Week 1: Game Art Round 2

I’m back at DMU for second year and another round of game art and with painful memories of a stress filled, sleep deprived final hand-in week still fresh in mind it’s pretty safe to say I have a much better work ethic and frame of mind this year.

But with welcome backs short lived we were thrown in the deep end not only with two group projects but the discovery that while we took a break the games industry did not and the diffuse and specular maps have been usurped in favour of PBR, physically based rendering. So here’s your maps, there’s Unreal engine 4 and this is the asset swap, enjoy!

The asset swap being our first project so to give everyone a taste of team work with each team member completing a step in creating an asset then passing it on. So I spent my first day spending a disproportional amount of time painting pictures of benches before a warm reunion with 3DS Max, which promptly crashed.

Once it was up and running again however I was working on a somewhat odd task of modelling a roasted pig, which I must admit is not how most vegetarians plan on spending their days but never the less I think he turned out ok and fairly cute given his circumstances.

 I chose not to name him knowing he would go on to be unwrapped and cooked by my teammates so I instead passed him on and moved onto my next tasks of unwrapping and texturing.

 I've done very few purely hand painted textures and the wood of the shield was generated with Photoshop filters but in this case I'm saying it counts but regardless I was very pleased with the outcome though my texture for the copper could have used some improvement, especially once it was in engine and my attempts to come to grips with the new roughness map left it particularly shiny and reflective but other than that it went alright.

As for the second group project there was only one topic of conversation:

Brown. Brown and the realisation I have never watched a movie that wasn't brown.
This project was to recreate a film still in engine but avoiding the recurring colour palettes of green and brown, a harder task than you might think. So we're still looking for something to work with on that front.

More on the visual design side life drawing is very rusty in terms of form and drawing speed so that's going to require some work to fix it.

All in all it's good to be back and I'm looking forward to this year, here's hoping I can organise myself better this time around.

Art Direction

A recent critical studies task was to give a presentation on art direction. Coming from A-level art history I went with traditional media to analyse as opposed to a game or film. 

I presented on a American painter Edward Hopper as I felt he displays a lot of the skills we been working on this year. His body of work covers various points of perspective, cityscapes, figures of people and he has a particular fondness for capturing light. What I like most about Hopper's work is how he brings all these aspects together and creates atmosphere in his paintings. 

Using one of my favorite paintings as an example, Nighthawks painted by Hopper in 1942 is one of his best examples of atmospheric painting. So much so it was the image Ridley Scott presented to his team creating Bladerunner for the feel he wanted for the city.  

Hopper has painted a lot of works exploring the effects of different light but Nighthawks is one of his best examples of the effects of man-made light during the nighttime such as the highlights on the counter seem highly reflective which would not be visible in the day.

Hopper uses the posture of his figures ad creates a sense of story within the dinner, giving the viewer the feeling of conversation between the people inside. 

The overall feel of the painting gives a 'city never sleeps' feel. Despite the surrounding buildings being dark and locked up for the night there is still part of the city open and awake with people around.

The skills Hopper shows in fitting atmosphere and story into a still image are commonly applied to game design, concept artists attempt to do the same with the artwork for the game worlds they are making. This concept work for Deus Ex: Human revolution does a lot of the same work with lighting, showing the reflection of man-made and neon lights.

The 00's to Now

While the 00’s kick off with new releases and new players in the console market it also marks Sega’s withdrawal from the game. After the release of the Dreamcast in 1998 by 2001 they had discontinued it (not before I got my hands on one). As Sony released the Playstation 2 and Nintendo released the humble and wonderful Gamecube and new challenger quickly stepped forward to fill Sega’s void in the form of Microsoft with the Xbox. These companies would stand as the console market giants of the coming decade and which would spawn the infamous rivalry between Sony and Microsoft, a rivalry would probably account for around 20% of the name calling that goes on across the internet.  

