Let me take you to the candy shop - pt.1

Picking just two summer projects from the list seemed like a pretty daunting task when I first saw the variety we had to choose from. There’s a very wide range of themes there and all of them have the potential to be pretty awesome, but at the same time none of them jumped out at me at first. However, I’ve wanted to model some kind of old fashioned shop for a while, and making a sweet shop seemed a good way to get that out of my system. 

I started with an idea of what I wanted, but pinning that mental image down into a workable concept has proved a challenge. Ideally what I’ve been looking for is a shop that is a perfect match to the one I have in my head, so I can just draw details directly from real life but it hasn’t been that easy. Looking around Leicester city centre has provided my with some reference material, but there’s only one sweet shop I can find and it’s quite far from fitting the bill of what I want my final product to look like. A large proportion of my research so far has therefore been through Google images, which if nothing else lets me quickly skim through different styles of shops, although it’s frustrating finding an image of a shop I like but not being able to see the details.

So while I still haven’t found a shop that’s exactly what I want, I have been able to pick out lots of images with individual elements that I like, and to create a mood board that overall shows a good representation of my” ideal” sweet shop.

I want to try to keep within the given specifications for the project, more as a personal challenge than anything – but also because budgeting my projects in terms of tris is one of the many areas I’ve struggled with. During this year’s projects, I’ve wavered between barely using half of the tri budget, to seriously struggling to finish the model within the limit, as was my biggest problem with the architectural project.

I’d say this was mostly down to still being pretty new at modelling – I had no idea what a given number of tris looked like as anything but a number, and each time I was attempting something completely new. There’s still undoubtedly going to be some trial and error involved, as this is significantly larger than any of the coursework projects, but at least I’m now prepared. 

To try and make it more manageable, I’ve split the project into three main chunks, and given them their own polygon budget: the shop exterior, including two sides of the building, the roof and part of the street, I’m giving 2k-3k tris; the interior and furniture I’m allowing 1k, and the remaining 6k to 7k tris are going towards all the various items to fill the shop with, mostly the jars.

These sections are also somewhat separate design-wise, with the idea that I can just switch between them if I get bored of one. So far that hasn’t exactly been successful; I’ve had to settle on the general plan of the outside of the building first before I can start designing the inside, because the layout of the inside of the shop is heavily dependent on the overall floor plan.

This is the exterior I’ve decided to use. When I was sketching up ideas, I knew it was going to have bay window, but I also really liked the look of the corner window. I couldn’t find any examples of shops that had both, but I think what I came up with is a plausible design that incorporates both. Now I’ve got the overall shape down, I can start looking at the details. I need to find a design for the edges of the windows and door that is consistent, and will work to neatly fill in the gap betweent he different windows and the brickwork.

I’m also trying (and somewhat failing) to resist the urge to start modelling the various small assets – for instance jars of sweets - without any prior preparation such as, well, working out whether I’ll actually need then in the scene. Making meshes is one of the parts I find the most fun, since at that point everything is simple you can quickly see the object taking shape, and with smaller assetsyou spend less time hunting for stray vertexes that have somehow eluded the weld tool.  At least, having given in and modelled a few different shaped jars, I can now estimate just how many jars I’ll be able to having in total, and can adjust the design of the shelving, etc., to make sure the shop doesn’t look too empty.

Partly, I aim to use this project to solidify what I’ve learnt over the year. There’s a few skills and techniques I want to get a better grip on before the start of next year, including quite basic thing like lighting, and rigging, which I ended up flailing around with a bit when they became necessary and I had no idea what I was doing. Baking object is another get think I want to get the hang of, or at the very least have tried. I actually wasn’t aware until recently that using a highpoly model to create a normal map for a lowpoly one was something you could do in Max. I guess I thought it was a ZBrush thing? I don’t think I really thought about at all, but it’s reassuring to know that there are easier ways to produce normal than using hand-painted height maps.

