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I'm a freelance 2d artist; My portfolio can be seen here.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
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  Coding, Miner, Painting, Faces, Steal my game idea | 
Posted - 5/28/2008 11:18:14 PM | Back in the coding again
I haven't touched code for a month, at least, and have not seriously coded for perhaps two months. My brain has to work hard to get back in to it but it feels good. Too bad about totally bashing my head on the corner of a cabinet door the other day.
In a better world I'd be inventing a time machine about now.
Coding what, you ask?
Project Codename: Miner
Think Miner VGA but skiffy and better. (Incidentally, the mining aspect of Dwarf Fortress was inspired in part by the gameplay of Miner VGA. Neat!)
So yes, this one has begun. (What another project? The one sentence refresh: I'll have as many projects as I please and shall deal with them at my whim!) Laura is actually going to code the thing in Java, I've just been thinking on terrain generation algorithms. It's not a question of reproducing extraterrestrial geology but rather of generating interesting game maps, of seeding veins of Unobtanium in a manner most enjoyable...
Concept art:
...which leads us to
Digital Painting
I though I ought to start this up again.
Current palette :
Images:
  
Yeah, those last two are totally Dwarf Fortress inspired. It's on my mind, obviously.
I was thinking a bit on drawing faces as relating to the Uncanny Valley concept; Perhaps it's easy to accept the opposite extremes of representation, a symbol vs. a photograph of a human face:
fig a.  fig b. 
But a drawing which insists upon a realistic* yet stylized aesthetic (which perhaps I am going for) can be very difficult to pull off. Maybe this is because humans are naturally very good and well practiced at seeing faces and how images that are trying to look like faces don't look exactly like faces. But humans are also capable of being socialized to accept nominally realistic-ish but actually non-realistic aesthetics uncritically, eg. advertising images & the hyper-real leaking into popular aesthetics, but maybe I'm shooting a bit wide with this.
Point is, drawing the human(oid) form is hard. I'm working on it.
[*I deny the word "realistic" as an aesthetic concept particularly with regard to computer games! It is too abused and needs rest; more on the treachery of images in another post.]
Steal My Game Idea
Part of the fun of RPGs is sifting through lots of skills, items, and characters, discovering how they work, how they interact with the world. Why waste time with all the leveling boredom and being all precious about HP?
Why not
A flat-progression Zombie Apocalypse RPG!!!
- Play a group of random survivors with random skills, quirks, and pathologies!
- Find other random survivors to join your team!
- Gameplay based on skills, item, & character discovery/exploration
- Inevitable death due to ever increasing zombie hordes & decay of infrastructure
- DF-style integration of previous plays into the fiction of a game-state (fight your zombified earlier characters!)
- One save, not of the game but of the world-state, so all choices are final, therefore:
- Play for the fear of the moment, the utter loss of irreplaceable items and characters (just one bite and they're an incubator of zombie-ism), there's no time (or game mechanic) for kibbutzing about saved games!
I'd play it. PS if anyone makes this you can totally give me like half the profits, right?
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| Dwarf Fortress and Art Direction | |
Posted - 5/21/2008 6:11:29 PM | Post Meta
Ok, my vacation from writing due to moving is officially over. (Did I go 2 weeks with nothing? Jeez!) Regular Wednesdayish posting shall continue as usual.
I've got lots of graphics work, so I'm happy and busy with that. At this point I don't actually need more work as such, I just need more time: less building furniture and painting the new place, moar graphics-making!
Losing is Fun: Dwarf Fortress
I got into Dwarf Fortress about a week ago, so help me god, and it is amazing. In many ways it is the antithesis of the contemporary gaming industry yet it is successful as a game and a source of income to the coder. It's a fascinating enough phenomena that it deserves a huge article/essay.
This is not that article. (I'll post it here if I finish it), I just had to use this to lead into mentioning a re-thought from over a year ago:
I was talking to dcosborn about designing our project, Codename: ATTAS, a space adventure/shooter/rpg, and via reading about DF recall saying that we should reward rather than punish the player for getting their ship blown up and losing all their money. Desperation, loss and perseverance through the worst of times make for great stories but games tend to punish the player for getting themselves into these sort of situations -- but they have such dramatic potential! There's a problem there, a conflict between telling a good story getting in the way of uncritical adherence to the assumed "win the game" narrative in game design / learned player behaviour.
