Here is an example of a great artist. Ruan Jia. His illustration and concept pieces all look great but you have to know that they all practice for countless hours to be able to reach that point. The art foundations aren't just a thing that art teachers talk about. They do apply to everything you do even though you may not see it. Well, even the great Shaddy Safadi quoted: "If you are not even good enough to recognize why this piece is great (referring to Jamie Jones), then it shows that you are bad".
Friday, September 26, 2014
Studies
Considering that we are Game Art students it is quite hard to actually find extra time to work on our traditional mediums or simply the 2D side of things. It is not that we do not have time whatsoever but if we want to actually get good at the 3D side of things, that is where most of our time is spent. It really is a shame that it is so hard to balance out our works as there are so many things to learn with so little time. If we had a digital painting class last year instead of traditional animation (which is happening this year I believe), it would have helped us out so much. No one can really blame the school because I believe that as now a days schooling is an additional tool that we use to help improve ourselves (A very expensive tool that is). Self study is still a huge part that will push our skill set along the way and to me a lot of people have neglected this part. If you were to listen to any successful artists working in industry now you'll easily see a common trend. They work hard. No one was lucky and happened to be good. All of them spent countless hours and got to where they are now so why aren't we doing the same thing?
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Print N Play Games
For our Game Design class we were tasked to go explore different print and play games and analyze them.
List of PnP games that I've looked at are:
- Eight On Eight
- Magma
- Rough
- Dungeon of D*
So the first game is Eight By Eight. In terms of construction for a print and play game it is quite basic. It requires the main board which is a simply an 8x8 grid with another row of 8 on top colored in black, tokens to represent the players, and an eight sided dice. Presentation wise it is very basic and bare bones. As a more casual game it does not matter as much as I'll explain later on, it is a variant of Connect Four.
The goal of the game is for the players to try and get 5 consecutive tokens lined up vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The game is simply played by rolling the dice that determines the column or row that the token will be placed in (choose one). The opponent is simply tasked to stop you and try to line up their own 5 pieces. This is essentially like connect four but the placement is decided by the dice roll. The twist however is that the players are allowed to "blackout" and cancel out one of the rolls. The cancelled roll will then have a token placed in the black row on top and from then on any rolls that land on that number will force the player to skip their turn.
Overall the game is pretty simple to play and understand. No complex design or anything of the sort. In terms of its design I would definitely have to call it out. For the majority I believe the game does work well enough as a Connect Four variant that adds in a factor of luck. The "twist" in this game however is questionable. If you were to call a blackout, this would cause you to lose your turn and effectively the row and column that is blacked out (a total of 15 out of 64 spots will be lost by a single call out). This simply means you will effectively eliminate your own playing space and give an extra turn to the opponent. The only realistic use of this "twist" is as a desperate measure when you are close to winning the game (essentially a re-roll for your last piece).
The verdict, the design of the twist is extremely flawed and acts more as a self crippling device if used incorrectly. A possible way to fix this is to eliminate the turn skip of the blackout into a temporary skip for X amount of turns instead if the number is rolled. The game itself without the blackout rules is fine and the twist would have been fine if not for its extreme skip mechanic.
Next,
This next game is a quite simple. No real twist or anything but a good example of a variant done right. Construction is also very straight forward only requiring the board and tokens for the player. The aesthetic of the game is pretty simple with a somewhat visually interesting background for the board (note: the print version for some reason does not include the rust texture seen below, so it becomes extremely plain and simple being plain white).
This game is essentially based on area occupation. The players are tasked to occupy as many spaces as possible using the tokens to section off areas. This game is essentially an extremely simplified version of the ancient Chinese game called "Go". It takes in the same premise of blocking the other player and obtaining space created through the pieces. Go however allows the player to eliminate other pieces by surrounding them whilst this game does not have anything of the sort. The simplification that magma uses is the elimination of "eating" the other other players and simply does not allow a players piece to be placed/ jump over the other players. And the hexagonal board that starts on the two sides also create a very different feel for the game.
Overall the design of this game is straight forward and makes a good simplified variant of the complex game of Go. There is no real complaints against the design other than that the playing space may become a bit to small for a play through with more than two people. The game does go by pretty fast after one play through as the players get used to the placement style and just tend to move on quicker than usual. The game is balanced and does not require much.
