crazy Pixel:

World Design

admin — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:47:54 +0000

Our world design stayed pretty true to early concept sketches, filled with abstract plants with whimsical textures and colors.

World Design – concept to completion

Character Design

admin — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:50:28 +0000

We went through a lot of character sketches before arriving at our final hero design. He was almost a treant, a dryad or a mushroom!

Rejected Hero Designs

Ultimately, we went with a young, nature boy character. Here’s his concept sketch along with his final render. Future plans may include the option to choose whether you play as him, a female character, or as one of the treants or mushrooms that didn’t make it into this version of the game.

Final Hero Design

We also sketched out a bunch of different enemies. A lot of them were pollutants and parasites that would threaten the plant life you’re trying to spread.

Rejected Enemy Designs

In the end, we went with our little rock dudes, that we like to call ‘runkins’. It’s not that we considered them the most interesting of the enemy designs, but under time constraints, they seemed like the most manageable. The final game will include all sorts of antagonists, with all sorts of behaviors.

Final Runkin Design

Our current character’s final geometry is 2370 triangles. We decided to go with a low poly modeling approach because we wanted to play it safe and make sure that we weren’t going to over-tax the system with only one model in game. We saved polys by using poly planes with transparency to map the hair. Future improvements will include ambient maps to pop the character out more from the background and swappable clothing/accessories.

Hero character turn-around