The Playstation 2 would go onto to be the best selling console of all time and even in the face of the new gen still holds that record high. Xbox would gain it's success from the release of the first Halo game and unfortunately for Nintendo the Gamecube had the misfortune to be branded a 'kids console' so fell into third place behind it's rivals mostly thanks to the hardware's colourscheme and the rather cartoon like graphics the system tended to utilised which was now losing it's place as the world moved out of low-poly resolutions and towards high definition.  

With what Dreamcast started Xbox finished as consoles in 2002 begin to enter the PC gaming world of multiplayer with the commercial launch of Xbox Live. Which this and the ever improving graphical quality of the console interest in PC began to decline but as it proved during all the industry crashes the PC is not easy to deter as Blizzard proved in 2004 with the release of World of Warcraft and that most successful MMO in the industry. PC gaming also received a big boost in China in 2000 with a ban on foreign consoles coming into action for the fear of harmful effects violent video games had on youths. This allowed PC to hold nearly two thirds of the gaming market in China. A ban that has very recently been lifted (Campbell, 2014). 

This brings us to the seventh generation and in 2005/2006 the console wars deployed the new troops. Each sporting high definition, wireless controllers, internal harddrives and online multiplayer and services, Sony and Microsoft continued to fight it out and Nintendo seemed to share the curse of the Gamecube and was branded a 'kids and family' console but this time, they made it work. Backwards compatible with the soon to be axed Gamecube the Nintendo Wii actually out sold the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

Internal memory and compatibility to the internet by this point has moved us long on from the days of blocky cartridges with the ability to download digital copies straight onto your system and providing a useful outlet for indie games to reach the audience. Internal memory also removed the hassle of locating which one of your many memory cards the save file you're looking for it on

No memory card?
Your hardware has improved

.

So we're finally back in 2014 and standing at the start of the next console generation with the Xbox One, PS4 and the Wii U where these corporate giants face the first real bit of upheaval they have in over a decade. The Xbox One was at the heart of a huge controversy regarding it's original 'Always on' policy that the console must be connected to the internet to function and is also limited with a DRM restriction in an attempt to combat piracy but also effects the use of used games on the system. Bad fan reactions lost many customers over to Sony despite the retraction on the always on policy.
Along side all the in fighting between the consoles they face new competition from smart phone and tablet gaming. With versions of the games attracting audiences not normally interested in games via social networking and free to play apps these independent and app based games are drawing in a large market casual market while the cost of console games continue to rise and PC offers players cheap access to games via programs such as Origin and Steam.


While the hardware continues to improve the past few years the games side has seen very little innovation. Call of Duty has made few changes to it's design with every new release, sticking close to their tried and proved design. New titles have been very same and generic.  Developers are hoping to take their games to the next level by utilising the power of next gen such as Bioware with the release of Dragon Age Inquisition offering a map 5-times the size of their first Dragon Age map and a possible 40 unique endings (Ligman, 2014). Hopefully with new and ever improving technology the game market with start to pick up again.




https://web.archive.org/web/20071103122615/http://www.games-fusion.net/press/content/blizzard_entertainment_announc.php

Campbell, Scott (2014) China lifts 14 year ban on foreign games consoles [Online] The Telegraph. Availble at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/video-game-news/10555370/China-lifts-14-year-ban-on-foreign-games-consoles.html

Ligman, Kris (2014)  Xbox the official magazine. Issue 111. P..51

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_and_video_games#2000s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_video_gaming 

1980's to 1990's and The Golden age of Arcade

In between cold war riots, Margret Thatcher riots and pretty interesting fashion statements time was found for the Golden age of arcade, an era few people would struggle to not name a game from and with Space invaders being credited with ending a crash in the market in 1977 largely caused by PONG clones flooding the market. Riding on this success and Asteroids there was a new innovation of games on the market with the appearance of pop icons Pac-man, Donkey Kong and Mario along with platform games, fighting games and shooters. The arcade had begun generating billions in revenue annually with the number of arcades doubling between 1980 and 1982 (Wolf, 2008)

