Meet Tere!
April 22, 2020
What’s Teravision Games playing? (Spring 2020)
June 11, 2020

We have ridiculously awesome people at Teravision Games and we’d love for you to get to meet them! This month, we’d love to introduce you to Daniel!

What’s your role at Teravision Games? 

I’m the Lead Technical Artist and Lead Animator. As Lead Technical Artist, I help the art team to understand how to make their assets gameplay compatible, creating tools that can help improve pipelines, shaders and VFX creation. That means I also help with the creation of character riggings, sounds, a lot of stuff – but we have a great team to support in each area. 

As a Lead Animator, I help our animation team to understand the requirements for each animation clip and provide feedback to help us improve every day.

What was the first game you ever played? 

I started with the Atari 2600, playing a lot of games with my brother. We even played the infamous E.T. game and to be honest, I don’t think it is the worst game ever made. Now the first game that made an impact on me was Prince Of Persia on PC. It had the best animations at the time, cool mechanics, and a nice story. I even remember the first time I saw the mirror scene, and later facing your mirror image and how you defeated it, it was very clever. It’s also really interesting to reflect on how our brains work because I remember the code prince.exe megahit x  where X was the number of lives you wanted to start with. I finished this game many times with and without that code. 

And what’s your favorite game, ever? Ever ever ever, you can only pick one.

It is Final Fantasy VII, the original one (currently playing the remake now and loving it). So far it’s the best JRPG game I have ever played. That sensation when you are finishing Midgar, which is very linear in its gameplay, and then the game switches into an open-world-like experience was amazing. 

The story, like many classic JRPGs, has a twist where your objectives change or expand. There is a part of the story that the game puts you in a very emotional situation, I remember trying to undo that moment and change it. But you can’t. You have to accept your destiny and it’s a very hard moment. 

In the end, it is not just the story of the game but it has to do with everything else you can do, from searching the powerful Ultima Weapons, to the Golden Saucer Chocobo racing, farming Chocobos to get the mighty Gold Chocobo. And the game music is probably one of the best at the time, and even today it’s still great. It was a rollercoaster of emotions and such a great experience overall.

What’s your favorite soundtrack to listen to while you’re working? 

It would depend a lot on the game currently playing, but my favorite ones are Final Fantasy VII, Red Dead Redemption and Killer Instinct (both the original and the remake/reboot). 

What are tools of the trade you couldn’t do your job without? 

I really like to have a Wacom tablet as part of my tools, it really helps me to provide more accurate feedback to my teammates. Also my webcam is a very powerful tool in my line of work.

What’s one of the best bugs you’ve ever seen in a game you helped make? 

I really love the bugs related to animations, if you forgot to set up an animation property you can have a pretty weird and funny result. 

I remember when we were using Unity 3.5 for one project, the animation setup was more complex than it is today, you have to use code to set up your clips on a script. We were working on a character that needed a reloading weapon animation. In our test, we had the start of this animation as an additive (mistake #1) and by default was looping (mistake #2), which caused the animation to keep adding transformations over and over causing the character to twist his body to the infinity. It’s always fun to watch these types of bugs!

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