Rich Jones: "The main affect a downloadable game has on the art pipeline is the memory limit. Although recent titles have been released with a huge 1.2GB download size, the official limit is currently 350MB.

This obviously puts caps on the amount of art going into the game especially when it comes to textures. You can easily get carried away making shaders the solution to all your art needs but there are other methods to think about.

Yes, we have used a certain amount of shader technology in Invincible Tiger but we made a decision very early on to base the majority of the environment detail within the meshes themselves using vertex lighting to depict light and colour in the scene.

This proved to solve a lot of memory issues, help load times and keep the game at a constant 60fps."

Rich Jones: "I'd say the most useful feature of VC would be the layers tool.

We didn't have this functionality at the start, instead relying on the blending of colour sets, mental ray baking options and importing attribute maps in Maya's paint vertex colour tool. Once this feature was implemented we had far more control over the final result. We were able to have different layers for colour, ambient occlusion and directional light and control the blend modes just as you would in Photoshop.

Another useful feature was the gradient tool. Again the functionality of this tool grew through our development but it was really helpful for adding extra depth into our scenes. And the ability to create multi-colour ramps for more control over the gradients.

And lastly a very simple feature but one that was used all the time. The 'Toggle Wire' button which switches off the wire frame that you have on your selected mesh. This made it clearer to see any adjustments that we made, as all changes happen in real-time."

Rich Jones: "I'd say in the end it did. There was a fair amount of R&D work into the art pipeline at the beginning of the project, as we were taking a different approach with the creation of our environments. But by the time we had our pipeline in place and the artists had got up to speed with the tool, we were able to get some great results really quickly.

When it came to polishing the levels and refining our palettes it was very quick and easy to use the layers and sliders to make adjustments. Adjustments, which without the tool, might have meant relighting the levels from scratch ."

Rich Jones: "We had an early version of the tool when it was quite basic. One of our artists on the team had connections at RenderHeads and had tried out the tool before.

We integrated Vertex Chameleon into our pipeline and because of the heavy use we were giving it we were able to give an awful lot of constructive feedback.

It worked very well for both sides really, we gave it a lot of functionality and stability testing on a live project, which was obviously of great use to you. At the same time we made several suggestions on how the tool could be improved - suggestions that would speed up our art pipeline."

Rich Jones: "Some expansion to the layers tool, it would be great to be able to 'merge visible' on layers rather than having to flatten everything. Also the ability to have layer masks and be able to handle vertex alpha in a separate layer or channel.

I'd like to see a curves tool for adjusting layers. Again, functionality taken from Photoshop that would give more control over colour ranges."

Rich Jones: "I would, yes. It's been a really good tool to work with on this project and has given us the results we wanted with the functionality and flexibility we needed."