Pac-Man was also credited with expanding the target audience, bringing a large influx of female players into gaming. Frogger also proved effective at interesting girls in games. (Herz. 1997)

Ever the turbulent industry it was once again rocked by a market crash in 1983, again with poor quality clones playing a major role. This crash dealt a particularly hard blow to the North American industry bankrupting many companies and causing major loses for Atari, who were not aided by their massive commercial failure of the ET game which was only worth burying the unsold cartridges in a big hole in New Mexico.

At the end of this crash and alongside the rise of PC gaming came the NES reviving the home console market after its release in North America in 1985, the industry began to once again recover bringing the now still popular franchises of Zelda, Metroid which brought players back behind their TV screens. Ultimately this began the end of the arcade genre and the rise of new genres such as American RPGs Metal gear solid and Dragon Quest and Japanese RPGs Final fantasy and Dragon warrior.

By the 90’s PC gaming continued to rise with multiplayer usually via modem to modem and by 1995 Activision was beginning to build PC units especially suited for gaming and working on creating games in 3D environments such as MechWarrior 2 (ckmogo). On the console front Nintendo and Sega with the Mega Drive being the big rivalry at the time but it was also the emergence of the handheld console with the Nintendo Gameboy remake the Gameboy Pocket.

Getting to the late 90’s I’m finally old enough to vaguely recall it without the need for too much research and reading as a starting point. In 1994 Sony hit the console market with the Playstation, 1996 saw the arrival of

the Nintendo 64. While the Nintendo 64 was a machine for cartridges the Playstation games came on CD-ROMS, allowing games to add bigger files with more cinematic elements and higher quality sound, as a result by 1998 Metal Gear Solid was one of the earliest games to contain full voice acting.

While the 80’s had been harsh to the consoles towards the end of the 90’s they’d come back fighting, bringing with them masses of titles, Sonic the hedgehog, Doom, Tomb Raider, Pokemon, Resident Evil, Half-life etc. etc, a very long list of games that started the franchises that are still going strong today and nearly 20 years on are still taking our money.

Wolf, M. (2008). The video game explosion: a history from PONG to PlayStation and beyond. ABC-CLIO. p. 105.

Herz. J. C (1997) Joystick Nation. Abacus.

(ckmogo) This Is "The Gamer's PC" 1995 (2009) [online video] Available from:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPOuR1CTJss

http://www.classicgaming.com/features/articles/computergaminghistory/

Getting into Immersion Pt 2. Interactive Storytelling.

Before looking at current examples let’s start by backing up through history for a better idea of when games and story began to mesh together. Early games from before the late 1970’s had little to no story. Games both lacked the graphics power to display large amounts of text and the memory to store it so what could be achieved was limited. One of the first examples of games coming into storytelling was ‘Colossal Cave Adventure’ in 1976. A text based adventure this was basically a book that being a game allowed for the interactive dimension, in which the player could interact and navigate with the text based environment with short commands such as ‘Get lamp’. (Ryan, 2014)

It would have been a different
movie if he'd had barrels to throw

Years later in 1981 Nintendo produces the first game to tell a complete story via cut scenes with the Donkey Kong arcade game (GWR, nd) but even with this, with only one monkey and no typewriter is wasn't going to be Shakespeare. The story was simply ‘Donkey Kong has kidnapped the princess you better go find her’ and while it’s not much it was a start and it got the message across just as well as cinema managed with its lady stealing giant ape except this time you got to be the one to knock it off its tower (when you say it like that it sounds awful but I’m sure you get what I’m saying). Also simple as it is, ‘save the princess’ has been the overall goal of almost every Mario game from then onward just with more to the story, more locations and a spikier ape like creature to do the kidnapping.  

