Better Late Than Never!

I am finally posting after a cold winter break. I spent a lot of time playing Dota2, steam sales, building my portfolio, looking for an intership, writing shaders, and particle systems. I have found over the break that companies are really looking for strong skills. I have skills with a variety of things from computer science to film to shaders to animations, but they really wanted to see what I was good at. I am taking that advice and working sharders and special effects for this semester. I was able to use programs like FX composer and visual studio to help write shaders and special effects.

Currently I have an ambient, diffuse, normal map, specular, and transparent shaders. I have also made a cool cartoon like fire effect. I am also working on directing the art team with animations, sounds, and level design. This is going to be an exciting semester.

I recently went to Disneyland for my wife's half marathon. It was a lot of fun! It is such a refreshing experience for an artist or animator to walk around the park and see all the time put it into to make you feel immersed in the experience.

Nexus Tablet Sketches

Here are a few quick sketches for the island level. I expected them to have a bit better quality, but these are from my Google Nexus Tablet. I will have to double check if I missed some settings or something.

Update: I can save my sketches from Sketchbook Pro as a PSD. I sent them to photoshop and saved them as png's and they look better. Not sure what the deal is.

The first illustration is supposed to be a crater with a body of water in it followed by a close up of three islands. This was a quick demo as I am still getting used to drawing with a tablet.

Lego Halloween Party

The lecture by Nolan Bushnell got me thinking. I need to be more obnoxious and my team and I need to have some fun. Since it was Halloween I brought some candy! The main event was a Lego level design party! I was having trouble stimulating creativity, but this worked great. The artists all engaged and helped build something together. I look forward to more of these creative activities.

Nolan Bushnell

I just met the founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell. He came for a lecture on business and he even addressed our questions on the game industry. Some of the things I enjoyed was his thoughts on hiring, studying, and living. Being obnoxious and dedicated is a good thing. Study while standing, eat chocolate, and weed out he toxic people in your group. His lecture was very fun and informative. It was great too meet such a big figure in the game industry.

Wreck It Ralph

I just went and saw Wreck-It-Ralph! It was a wonderful movie. It had familiar Pixar tone, great cameos, and all out fun. There were great one-liners, hilarious product placement, and more fun. FUN is the best word to describe this movie. I really felt like I was little enjoying my childhood all over again, but without my mom telling me that video games are silly. Well I guess they are silly, but there is a lot of culture to it. This culture is developing and this movie shows that the new and the old can mesh well together. That's another thing to take from this movie. Never forget where you came from. Learning from old games will teach you how to make new games. I am very happy this movie was made to at least make me feel valid.

Jedi Academy Intership

I am seriously looking into applying for the Jedi Academy internship. I don't have amazing assets created that I would be proud of yet. I have mostly put my efforts toward being a game lead and art director in both Game Design 1 and 2. I do have confidence I can make something awesome, but I am not sure what to put in there. Should I only go for what I am best at or what I like most? For example, I really like making textures for games. Textures like normal maps, ambient occlusion maps, and light maps to improve efficiency. I also like animating, but I feel like my biggest interest is creating a tone or mood. Games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent comes to mind. It is dark, scary, 3D, and has great sound. My biggest interest is immersing the player into a word through a unified art style. I would say that my skills as a modeler and 2D artist lack. I hope that this does not disqualify me.

Game Mechanics

Game mechanics are a tough thing to understand. Even after playing many games, taking classes, and building games, the mechanics are tough to define. I have recently played Wizorb and Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes. These two games both have what seems to be an rpg element where you walk around towns and talk to people. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past comes to mind when I am playing those games. Ninja Royale feels like that right now. You have a guy who wants to help a city, there will be some parkour, and eventually some sort of boss fight. What Wizorb and M & M have is that the game isn't actually an RPG. They are strategy games. There is a whole other game than just walking around cities, talking to people, and saving the town. The important questions we have to ask are:

What do you have to do to save the town? Why are you being forced to do it that way? Why are you saving the town?

We want to make our game unique. These games did something unique. You think it is going to be another RPG/Hack and Slash. They turn it on its head by creating a new mechanic or new gameplay style. How can we make a game within what looks like another RPG?

The idea I had was to use these spirit wards. In Japanese culture they many ways to ward off evil. I want to take this a step further and create a game out of these wards. I am still fleshing this out, but this could be the reason why the character has to parkour. These spells are in all the usual places so the character has to get creative and go around them. The character can also use these spells to protect himself or others. Anyways I am still working on it.