This game is something that breaks away from the two above (not exactly a board game). It is a card game that is based on completing the objectives of the cards so it is essentially a game based on competing in mini games. The mini games ranges from physical challenges, simple trivia, and completely random things that could instantly fail a participant for no reason. Five cards are drawn and the last man standing wins (also eliminated by running out of cards). Honestly there is not much to learn or say about this game other than that it is just pure fun mayhem. The game may have ridiculous balancing issues (such as failing the player who happens to have picked up the "Worthless" card) but down to its core mechanics, what allows it to work is the human interactions. Unlike the other PnP games out there this game does not put you into the shoes of someone else. It purely focuses on YOU and because of that it makes the ridiculous mini games much more enjoyable.
Ultimately this is a very bare bones games with ridiculous conditions and odd specifications. Design wise there is not much to it either other than the balancing of the mini games. But with the nature of the game being "Rough", its overly exaggerated mechanics make it a fun game to play. It may not look the best as it consists of simple cut out cards but it is undeniably an enjoyable game.
Other game situation examples include: Not being able to talk whilst two people are holding up a table and folding a paper plane to see which goes the furthest! Fun times (played for about 3 hours straight)!
I am just going to say this right off the bat that we did not want to play this game at all. The problem is with the game type itself. Unlike the first three games mentioned within this post, Dungeons of D is a role playing game. The main thing that struck everyone is the instructions. It is a huge wall of text that immediately turns away anyone who is not genuinely interested in the game. It is true that we do not know if it is fun or not but the excessive amount of instructions/ construction that we would have had to do to play this game is deemed unworthy as a pay off.
By design that is a failure in the sense that the game is unable to keep the interest of the player (especially new ones) from the start. The problem is not within the wall of text alone as the visuals that accompanied it is fairly week. An uninteresting blank wall of text is something that most people would rather opt out of and move onto the next time. Visuals are created to help gain interest and lead around the eye but in this case the game failed to do so. We attempted to play this game but did not get very far due to the high amount of information that was needed to start. As none of us were too thrilled for role playing games it did help the cause (nether did the average 1 hour of play time not including setup).
I have to say that the problem with this game is NOT due to its actual game design since we did not go very far. The problem that I want to point out here is the overarching design of board games in general. If the design and presentation is weak, it will immediately turn away new players or lower their interest. There are many factors that separate the game types from your casual games (examples above) to a niche game type like role playing games. The amount of social interaction, the time span, etc... It is extremely hard to bring out everything and talk about design so to sum it up. Everything matters from the moment the player sees the game till the game is finished (I wrote my research paper last year on the same subject as this so explaining it here would not fit).
It is hard to exactly determine the most desirable PnP game due to the niches but so far what makes a good PnP game for me is simplicity and presentation. The faster the game is set up, the less time there is for the players to lose interest. The social interaction aspect definitely became one of the bigger influences within the decision of which game was more fun to play.
Good game design is something that is extremely thought out and is hard to fully explain. I cannot stress how many different factors are compiled together to create something of quality. Essentially everything out there from business, literature, to art requires a large amount of knowledge about design to execute. Nothing happens by accident in the design world.
List of PnP games that I've looked at are:
- Eight On Eight
- Magma
- Rough
- Dungeon of D*
EIGHT BY EIGHT
So the first game is Eight By Eight. In terms of construction for a print and play game it is quite basic. It requires the main board which is a simply an 8x8 grid with another row of 8 on top colored in black, tokens to represent the players, and an eight sided dice. Presentation wise it is very basic and bare bones. As a more casual game it does not matter as much as I'll explain later on, it is a variant of Connect Four.
The goal of the game is for the players to try and get 5 consecutive tokens lined up vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The game is simply played by rolling the dice that determines the column or row that the token will be placed in (choose one). The opponent is simply tasked to stop you and try to line up their own 5 pieces. This is essentially like connect four but the placement is decided by the dice roll. The twist however is that the players are allowed to "blackout" and cancel out one of the rolls. The cancelled roll will then have a token placed in the black row on top and from then on any rolls that land on that number will force the player to skip their turn.
