composition

When thinking of composition it's important to understand the subject in which you plan to draw. The most basic form being landscape and portrait. The form of a person is tall, yet the form of a landscape is wide. Hence why the page would need to be one way for one and the other way for the later. Obviously this is the very basic definition of the word but this can be applied into other aspects. A tall building for example would need portrait. but it's a landscape really. Images with clutter distract from the focus of an image. Understanding the focus of a scene is also important. When someone looks at a painting, that persons eye should be drawn to main focus of the piece of art. A photographer for example would have his lens focused with other areas blurred. This can also be applied to paintings. Line and shapes have and influence of how someone's eye would focus on objects in the scene. Brighter colours can catch someone's eye as opposed to darks. But blacks are very strong colours. That often appear at a far. But strong blacks in the distance of a picture can distract the focus of the main focal point. So contrast is important. The feel and mood of a picture can be composed by colour but also positioning. Looking up could suggest dominance for example. A lions leap would have more of an impact if it was viewed as the lion was towering over rather than viewed from afar. As I spent time as a chef we were taught the rule of odds. presenting in odd numbers is more appealing to the eye than even numbers. I agree with this entirely but it's hard to understand why. You would think that uniformity would have more appeal. Maybe chaos plays an important role in beauty because it offers more interest. The unknown plays an important role in interest. The focus on something in the dark can draw in the attention of the onlooker. The same as why people need to look at accidents as they drive past on the motorway.

Asus WAVI Xtion

Prime scene, the guys who's technology is inside Kinect. Have teamed up with ASUS to bring its awesomeness to the PC. It don't look as good though, and it definitely don't sound as good as its been called the WAVI Xtion. It will have the same role, controling games movies music etc. But it's aimed for living room use. Bit strange as most people are mor elikley to have a Xbox in there rather than a PC.

The is also plans for Asus to have an entire app ecosystem just like everyone else seems to be doing but thats for another post. We should see a release in the 2Q of this year.

With the ability to already connect the Kinect to PC with custom driver will it be worth forking out the extra cash. We will have to wait and see but I doubt it.!

A game to watch out for (especially us game artists)

I've mentioned this game a few times now. But in the past few weeks I've seen this game become a playable beta. So I've decided to write about it as I feel its at a stage were other people can appreciate it. Its not a review and I'm not going to talk much about the game itself. This is about how the team got to were they are today and how you can follow the teams development as the game is slowly pieced together. Ill include a video at the end that just got release showing game play. So if your interested go and buy it and get access to the beta.



The team (Unknown Worlds) originally made Natural Selection 1 as a mod for Half-Life. It was a massive success and unlike most other mod teams, that made there sequels on the source engine after Hal-Life 2 was released, they decide to go ahead and make there game from scratch, on there own engine! A feat in itself, but with only four developers this project felt like it could have a film written about it.



There attitude towards there community had always been open. These guys relay appreciate all the support the players have given them over the years. They also realised that it was a wealth of criticism and feedback that they could tap into if the players had a hold of there game. As the team was short on money, they couldn't afford to employ testers and Q/A groups. So instead they started taking pre-orders with the promise of early alpha assess to special edition owners. They also get exclusive in-game black armour, ohhhhhhh...



After the alpha was finally release after many of updates on there website showing off lots of models and concepts and map ideas. With video reveals of some of the alien classes, public testing could start. This was important as the engine was new and had never been tested before with clients joining from all over the world. As you may of guessed it dint work to well. But astonishingly UW had been able to release updates weekly over steam. Sometimes even more than one a week! Just recently they dropped the bomb that they were moving to beta stage. This would give all the people that pre-ordered the standard edition access to the game and closed beta access would be given to the next 10.,000 pre-orders. Obviously they were running out of money again. Plus the alpha was in no state to be handed out to even more player. Especially those that may not appreciate if being in such a raw state. But miraculously when the patch came out it had addressed so many of the bugs that was creating severe lag on servers and low fps on people PCs it actually became playable.

At the time of writing, the game is getting there. There still releasing updates to address problems, so allot of the features are still to be implemented. But even at this early stage its still a crap load of fun.

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/ this is the community site that has a real time progress page along side the news page. Is shows all the features and bug fixes there adding into the next patch. As-well as a forum and twitter updates etc. Have a dig around and figure out what this game is all about.

This is the official Beta game-play video. So check it out. Click the video to go to the official youtube channel were theirs more videos.



THIS link goes to a fan made channel, and has lots of videos explaining how to play the game as well as lots of game-play on both the alien and marine sides.

For me even though this game is really good, that's not the reason I love it so much. The fact that you can follow along with the devs makes it all the more interesting.I cant wait till its finished!

On Live Stream games and play instantly 2nd december

On live have announced that they are to release there game system on the 2nd of December (my birthday :D) on there site only for 99$. The release tittle include Batman Arkham Asylum, Dirt 2, Avp, Assassins Creed 2, among many others. Its just a shame I've played or owned most of them already. I expect there to be more added if its a big success. For those who haven't heard about it after it was shown at E3, you can instantly play game over a broadband connection via streaming. If you go to the website you can download a pc version for free and play all the games on trial for 30 mins. we have a 20Mb connection at our house and after trying some games I get lots of connection errors and there is about a 1 second lag between controller movement and on-screen movement.