The final, big important thing I want  to work on is keeping my written work up to date. While I’ve mostly kept up with the game production and visual design parts of the course, critical studies, the third side of triangle, has been badly neglected. I find writing difficult, or at least I find writing concisely and meaningfully difficult. It’s something which – as much as I put it off – I know will only improve if I practice, and for that reason, I’m going to make a real effort to blog about this project as it moves along.

game design: art direction

Creating a good game isn’t just a case of having the right people. Large production teams mean you can get out more content, but the more people you have working on the same thing, the harder it is to coordinate. Many game series rely on an easily recognisable style to sell copies, and so there needs to tight quality control to make sure that work produced by different individuals fits into the larger picture. An art director has to has to set the style for a game, and throughout the production process, they’re responsible for making sure the work produced will come together in the final product.

In some ways, games are a much more unforgiving medium than film. You can’t hide things with careful camera angles or cropping; everything in the virtual environment you’re creating is laid bare for the player to scrutinize. In film you can direct the viewers’ attention to a certain subject, and if they miss something, once the camera moves on it’s gone. Games have to anticipate the player moving at their own pace, and there’s no knowing or controlling what a particular person will choose to look at; at most you can try to draw their attention with visual clues.

Somewhere you have to compromise between quality and quantity, between artistic realism and practicality. There’s a limit to what can realistically be achieved within a given timeframe, and not having a clear stylistic aim once the actually work begins is a sure way to waste valuable time. This is where concept art plays a valuable role, but even that is usually produced by people, who will all have their own visual style and ideas, and will all have a different take on the same subject. 

Luckily, there are tools that can be used to maintain artistic consistency. Reference libraries are invaluable for sharing ideas and quickly establishing a theme. These will probably include photographs, textures, colour palettes, a variety of artwork and even screenshots of previous games if the project is trying to emulate a pre-existing style. Modelling a few test assets prior to starting production allows a more accurate estimate of production time, and also can be used as reference for further assets.

A clearly defined pipeline for modelling assets means inconsistencies can be addressed before they become excessively costly to correct. Checklists for stylisation and overall quality can help to make sure all assessts meet the same standard.

For efficiency, it’s likely that many assets, such as textures and meshes, will be reused. Working out where and how these assets will be used requires planning in advance. 

Ultimately, the role of an Art Director is a creative one. Even if they don’t directly contribute to any individual detail, their influence is seen thought the final product, in the visual style of the game as a whole. An art director will need to be able to make informed artistic choices, and therefore it is essential that they have a solid knowledge of the basics of art, such as composition and colour  theory.

Visual design: Guildhall

I had a lot of fun with this, although at times it was frustrating. Probably the biggest thing I’ve learnt from this project is that not only are excessively large image sizes unnecessary, my computer hates them, especially once you bring in multiple layers. Most of the grief this gave me was because my PC had to deal with a 10000 by 7000 image with about 30 layers. Sorry computer! I promise I’ll never to do that to you again! (Spoiler: I probably will.)

Other than that, some parts – specifically the stairs and banisters in the foreground -would have benefited from me using 3-point perspective, instead of shoehorning everything into 2-point. Maybe next time.

elements of game design

I’ve always thought that the best way to divide games into categories is to look at why we play them. I’m a bit of a Solitaire addict, but I’m still surprised that, on reflection, since Christmas the amount of time I’ve spent playing Klondike on my phone is probably comparable to the total hours I’ve spent hiking around Skyrim.

Surprising? I’ve been eager for the fifth Elder Scrolls game ever since it was nothing more than speculation and vague, cryptic comments hidden in Bethesda interviews. I suppose it’s because of how quickly I can get into the game. I won’t play a PC game like Skyrim unless I know I’ve got at least an hour to spare, and if I have that much free time, I’ll often have some other outstanding task that I can’t justify ignoring for that long.

It’s not just a matter of the time it takes to start up my computer and the game itself – there’s a certain amount of mental involvement too. If I haven’t touched the game for a few days, I’ve probably completely forgotten what I was doing, and it’ll take a while to get my bearings. Neither do I want to play for a short time. I’ll say this now; Skyrim does not have the best quests I’ve come across, or the best controls – but the huge world and gorgeous graphics make it extremely immersive nonetheless, and to get the best experience you need to play for a long stretch of time. 

Solitaire, on the other hand, is just something I play at two in the morning when I can’t sleep. It’s kind of addictive, true, but I can sum up everything I have to say about it in a few sentences. It’s hard to objectively describe a card game in terms of video game mechanics, but the controls themselves are so simple I could pick it up and start playing almost immediately. While there’s’ definitely quite a lot that could be said about the strategy, the basic mechanics is just the absolute minimum of what is needed to be playable.