In the older versions of Dwarf Fortress doom was inevitable along the lines of Tolkein's dwarves of Moria -- they "dug too deep" and awoke a monster... At the very least, even without the Moria-doom ending, death and calamity is interesting in DF because there are so many ways things can go terribly wrong (see: Boatmurdered), then when your fortress is dead and abandoned you can revisit it later as an adventurer exploring a dungeon or as a party trying to reclaim the settlement. The player's loss of the fortress becomes a gain, it becomes part of the setting of the game world. Brilliant!
So indeed why not reward the player both with game mechanics and flavorful content for "losing"? In ATTAS the player could perhaps gain all kinds of bonus traits ("brush with death", "unkillable", "lived to tell the tale") and additional skills for pushing on beyond calamity rather than reloading. These events can be commented upon in-game by npcs and such to build into the game fiction and game design a motive for the player to experience loss which takes into account the win-game player motive.
As a general element of game design, then, the player should be rewarded for playing the game not gaming the game.
(Depending on what kind of game you're making of course. Still, a move against the win/lose-reload dichotomy is good, just as games as a whole moved past using a numerical score just-because.)
So here's a fun interview of the DF coder covering writing to game design to world generation to simulating fluids with cellular automata:
"Losing is fun", Interview: The Making Of Dwarf Fortress
Random inflammatory quote: "TA: Hit points are depressing to me. It's sort of a reflex to just have HP/MP, like a game designer stopped doing their job.
Art Direction
As a freelance artist working directly for game coders/designers I am growing to see the necessity of art direction (and how it hurts to lack it). In my case I have to learn to do this myself so I've been having some thoughts on how to go about art direction prompted in part by this feature about the art direction of Magic: The Gathering.
[Though to be honest I quite enjoyed MTG's earlier years when the art was, in hindsight and as described by the linked article, managed in a much looser fashion, so there was a huge range and variety of artwork, and as we all know, the art of MTG is about 2/3rds of the fun of the game. Recent artwork for MTG is much more polished and of a more even and standardized comic book/concept art style which I think loses something interesting.]
So here I have written a list of art direction issues as an artist addressing a coder/designer (henceforth "designer").
What I need:
Precise technical specifications -
I need to know exactly what format and resolution the designer wants graphics to be in, for obvious reasons I hope.
Image scale -
What size are people or buildings in the game? If it's about spaceships, about what scale should they be on -- are these spaceships the size of cities or the size of fighter planes? Is the average human being, say, 80 pixels high and in the map-screen houses are about 30x30 pixels? I need to know!
I recall that in Half-life 2 there were special textures made for the map-makers that showed the height of a player, of a door, and of counter-tops (or something) so that the maps could be made to-scale and consistent without all the resources completed. This was good thinking on someone's part.
Mood & feeling -
Is the game fun & bright or dark & violent? I need to know what I should be trying to get the player to feel.
Art style -
This is like mood & feeling, but more specific about exactly how the graphics are drawn. Should the graphics be cartoony, with hard outlines? Manga? Painterly? 3d rendered? This may require examples of resources already made, if any, or examples from others games/media for me to emulate.
[I don't do 3d stuff or anime/manga, so hopefully you know that before hiring me!]
Game background -
I'd like to know everything about the background story and setting so that I can make something that fits into the game world. The more material the better! Often, though, the game is set in a more generic scifi or fantasy world so this doesn't matter all that much, but is still helpful.
Other resources -
Is another artist doing art for your game as well? Are there in-progress screenshots? I need to see these so that I can match my work to what has already been done, or at least I'd like to see what my graphics are going to be doing in the game.
In-progress shots -
Related to the last point, over a longer job it is very useful for me to see my art in-game to see if it is working. I could be provided with a build of the game itself, or with screenshots, whichever is most convenient.
And for all of these, if a designer says "do whatever you want" or "you decide" I really hope they mean it, because otherwise everyone is going to be unhappy. (And I do very much enjoy making things however I like, don't get me wrong.) [The moral:] It's best to state design demands clearly and comprehensively because it'll make both our jobs easier, and in the future I'm going to use this list to cover all the things that I need to know as an artist doing work for a client.
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