EA Alumni Chart Course from AAA to Independent Work on ZOR: Pilgrimage of the

Clint Jorgenson and Gavin Yastremski talk to Game Rant about how their past work at studios like EA led them to work on ZOR: Pilgrimage of the Slorfs.

Working on fan projects and small indie games is one way to get noticed and a chance at bigger roles in the industry. Toby Fox got his start working on projects like EarthBound Halloween Hack, but after he became famous with Undertale, he got the chance to work for Nintendo. He got a Mii Fighter costume in Super Smash Bros. and made music for the Pokemon series.
ZOR is a mix of different types of games. It's a deck-building roguelike with survival and crafting elements set on grids that look like tabletop games. Righteous Hammer Games is known for Solitairica, a roguelike-RPG version of Solitaire that came out in 2016. It is a small company for the size of its current project. Most of ZOR is being made by just two people from their garages: studio founder and creative director Clint Jorgenson and artist Gavin Yastremski (with some contractors pitching in). But Game Rant talked to Jorgenson and Yastremski about their past experience at studios like EA and how those skills have helped them in the indie space.
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Jorgenson got his first computer in the 1980s, and he said he was immediately interested in graphics and programming. He couldn't do this as a job when he worked at a lumberyard in the 1990s, but the dotcom boom showed him that digital art could be a career. After failing out of electrical engineering, he went to the Vancouver Film School and learned how to use programs like ActionScript and Flash before trying for a short time to work in movies. One of his first jobs was making the fake computer screens for 2002's live-action Scooby-Doo (a practice he called "fantasy UI").
Soon after, Jorgenson got his first job in the games industry, working on EA's Def Jam: Fight for NY. That was the start of a 13-year career with the company, during which Jorgenson worked on every Skate game, a few SSX games, and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. Jorgenson met Yastremski while working on the PvZ spin-off. Yastremski, like Jorgenson, went from a short time in film and TV to a nine-year job at EA thanks to connections with a professor at the Art Institute of Vancouver who had worked on SSX.
Yastremski said he was "blessed" to learn 3D software in high school, which gave him a taste of the world of video game art. "That blew my mind," he said. "I knew this was what I had to do when I got out of high school." During his time at PopCap Games, he worked on Garden Warfare, GW2, and Battle for Neighborville. After that, Yastremski had the chance to work on Apex Legends by Respawn Entertainment for about nine months.
Jorgenson said he was happy at EA and "lucky" to work on a number of great games, but he was starting to feel tired. Kevin Ng, who used to work on Bully and Skate, started making independent mobile games a few years before he founded Wonderful Lasers in 2014. Jorgenson was inspired by Ng's success. He said he wanted to move away from the specialization of AAA development and become more of a generalist. He and Joe Van Zeipel, who worked on Garden Warfare, started Righteous Hammer Games in 2015.
Jorgenson and Zeipel "jammed on ideas" before leaving EA, but they decided to start by remaking Solitaire to learn Unreal Engine. During this time, Jorgenson came up with the "mechanical mash-up" of Solitaire, which uses the same kinds of features as iPad games like Puzzle Quest. Rob Blake, who worked on the audio for Garden Warfare and is also known for his work on Mass Effect, helped the game succeed with his "over-the-top and unrestrained" energy.
"It was a lot of fun because we were so happy to be doing our own project for the first time that we decided to go crazy with it. But yeah, it was kind of a fluke, not everything was planned."
Shortly after Solitairica, prototyping for ZOR started, but Zeipel would leave Righteous Hammer to work on Dauntless as a user interface designer for Phoenix Labs. After seeing other people get government grants, Jorgenson "threw his lot in" and applied for funding through British Columbia's Creative BC organization. The grant he got could only be used to hire people, so over the next few months he worked with concept artists and 3D animators to make a "vertical slice." Yastremski left Respawn soon after hearing about this project because he was "always blown away" by Jorgenson's UI work on Plants vs. Zombies and wanted more creative freedom away from the constraints of a "giant, well-polished product."
Yastremski helped shape ZOR's artistic vision, which was influenced by the works of Jim Henson and Don Bluth, especially the "dark, kind of creepy, and cute" worlds of The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and The NeverEnding Story. With a more complicated 3D style and more money for roles like quality assurance and sound through Epic Games' MegaGrants program, ZOR's scope grew. The project was supposed to take two years, but it has already been going on for four years, and its Early Access launch is coming up this month. ZOR was first announced with a teaser trailer in October 2019, but Jorgenson said, "We definitely announced it too early" because the game's ambitious goals made it hard to figure out when it would come out.

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