Chex Quest HD
Released: May 18, 2020
Tags: Unreal Engine 4, C++, Blender, Retail Games
In 2019, Charles Jacobi posted a trailer for his work-in-progress project: a remake of the original Chex Quest. Charles was one of the lead artists during CQ's development in 1996, and he was spearheading a remake of it in Unreal Engine. Someone then posted a link to this video in the Facepunch forums, and it made its ways to my eyeballs. Watching the video, one thought came to my mind: "Damn, those weapon animations are underwhelming".
Seeing as the project was looking for volunteers, I joined to contribute some weapon animations as I already had a lot of experience in weapon animation and programming. Unfortunately, this project was being developed in Unreal Engine 4, which was a bit of a challenge for me because I was using a 8 year old laptop with a GeForce 555m. I contributed some improved weapon animations, and I intended on also modifying some weapon code to give them more punch. However, the weapon code was being done in Blueprints, which meant I had to spend a lot of time fighting UE in my underpowered computer, nor did I have much time to delve deep into the codebase since I was also having to worry about classwork and tests.
Ultimately, Charles got in touch with General Mills, who offered to sponsor the project and expand the scope. As a result, the project got taken off our hands and passed onto a support studio called Flight School, who had the ability to work on this full time. One of the bullet points of the increased scope was that the game was going to have multiple playable characters (to represent different Chex products), so I'm sure that the final product made significant changes to the weapon rigs and animations.
So, I ultimately don't know how much of my work made it into the final product... But my name is in the credits and I received a black marble plaque from General Mills! We were also given two boxes of Chex Quest goodies (one from Limited Run Games), and a big box full of Chex food products.
Funny story, to announce the release of Chex Quest HD, General Mills offered us an all-expenses paid trip to San Diego Comic-Con. Unfortunately, the year was 2020... So to compensate, General Mills instead gave us a monetary check, money which I used to build my Silicon Graphics Sleeper PC.
Here's a video of a Flemoid costume, commisioned by General Mills, which was meant to walk around the Comic-Con halls:
I would have liked to include some images of some of my animation work in Blender, but I can't find my source files on my old laptop, and the OneDrive that was used to share assets during development is no longer available :(