If you want to play on your TV you will need to buy the little black box The whole thing is just a small box with a connection to a TV via HDMI. It also has a micro usb for power and the Ethernet port for connecting to your broadband line. You also get a controller that looks allot like the 360's. Its wireless and had the added ability of having dedicated media keys for music and video.

The applications for this are amazing. As its streamed the technology only requires the ability to stream the games not render them. That's done by other machines. This means that we could see the service pop up on the like of iphone, ipad, even smartphones. Just imagine playing Boarderlands on your phone just as if you were playing it on your xbox 360!

The importance of planning

Everything in life needs planning. Days out, even trips to the supermarket. So it's only natural to asume that the most important thing that would need planning is work at your job. Let's not talk in the context of game for a minute. Lets thing about a builder who has a client that are a couple who own a piece of land that they want to build a house on. Imagine if that builder just got his diggers in and started digging foundations without thinking it through before starting any work. Having a blueprint of the house not only lets the builders know how the house will look, but also the clients, so they can decide if it's what they want.

Now let's look at the same example in the game industry. It would be the same for the lead artist to have a similar role as our couple in our last example. He would oversee the concept or environment artists to make sure the asset ( let's say it's a building that's going into a city environment) is going to fit not only in size but also in style. That the complexity of features such as windows and doors aren't to complex as this would result in the game running at low frames per second or worse it would crash all together.
So with this in mind what can I do to make the process of planning easier for me and the person reading it. In my opinion the most important aspect would be simplicity. I don't see the point of having pages and pages of text. Sometimes a quick sketch that's been annotated can be more than enough to get the point across, rather than paragraph after paragraph of text. Also understanding limitation and restrictions. Or even the role of the "asset". For example, if it was a enemy character for a first person shooter, he may not need to be rigged for talking in cut scenes unlike the main characters. This may mean that his mouth could be model without the need for it to be opened, thus saving valuable time that may have been wasted if this area was overlooked and not first discussed or not made clear during the planning stage.
An example of restriction would be that a model needs to be under a curtain amount of triangles. So planning a budget amount over the entire model would avoid having all the triangle used up on the first part they you modelled, only to realise as you got closer to the end you have to make it less detailed as you would have like, due to the fact you would run over budget. Equal distribution of details is important to balance the overall density of a model. This would very difficult if it was not considered during the planning stage.
It's important to get into the habit of thinking about the projects were set as a whole rather than just jumping into max and start modelling something why were are studying at university, as this will become second nature to us when we end up working in the industry.

Game City 2010

I know it was a few weeks ago now, but I wanted to wait for the release of kinect, get kinect sports and talk about them both as Tom and I were able to get into a key note speech with Rare about said game and gadget. My plan was to buy it, play it, talk about it. But after looking at my account balance I'm going have to wait till Christmas! What I can talk about is the speech.
Rare Studio’s Executive Producer of Technology and Communications, Nick Burton, was the guy to give the speech. The thing I found most exiting, is how they play tested. The original office was to small for all the movements,. They found themselves moving backwards into the hallway for extra space, so in the end they just got rid of the cubical office spaces and opened the whole room into one massive kinect playground. Nick let us in on some secrets as we watched volunteers from the audience play testing. They wasn't putting enough effort into running. but the devise is able to pick up large, more eccentric movements and reward players with speed. This the resulted in the two gunny pigs delivering a very entertaining and hilarious display of Benny hill style running.

After the talk Tom and I had a ten minute team death match round of crysis 2. This was very enjoyable and after looking at all the E3 videos this game is looking very exciting. I've only just managed to play the first encounter on the PC after building my new computer (I can now play on full specs!) which is amazing title and it hard to believe its now almost 4 years old as it still stand tall among most of today's games. I was able to bag myself a "I love NY" t-shirt for being the highest scorer, which was a bonus. But as the day came to a close and it being the last day of the festival, I think they had allot of t-shirts left so everyone was getting one. As we discovered after a second go of the demo. So I didn't feel so special, but all least we had a spare to give our room mate when we got back. Should have put it on Ebay!
I could go on but I'm trying to keep this short and sweet. All in all it was a great day and I will be attending again next year as it only a short train ride away and I encourage everyone else to do the same.

Jolyon Webb and Aaron Allport from Blitz Games.

Just like our first year we started the year with a talk from Jolyon Webb and Aaron Allport from Blitz Games, and just like last year it was very informative. It's always a good opportunity for us to get real advice from real industry professionals.

I've taken all of their points into consideration, and they made me feel a bit more straight headed about were my head should be at, and how I should go about finding a job when I leave. My big fear is not knowing what area of expertise I want to go into when job hunting. I'm hoping ill just fall into it after I try more things over the next two years of my course. Hopefully I'll be able to understand what I enjoy the most by then, as I like every aspect of the industry at the moment. It's a very hard decision that will affect my whole career. For now I'm just going to make sure my technical ability and keen eye keeps my work to a high standard.

As I look more into studios and job I'm finding that there is actually allot more studios in this country than I first thought. Let's hope that this means there will be plenty of jobs to choose from when I finish.