Moving on from these, the world seems very undecided on what story telling in game constitutes and researching has left me somewhat more confused than before I started. It’s all well and good to come from these points such as Donkey Kong to where we are now but what I've found is the debate that just ‘a game with a story’ is not the same as ‘an interactive story’. This is a debate that actually made me question the point I was trying to make when starting this, was I looking for good storytelling in games or games that pull off an interactive story. This left me sat there stumped for a good long while of what I was actually looking for. Thinking it over interaction with the game and its story was what I originally wanted, to put the fact you have control and freedom within the story environment to use. This swiftly opened up many more debates surrounding it.

A story can’t be interactive if it linear. It’s not interactive if it’s scripted. Yet games that have this in abundance are receiving praise for their interactivity. Beyond two souls received a lot of praise, with the official PlayStation magazine calling it ‘an essential purchase for interactive-drama fans’ (Iwaniuk, 2013). Beyond received a lot of love, love I get the feeling in the result of Stockholm syndrome because to me it was essentially a film that held me hostage because it occasionally needed me to tap a button. If that was just to make me feel like I was actually of use to it or because the quick time events were all that stood in the way of it being shipped as a game rather than an animated film I don’t know but while it was different and I thought it was pretty good as a movie but having me tap a button at scripted points to check I’m still watching is far from an interactive player experience.

Games will always have a level of restraint, if the game doesn't have a dance option then there isn't going to be any dancing (modding community not included), you can’t get past the need for things to be programmed in but I don’t think that has to be a major hurdle. Despite my view of beyond two souls I disagree that a game can’t be linear and immersive, it’s more about how involved you get as you follow the story. I’m not talking get from A to B and shoot anything that moves but something that gives you a level of freedom within its story. Half-life achieved a nice in-between of the styles of Quake and Metal gear in terms of little story or dumping a large amount of information in your lap. Half-life began to allow you to decide your own level of involvement and immersion, you could be a man escaping from a secret base during an alien attack or you could look deeper and discover a bigger story full of conspiracy. (Hodgson, 2004)   

I found this again with Deus Ex: Human revolution, again you follow an overall linear story but talking to the right people, going off the map provides access to more information and gives the feeling off more story on a larger scale. Basically non-linear gameplay within a linear story.

To conclude this creating immersive, interactive environments in games doesn't seem easy, especially when the accepted view on what that is exactly seems so confused and cloudy. There doesn't seem to be one right way to do it and some do it better than others and to offer Beyond two souls some redemption even if I don’t think it worked it took a shot and tried something new, which is a good thing in an industry so uneasy about going off the beaten track.

Ryan, M. Emerson, L and Robertson B (eds) (2014) The John Hopkins guide to digital media. Baltimore. John Hopkins University Press.

GWR, nd http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-5000/first-use-of-cutscenes-to-tell-a-story-in-a-video-game/

Iwaniuk, P. (2013) Beyond: Two Souls review – an essential purchase for interactive-drama fans. (Online) PlayStation official magazine UK. Available from: http://www.officialplaystationmagazine.co.uk/review/beyond-two-souls-review-official-playstation-magazine/

Hodgson, D. (ed) (2004) Half-life 2: Raising the bar. Roseville CA.Prima Games.

Critical Studies Workshop

I've never enjoyed writing mainly because I find it difficult so I’m happy to take all the help I can get hence I was quite eager to attend the critical studies library workshop.

The biggest things I took from it was an actual idea of referencing, after glancing at some of my own work and having no idea what I was talking about and where it became quite obvious why it needs to be done correctly so I corrected that where I could. I was also advised as I stared at a blank paper plate I was meant to fill with writing to try talking into a Dictaphone to see if that organises and collects my thoughts more.  

The day ended with a look the role of an art director and at image painted to industry standard in two hours looks like, a concept that was only slightly overwhelming. I always knew that my drawing pace needed work but not quite to that extent.

Well now it’s an Easter of putting these workshop notes to use and catching up with the blog tasks for me.