I don’t play games because I like the combat mechanics (although they have a direct impact on my enjoyment of the game) or even because of the graphics – although the art direction often has a direct impact on whether I’d play the game in the first place. 

It’s about the story.

I don’t mean the long overarching plot of the game, either. I’ve played games with elaborate plotlines and fully fleshed out backstories for every area in game, and then I’ve completely ignored every cut-scene and lengthy charactermonologue because they haven’t contributed anything to my enjoyment of the game. Sometimes all I really want from a game is enemies to kill and puzzles to solve, and I don’t care why other than that the former are attacking me, the latter gives me better items, and overall there’s a general sense of progression.

In a game demo I played years ago, one character option starts the game in a dungeon. The first thing you have to do is kick down a loose part of the wall, sneak through the sewer and kill the sleeping guard to get a key. This whole series of steps is just a way of teaching you the basic game mechanics – targeting objects, kicking, killing enemies, picking up objects. It’s just a series of buttons. There’s no choice in what you have to do – escaping that cell is the only way to progress the game. 

Yet it’s immersive; the only prompt that you get to start off of how to aim and kick, you have to work out that the wall is loose. The only way you know that is that one of the blocks on the wall looks wonky. The controls and graphics work together to tell that small story of how you get out of the cell, and there’s a great sense of achievement the first time you get it, because the character didn’t work out how to escape – you did.

However, that one experience is hardly enough to base an entire game on. It’s the final product of gameplay, and – like CGI in movies - if the person in front of the screen is constantly aware of the mechanics behind it you’ve probably screwed up.

 Explaining how a game will work, while also conveying the experience of playing it is not an easy task, but that’s what design documents have to do. Most of us have probably played a game where there’s been some quirk of the controls we’ve hated, that if we had designed the game we would have done differently. After you’ve played a game for a few hours these things seem obvious, but if you’re just reading the mechanics of the controls, it would be near impossible to pick these things out.

This is an example of why game design should not be a one way process; the design document needs to evolve to overcome problems. However experiments of any kind are expensive and time consuming. That’s why, I suspect, most games seem to have nearly identical controls (speaking as a PC gamer); game producers know what works and seldom stray from it.

That’s one of the reasons I applaud assassin’s creed. When I was following the production of the first game, my enthusiasm was for the setting and the character design, and my only interest in the game mechanics was that there would be platforming, somewhat similar to that in Prince of Persia. The first time I played Assassins creed was actually on a playstation while at a friend’s house. I played it for… maybe an hour or two. Bearing in mind that I hadn’t used a controller for at least a few years, it’s amazing how quickly the controls became second nature, even if I was zigzagging all over the place because I can’t get the hang of aiming with the thumb joystick thingies. 

The point is, even though the mechanics the game uses – having different “modes” of movement – was something relativley new, it quickly became instinctual, to the point where I still occasionally try to sprint with the mouse button in other games. If I see a piece of a building ingame, expect to be able to grab onto it, and find that I can, then as far as I’m concerned the game has successfully created an immersive experience.

game review: Dear Esther

It’s probably not the best idea for my first review to be of a game that is only debatably a game, but after playing Dear Ester, I felt the strong need to talk about it.  

Dear Esther does have game mechanics, but they are the extremely basic WASD controls used walk around and progress in the game. This small level of interactiveness is pretty much the only thing that separates it from being a computer generated movie. In some ways, Dear Esther reminds me of the 2D point and click adventures you find all over the internet, only there are no puzzles, and the mouse controls only affect the camera. 

It’s the nature of first person games to project into the character. You see from their eyes, and for the duration of the game you are them. In Dear Esther, it is left ambiguous as to who you are actually playing as. You can project yourself into their shoes and imagine the quiet footsteps of the protagonist are your own, but then you still have no choice in what you do. 

All you can do is walk, and ultimately there is only one way to go. You cannot lose and you cannot die, nothing you do makes any difference in the end. It is an uncomfortable feeling, being so powerless in a medium that is all about control.

In a way it shows that there such a thing as too much story versus effort. Having to work to find out what happens next – be it through combat, puzzles or platforming – makes the narrative reward seem so much better.

