For over 10 years I have been involved with the Primal Carnage videogame franchise. It has been an epic journey, lasting most of my professional career. Since around 2013 i have gone from creating additional artwork for the first game, to being creative director on its most recent iteration Primal Carnage: Evolution.

As an indie game developer one often wears many hats, which can be fun, if challenging. Having studied art I naturally gravitated towards that side of things, but I’d also done sound design for my student films and seeing as nobody else was around to do it – I dived into that as well!

Primal Carnage: Extinction emerged out of a failed attempt from series originators Lukewarm Media to make an ambitious singleplayer title – Primal Carnage: Genesis. The newly formed Circle 5 Publishing took ownership of the franchise after that game and team fell apart, looking to bring the existing multiplayer experience to more platforms. 

My role was originally revamping existing art assets and texturing new props, but having taught myself UDK prior to working on Extinction I was quickly able to start assisting in other areas such as level design.

Sound Design

See here for an example of my audio work on Extinction, which involved creating sound effects for new dinosaurs and weapons. I also implemented and optimized all of the game’s audio, significantly improving both the sound of the game and its performance.

Level Art

In bringing environments forward from the original Primal Carnage, we wanted to give them a higher level of detail and realism. I touched up numerous art assets, giving them more weathered textures so that they better fit the run-down maps. I also created and placed many little environmental details such as signs, grime and screen animations that gave more of a story to the levels.

Cinematics

As development progressed, my duties also included cutscene and trailer creation, along with providing promotional artwork. My previous experience with video production meant I was instrumental in planning & executing Extinction’s cinematics and trailers. Videos were staged in-game with Unreal Matinee and then I would edit, grade and sound mix the final version in software such as Adobe Premiere. I also created all of the game’s motion graphics, from studio logo animations to animated loading videos.

Official Trailers

Primal Carnage: Extinction launched into Early Access on Steam in 2014, and was later released in 2015 for both PC and PlayStation 4. It was my first title seen from start to finish and I am proud of what we were able to accomplish given the time pressure.

What originally was intended to be a smaller scale project turned out to be over 3 years of work to bring the outsourced PS4 version of Primal Carnage: Extinction kicking and screaming into the modern day. Having not developed for console internally before presented its own hurdles to overcome, as did a global pandemic hitting right around the time we were trying to get hold of dev kits from Sony.

Even though I have many more managerial duties now, I’m still very much in the thick of it, creating art and shepherding new features.