Overall the game is pretty simple to play and understand. No complex design or anything of the sort. In terms of its design I would definitely have to call it out. For the majority I believe the game does work well enough as a Connect Four variant that adds in a factor of luck. The "twist" in this game however is questionable. If you were to call a blackout, this would cause you to lose your turn and effectively the row and column that is blacked out (a total of 15 out of 64 spots will be lost by a single call out). This simply means you will effectively eliminate your own playing space and give an extra turn to the opponent. The only realistic use of this "twist" is as a desperate measure when you are close to winning the game (essentially a re-roll for your last piece).
The verdict, the design of the twist is extremely flawed and acts more as a self crippling device if used incorrectly. A possible way to fix this is to eliminate the turn skip of the blackout into a temporary skip for X amount of turns instead if the number is rolled. The game itself without the blackout rules is fine and the twist would have been fine if not for its extreme skip mechanic.
Next,
MAGMA
This next game is a quite simple. No real twist or anything but a good example of a variant done right. Construction is also very straight forward only requiring the board and tokens for the player. The aesthetic of the game is pretty simple with a somewhat visually interesting background for the board (note: the print version for some reason does not include the rust texture seen below, so it becomes extremely plain and simple being plain white).
This game is essentially based on area occupation. The players are tasked to occupy as many spaces as possible using the tokens to section off areas. This game is essentially an extremely simplified version of the ancient Chinese game called "Go". It takes in the same premise of blocking the other player and obtaining space created through the pieces. Go however allows the player to eliminate other pieces by surrounding them whilst this game does not have anything of the sort. The simplification that magma uses is the elimination of "eating" the other other players and simply does not allow a players piece to be placed/ jump over the other players. And the hexagonal board that starts on the two sides also create a very different feel for the game.
Overall the design of this game is straight forward and makes a good simplified variant of the complex game of Go. There is no real complaints against the design other than that the playing space may become a bit to small for a play through with more than two people. The game does go by pretty fast after one play through as the players get used to the placement style and just tend to move on quicker than usual. The game is balanced and does not require much.
ROUGH
This game is something that breaks away from the two above (not exactly a board game). It is a card game that is based on completing the objectives of the cards so it is essentially a game based on competing in mini games. The mini games ranges from physical challenges, simple trivia, and completely random things that could instantly fail a participant for no reason. Five cards are drawn and the last man standing wins (also eliminated by running out of cards). Honestly there is not much to learn or say about this game other than that it is just pure fun mayhem. The game may have ridiculous balancing issues (such as failing the player who happens to have picked up the "Worthless" card) but down to its core mechanics, what allows it to work is the human interactions. Unlike the other PnP games out there this game does not put you into the shoes of someone else. It purely focuses on YOU and because of that it makes the ridiculous mini games much more enjoyable.
Ultimately this is a very bare bones games with ridiculous conditions and odd specifications. Design wise there is not much to it either other than the balancing of the mini games. But with the nature of the game being "Rough", its overly exaggerated mechanics make it a fun game to play. It may not look the best as it consists of simple cut out cards but it is undeniably an enjoyable game.
Current game consists of a slapping contest till one loses in the background (which will keep on happening in the background till one loses) and a staring contest.
Other game situation examples include: Not being able to talk whilst two people are holding up a table and folding a paper plane to see which goes the furthest! Fun times (played for about 3 hours straight)!
DUNGEONS OF D***
I am just going to say this right off the bat that we did not want to play this game at all. The problem is with the game type itself. Unlike the first three games mentioned within this post, Dungeons of D is a role playing game. The main thing that struck everyone is the instructions. It is a huge wall of text that immediately turns away anyone who is not genuinely interested in the game. It is true that we do not know if it is fun or not but the excessive amount of instructions/ construction that we would have had to do to play this game is deemed unworthy as a pay off.
By design that is a failure in the sense that the game is unable to keep the interest of the player (especially new ones) from the start. The problem is not within the wall of text alone as the visuals that accompanied it is fairly week. An uninteresting blank wall of text is something that most people would rather opt out of and move onto the next time. Visuals are created to help gain interest and lead around the eye but in this case the game failed to do so. We attempted to play this game but did not get very far due to the high amount of information that was needed to start. As none of us were too thrilled for role playing games it did help the cause (nether did the average 1 hour of play time not including setup).