I understand what the makers of Dear Esther were trying to do. There are small details, like the paper boats in the underground stream and the bread and fish in the caves, that give you an idea of the kind of depth the game was aiming for, but it wasn’t strong enough to make the experience stand up on its own.

You can play through the whole thing in little more than an hour, and although there are some parts I did go back and examine in more detail, the majority of the walking around is too tedious and uneventful to sit through a second time. The whole thing feels unfinished and unresolved, as though it’s a prelude or a demo. 

I was hoping there would be some underlying plot to uncover, but there isn’t.

The graphics, at least are solid. They’re not my any means ground-breaking, but the island does feel like a lonely, deserted island. The caves are beautiful, and there’s no doubt that whoever created the visual aspect of dear Esther took a lot of care over crafting the virtual world.

It’s just a shame they chose such a boring premise. I get the feeling that had they chosen a more interesting idea, or even rewritten the story to have a solid plot, the game would have had a more widely positive reception. This kind of thing is obviously never going to appeal to people who play games solely for the action, but I went in expecting a good story, and was left disappointed.

Is it worth buying? For such a small amount of content, the price is rather steep, but if you enjoy natural scenery, and don’t mind the extent of the gameplay being a virtual tour, it can be a nice break from more intensive gaming experiences. Just don’t be surprised if, at the end, you come away with a strong sense on unfulfillment.

writing about games, previews, reviews, commentary and lies

Reviewers usually write reviews because they are gamers themselves. They’re involved and passionate about the games they write about, and want to convey their experience of playing it. Alternatively, they find a game falls short of their expectations, and want to – not dissuade other people from buying it, exactly – but to make sure anyone who does buy the game isn’t getting less than they were hoping for.

The problem then is that reviews will more often than not be written from a biased point of view. What one person looks for in a game will be different from what somebody else finds fun. Of course you can rate different aspects of a game against a scale – looking separately at graphics, gameplay, and storyline – but how do you decide what is most relevant for the game in question?

A RPG may be able to get away with repetitive combat if it tells a compelling story, but a first person shooter can’t get away with unresponsive controls. How do you weight certain aspects against each other? Should reviews be tailored to fit different genres, or should all games go through the same scrutiny regardless of their intended audience and function?

On the internet, this type on informal review works fine, as the reviews are written and by individuals and posted on their own sites and blogs. However, when it comes to forming these articles in to an official publication, such as a magazine, financial backing in needed, requiring a more structured format with a business plan. A company needs to be set up which will attract revenue from banks or shareholders and advertisers and the costs need to be offset by projected profits. This cannot be achieved unless the circulation is large or the revenue will not be available. Companies such as IGN and Eurogamer are such companies supporting magazines.

Producers and editors require a salary and journalists expect to be paid, there are printing and distribution costs, and therefore the subscription size is paramount. To cover the costs it is essential to attract a large enough amount of people to buy the magazines and they are competing with the internet which is free. So what are the advantages of magazines opposed to online publications?

An obvious reason for buying magazines is that they are potable. They can be read on the train, on the loo, at the coffee table – although in the last few years eBook readers have started to compete with this.  Many of the articles seen in magazines will be just as readily available online.

It could be argued that they are better written. This too could be questioned. Salaried journalists should be able to produce better quality articles than bloggers but the journalists have to have a real interest in computer games to bring the articles to life. To get round this and to keep costs down many magazines employ computer enthusiastic school leavers to write for one year and then terminate their contract. One computer magazine expected a turnover  of 450000 but sold less than half of the projected numbers. Producers have to constantly balance, balancing the costs with the quality. If the magazine is not profitable banks and investors can withdraw their support. 

New games journalism can be quite removed from the content of the game itself, whereas more tradition reviews will focus entirely on the content.

Reviews that rate games will usually cover certain aspects of the game individually, using the same general format for every release, and them giving the game a score on a scale. However, this method of reviewing is not always as objective as it is made out to be; you can rate graphics on their technical merits, but it is more difficult to rate the immersion they provide in the game world. Most sites provide an overview of how ratings are attributed, but even these are based on very subjective qualities.