Industry job requirements

For this task we were set to find a job request for a role we’d be interested in filling in the future to get an idea of the standard and requirements industries are looking for and give us a clearer picture of what we’re aiming to achieve on the course.

I went with a listing for an environment artist, while I’m a huge fan of characters and character art when it comes to making things myself I find I’m much happier with environments and they are what I spend a large proportion of my time in-game stopping to look at.

(Colour coding probably isn't the best way to do this but it’s the easiest way to organise it to make sense to myself to avoid this turning into a much bigger rambling wall of text so, red would be something I’m nowhere near, blue what I’m already working on improving and regular black something I think I can already do)

This ad is for a senior environment artist for Sony in one of their London offices

“We are looking for an experienced and highly motivated Senior Environment Artist to join our world-class development team working on our next generation PS4 titles.”

Job Responsibility:
- Creating environment and prop assets to a high level of skill and ability within a predefined art style

- Able to take ownership of distinct areas & work through complex areas of work with little to no supervision

- Proactive in being aware of industry knowledge and highlighting examples of technical and quality benchmarks in current environment asset creation

- Ability to independently plan, brief, review & integrate outsource environment and prop work

- Contributes to ideas for development of the environment department, projects and team

- Able to identify personal growth and be proactive in following a self-development plan

- Mentorship to junior environment team members

- Proactive in driving internal communication and inspiration within the environment team

Knowledge and skills:
- Very high level of modelling, texturing, and UV mapping skills including high detail modelling techniques in Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop (or equivalent 3D and 2D programs) with an attention to modelling relevant detail when creating environment assets

- Strong understanding of the principles of form, composition, colour and lighting.

- Ability to independently plan, brief, review & integrate outsource work.

- Strong creative and technical problem solving skills. (who could deny it with my amazing colour coding system?)

- The ability to meet deadlines and to work to a technical and time budget for assets.

- Strong time management abilities, able to self-direct and maintain a sustainable predictable art delivery process.

- Ability to highlight examples of inspirational work that pushes technical and quality benchmarks

- Able to take direction and feedback from the team Supervisors and Directors.

- Proactive and self-motivated team player who works well in a collaborative environment.

- Excellent communication skills - artistic, verbal, and written.

- Flexibility & the ability to learn new skills over time.

Ok so overall there is very little black text there. My employability currently consists of willingness to learn and receiving feedback which is generally the minimum for every university student. 

All the red pretty much highlights my two biggest weaknesses, communication and management. That is honestly no secret, it's always been that way. Over the years I've used a lot of methods to get myself organised and while they work for a while they've never stuck more than a month or so. The only solution I have for this one is to develop some damn willpower for a change. 

As for communication, especially verbal it's something I'm always working on and a factor that's dragged me down for years. My work suffered all through my foundation course from an inability to communicate with and ask for help from tutors. While it caused all these problems believe it or not that's an improvement, go back a couple of years and I couldn't catch a train alone without someone to buy my tickets so I didn't have to talk to the conductor. Written communication doesn't come easy either, I'm one of those dyslexics who could sit there for hours sometimes trying to put thoughts into words without success. I've found coping mechanisms to help organise my thoughts (amazing colour coding) but while this helps me I'm never sure if what I end up with makes as much sense to others as my systems do to me.

And finally all that blue is pretty much what the course is trying to help me to do and what I'm already trying to work towards, it's almost as if the course structure was written to be industry standard, funny that. 

But how to go about turning all those requirements into black text? I think the biggest thing to sort out with all this is communication and with some hard work everything else will follow. I have no problems taking criticism but never actively seek it so my work never really varies from the ideas I have and the problems I see so I should try to talk with the other course members more and use the DMUGA Facebook account more often. The up and coming group projects will also be a good opportunity to experience working in a team for the first time on an art based project and is a good starting point for fixing some of those red issues, since while practice probably won't make me perfect it can make me better.