Fast Five – Neil Rennison

Soon.  Soon, soon, soon.  Neil Rennison will be speaking on Everything Old is New Again and chairing the One Man Band session.

What are you working on right now?

I am currently increasing the resolution of the in-game UI artwork for our new Gamebook Adventures title, Slaves of Rema for iPhone 4 and iPad. This basically means starting it all again from scratch to maintain pixel quality at the higher resolution! Quite painful!

What thing that you’ve worked on, personal or paid, are you most proud of?

I’m really proud of my art contributions over the years to the various hand-held  (DS, PSP, Java, Brew, iPhone) versions of the Need For Speed, Nascar and Juiced series as well as other racing game franchises. Some of these I got immense satisfaction from directly steering the art direction. I’ve also developed my own 3D environment building process over the years. This enables me to create racing tracks very fast, whilst retaining a mathematical structure that enables me to maintain consistent texturing throughout.

What’s a non-gaming entertainment / artistic highlight of the past 12-months for you?

That’s tough and I’ll probably sound quite abstract here, but the birth of my daughter and seeing her grow and change these last 5 months has done more for me on a creative level than I ever imagined. I look at the world in such a different way now – plus it doesn’t give me much time for enjoying any forms of entertainment!

What are you most looking forward to?

Seeing Gamebook Adventures finally available to play/read on an iPad. I’m really hoping that it, in a small way helps contribute to the evolution that is taking place in how we consume literature, interactive or otherwise.

What are you playing right now – digital or otherwise?

Lots of obscure iPhone games when I have the chance. There are some indie gems tucked away on the App Store which are amazing even though they probably only sold 5 copies. I have Alan Wake and Batman AA for 360 waiting to be completed, but I barely have the time at the moment to sit down for more than half an hour with a console game.

Neil is the wearer of many indie dev hats running Tin Man Games, a Melbourne based iPhone and iPad developer. To help pay the bills he also performs art outsource services for larger developers and publishers through his other gig, Fraction Studios.