I have to say that the problem with this game is NOT due to its actual game design since we did not go very far. The problem that I want to point out here is the overarching design of board games in general. If the design and presentation is weak, it will immediately turn away new players or lower their interest. There are many factors that separate the game types from your casual games (examples above) to a niche game type like role playing games. The amount of social interaction, the time span, etc... It is extremely hard to bring out everything and talk about design so to sum it up. Everything matters from the moment the player sees the game till the game is finished (I wrote my research paper last year on the same subject as this so explaining it here would not fit).
It is hard to exactly determine the most desirable PnP game due to the niches but so far what makes a good PnP game for me is simplicity and presentation. The faster the game is set up, the less time there is for the players to lose interest. The social interaction aspect definitely became one of the bigger influences within the decision of which game was more fun to play.
Good game design is something that is extremely thought out and is hard to fully explain. I cannot stress how many different factors are compiled together to create something of quality. Essentially everything out there from business, literature, to art requires a large amount of knowledge about design to execute. Nothing happens by accident in the design world.
Go read this book.
FREE TIME!
With the extra day off I finally made some room to just drop dead and lay around. Well, only in terms of homework at least. Now that I look back 80% of the time I hang out at my friends place I'm always trying to do some form of studying. Last year it was studying Glenn Vilppu's methods for figure drawing. Image below... that's what you call a master.
Vilppu Academy
This definitely helped me out so much last year that I can't stress it enough. In comparison to our schools "Observational" figure drawing, Vilppu's constructive/ imaginary figure drawing helped me out much more. I was also able to attend one of Vilppu's classes during spring break and that was quite eye opening. To see such a proficient artist doing what they do best in person is more inspirational than anything. Now that I feel somewhat comfortable to move forward myself for drawing I am now going to focus on digital painting.
I have nothing against traditional media but I simply have no time for it so photoshop is the way to go! I have no experience whatsoever in painting so its definitely going to be especially tough for the next few months. I mainly do figure painting (mostly portrait as of now) for practice/ study purposes. Sometimes I do comps just to practice on the broad values and silhouettes for environments but I have to admit that I have yet to have taken it much further than that. Something that I do for fun in terms of painting are Mechs and Jets (simply hardsurface stuff). It's just what I want to do so yeah...!
This ones a study of Shoji Kawamori's illustration for Macross. I'd say it was around the time of this painting (early on during summer) that I actually tried to paint digitally (although my tablet broke halfway through the summer and I couldn't move onwards, it was horrible...). Its a fairly quick study as I wanted to try broad strokes and overall value (more like a comp study). Basically what I was doing, and will be doing for the next year, is just to focus on values only. This next image is something I did yesterday because I realized that I have not painted something that I really wanted to paint for months now. Annnnd that would be Mechs!
I've got to say that it's so refreshing to do what you want once in a while. It just feels really enjoyable when you do something that you genuinely like or want to do. This piece is really nothing as I just spat it out remembering that I haven't done one in a while. It technically is still a study piece as I am still trying to figure out values with it. I am focusing more on painting techniques and values right now as feel that I need the basics before I could do anything. For example I did not spend any time designing this guy here. I just did a quick sketch and proceeded to paint over it. Once I am able to grasp digital painting better I'll then actually pay attention to the design (notice how theres pretty much no detail whatsoever apart from the small amount of scratches I added for texture).
Annd that's it for my non-nonsensical post for the day! Enjoy my bad works on my journey to learn how to paint!
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Conferences/ Shows!
After hearing my friend bring up the Game Developers Conference (GDC) for 2015 it reminded me that these conferences/ events existed. Being tied down with work all the time (recently) really does make you lose track of things. The two events that I would definitely like to attend the most during my time here in the States (whilst studying) would easily be GDC and the Massive Black Workshop. GDC for sure due to it arguably being the most relevant event for those who want to enter the game industry whilst the Massive Black Workshop is something more of a personal interest. As a sophmore it is not necessary for us to attend GDC just yet but it will definitely be a plus.