New games journalism does away with any pretence of judging games according to a preset formula. Sometimes they aren’t even discussing the quality or attributes of the games themselves, but rather certain aspects of a community related to a game, such as in this article which talks about the social etiquette that had developed in an online game. Sometimes they are using games to comment on serious issues, whether they’re related or completely separate from the virtual world. Articles written in this style are written informally, in a way that tries to connect to the reader through common experience and often humour. This can make them more enjoyable and easier to read than a more rigid article that just gives a point-by point analysis of a game without any personal involvement,  but is not so useful when it comes to deciding whether a game is worth spending money on.

More straight forward and to the point style reviews would be more use to a casual gamer wanting to decide which game they’d enjoy. These type of reviews are more than anything a form of advertisement as well as a source of information.

a history of computer games, part three: 2000s

Since the introduction of 3D graphics, the improvements in the level of detail have increased greatly. Between the PS1 and PS2, technical aspects on graphics increased greatly; the polygon counts of the games produced for the platform increased by 50 times, while at the same time screen resolution increased  by 2.5, vastly increasing the amount of information that must be displayed at any point of time during the game. Comparing recent releases to the very first video games, by far the most obvious difference is in the graphics. These are visible even without playing the game and many casual gamers will purchase games based on this first impression.

As the baseline for quality of graphics continues to be pushed higher, the technology it is built on must also improve.  Development frameworks such as the Unreal Engine streamline the production of the software by providing toolsets for game producers to work from, but even clever programming is ultimately limited by the hardware. 

A more recent development is companies such as OnLive, which provide “cloud gaming”, where other computers run the game, and then stream it to the console the player is using.

At present, consoles such as the Wii and the Kinect are the exception. Their marketing is based on the novelty of the controls rather than piggybacking on established game series, but that may change as interactive controls become more common and future games are designed to accommodate them.

Games have always pushed the limitations of the current technology, but now they have the pressure of huge companies behind them, and an entire industry resting on their financial success.

In order to maximise profits, most games publishers find it necessity to make games available to a large an audience as possible, which means porting new releases to multiple consoles. Making a game work on all machines is not straight forward; console companies have their own in-house publishers - or at least a specific company they outsource to - and therefore have little need to make their own systems compatible with their competitor’s, leaving the game developers to bridge that gap.  Unsurprisingly, several companies have risen to fill this niche, providing tools such as Criterion's Renderware that make this task easier for producers.

Increasing complexity in games means more demand on the hardware, but technology is not improving fast enough to keep up with the demands of the market. At the moment, the only foreseeable answer to the increased demand for processing power is using multiple CPUs, but this comes with its own technical problems. Games must be designed to distribute the workload, and this mean a different approach to how the game is built, and requires skills that are not currently available.

Lastly, the length of development time means that by the time a project is finished, the technology it was based on at the beginning will not be the most up to date. With any new game, developers must anticipate and accommodate for the changes that will take place within the timescale of the project.

As technology and skill needed to produce a game increases, so does the time and the cost. In 1982, Pacman cost one person the grand total of $100,000 to produce. Halo 2, released in 2004, cost 400 times that. True, the profits these days are greater, but not on such a noticeable scale. It takes an enormous amount of time money to produce a game in line with popular titles; the start-up costs are so high it is generally impossible for individuals to produce games in the way they once did. The expectations of games are so high, but increase in expense does not guarantee perceivable increase in quality, at least to the general public.

With the monetary pressure hanging over their heads, companies often go for the safe option; sequels and games based of successful cinema are often produced in favour of new ideas. However with realism of graphics struggling to compete with expectations, innovative gameplay and storytelling may become the deciding factor in future games’ success.

It takes a lot of people to produce a game that lives up to todays expectations, the sheer amount and diversity of content call for many different skills; artists, engineers, writers and programmers, and people to make sure they all cooperate. 

The final consideration for game producers is making their product available to the global market, and making sure it isn’t outcompeted by the many, many other available games that are all fighting for the same customers. One way of ensuring that a game isn’t overshadowed is to make sure releases of similar games are staggered. Produces also have to consider that what will work in one company might not work in another, either because of language differences, or the expectations of consumers. For instance when the Xbox was to be released in Japan, the controlled was deemed too bulky, and a more streamlined version was produced for the Japanese market.  They’re not obvious problems, but as the games industry continues to develop the need to think globally will only become more important.