In December 2017 Blue Giraffe got green light to start working on Criminal Minds. Working on such a well known IP is always exiting and a lot of fun. We made Criminal Minds in record time. It took a little longer than 6 months and it released in November 2018. The Criminal Minds team was quite small. I think we were with about six full time members. Which was about half the size of the full Blue Giraffe team. While the Criminal Minds gameplay is based on the Hearts Medicine gameplay, it is still quite different. Hearts Medicine would tell its story over 6 hospital rooms that would take about 10 levels to complete. Criminal Minds did the same, but with 6 cases. In total we had 41 environments for Criminal Minds.

For Criminal Minds I was responsible for the character models and implementing story. But before I could start on story, we first needed all the models finished. And I had to wait for the writing team to finish as well. Because Criminal Minds was based on the Hearts Medicine engine, we used the same art pipeline. Which was a mix of handdrawn 2D backgrounds and objects with prerendered 3D characters. Next to all the main Criminal Minds agents, of which there were 8, we also needed the suspects for each case, and a whole lot of NPC's.
For the NPC's I made a character creator in 3Ds Max which used a set of premade objects to make a new character. This character would be saved to a separate file do the character animators could work on them. The parts were already skinned so it was really streamlined.

Implementing story and cinematics was done in the inhouse 2D engine. It would load up a preformatted script file that would set up all the characters and dialog. We then had to add all the character poses and animations. Because we had the script ready before I could implent it, we had the full game dialog scenes and cinematic cues standing in a week. All we then had to do was make and hook up the levels, and make the cinematics. By doing this the team always had a good understanding of the entire game.
I had a lot of freedom implementing the story an cinematics. Of course I had to respect the notes and intentions of the writers. But I was responsible for planning out how the characters would visibly behave, and interact with the environment. I would make placeholders of every pose I wanted for the characters emotions, or a unique pose that would better fit the story. This made the process very quick and fun to work with. For some more elaborate instances I would animate the characters myself so I could tweak the pacing or a pose to fit the story better.

I'm very proud of what we accomplished with this project. It was a great game to work on.

Videos