It would make most sense to enter through the volunteer program for (that is yet to be announced for 2015 sadly) GDC as it is quite pricey to go on our own expense and I have no clue what you would do going in with a student expo pass. Being a volunteer would put you into a group of people which is the more optimal option but then again the spots are limited (not to mention it is happening the week after spring break). The Massive Black Workshop on the other hand is a workshop that invites a fair amount of prominent artists in the industry. The reason why anyone would want to go there does not need any explanation!
I don't really know where I am going with this but I guess it just hit me that Tokyo Game Show (TGS) just passed this week. I'm just tired I guess...
It would make most sense to enter through the volunteer program for (that is yet to be announced for 2015 sadly) GDC as it is quite pricey to go on our own expense and I have no clue what you would do going in with a student expo pass. Being a volunteer would put you into a group of people which is the more optimal option but then again the spots are limited (not to mention it is happening the week after spring break). The Massive Black Workshop on the other hand is a workshop that invites a fair amount of prominent artists in the industry. The reason why anyone would want to go there does not need any explanation!
I don't really know where I am going with this but I guess it just hit me that Tokyo Game Show (TGS) just passed this week. I'm just tired I guess...
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Assassin's Creed: Revelations Trailer for GA227
So this is a trailer remake of the Assassin's Creed: Revelations that we had to do for our game design class using clips from a B role. The time limit was 35-65 seconds and we had some minor requirements such as basic animations in Adobe Premiere. Most challenging part was definitely getting the music right as the audio is what makes or breaks a trailer (At least for my workflow). 65 seconds was our maximum length and that proved to be a challenge at times (hence the rushed feeling at times in the trailer). The trailer did come out well even though it uses a lot of generic modern trailer techniques. At least in that sense I did learn what I was supposed to for this project. The export quality is acceptable but since its the correct preset requirement it'll have to make due!
Enjoy!
Sunday, September 7, 2014
VFX: A New-ish Fascination
So a while ago I came across this video (Vimeo link) and it pretty much spiked my interests in VFX by at least tenfold. The video shown above is a demo reel done by Big Lazy Robot VFX (aka. BLR) for 2013. As someone who is constantly flooded with CG content all the time, I'd say that it is easy to take things for granted and forget how far technology has come in this day and age. The combination of my fascinations with robots and dynamic lighting effects make me want to learn more about the VFX world. I can not exactly put it into words but I'd just love to find out about the process of VFX one day to see the differences between the Video Game world and the Film VFX world. This includes the modelling process to the whole pipeline to see how things are (as there are many artists out there who constantly dabble into both fields). I do not have much to say about the video except that I really like how awesome the reel is!
Another big factor for me being fascinated by the VFX/ film industry is also because of the following video.
This video here is an homage to the cult classic Ghost In The Shell directed by Ash Thorp (Vimeo link with credits). The project really intrigues me to see the sheer amount of creativity and skill put into it by a very talented group of artists. I can not say for sure what each person will get out of watching this video but for me it is a big amount of respect and admiration for those who worked on the project. I will not go into much detail now but Ash Thorp will get his own little write up in the future.
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Game Art Atlas
Sometime during the second semester of my freshmen year my friends and I had an idea to compile a bunch of resources that would be relevant to us Game Art majors and created this blog: Game Art Atlas. These resources ranged from things such as ZBrush Central, Game Dev Map, and Gamasutra. If anyone has ever head of Level UP! then I would say we were creating their resource section but making that our main focus instead of overpaints and streams.
It was an interesting idea to see who has come across what kind of sites/ resources but the whole idea ended very fast. Basically after I started all the template and layout (everything on the site so far) everyone bailed. It was disappointing to see that the very thing that we were going to create to help aid us along the way in our course was abandoned right off the bat.
A good thing however on my end was that it kick started my own research/ studying discipline. Instead of publishing everything to the site like I intended to I simply gathered everything I found useful and stuck it into Google drive. This ranges from tutorials to lists of artists. The Artist Atlas section that I put together was then what started my pursuit to discover different artists out there and that has been a great source of inspiration for me. Maybe someday I'll restart the blog up from scratch again. Someday...
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