Sunday, 27 December 2009
Anyway Santa gave me a scanner for Xmas so ill add some images of my sketches up here shortly that I've been working on.
Definatly looking forward to building these characters and editors, feels so different than everything else. The programmer is doing a good job so far and I might have some of that stuff to put up here soon aswell. Time for some photoshop painting...
Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Monday, 30 November 2009
Just a Note...
A good article I want to keep note of for my research, good quick read.
Steampunk
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
End Credits
Mistake in the trailer for the film, they say "the players are real people" whereas they clearly meant to say the characters or avatars are real people because obviously the players would be real people. I guess it depends on your take of the word "player"...
Also managed to pick up a good magazine about character design, the name escapes me for the moment but no doubt I'll reference it on here some point soon.
Thursday, 19 November 2009
An Interesting Article...
Other design work...
Small note that I noticed while looking closely is I used two different styles of red by mistake, my bad, maybe no one will notice.
As far as my anatomy work goes, I've been working on the hands at the moment... my weak point, but I'm getting the hang of it. Wish I had a scanner so I could post some of my sketches up... never mind lets see what Santa brings this Christmas.
I have been reading through a journal which talks about the concept of embodiment, basically what stance the player takes in relation to a character while playing the game. It's been hard trying to describe this to people so I'm lucky I came across those words because it makes life a lot easier.
Realised I wrote my proposal slightly wrong which is a bit worrying, needed a much larger bibliography, which I have but I got confused at what you actually need to put in it. Ah well we will see what feedback I get next week.
Have been doing a lot of research on dark and grungy basements, and also on a mutated angel type theme... hmm I'd be able to describe that a lot better in images than in writing.
Monday, 16 November 2009
After Crit Week
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Gender
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
A long weekend
I think I might hop into Zbrush shortly and do some mock-ups for my presentation next week. Real shame COD4:MW2 has to come out the same week as the presentations...
Had to put up pictures of stalkers (the game...) here too, very cool outfit designs.
Also I have been having some internal debate about using the words "avatar" which from what I've read means a self representation or an alter ego but I think if your not giving unlimited control to the user then it's not really an avatar, as even the slightly common trait in a character editor creates character. And what if I'm not wanting to create a character to represent myself, but a character to adhere to the story best, I wouldn't class that as an avatar.
Finally got a hold of a book I've been trying to get from the library for a month called "Better Game Characters by Design". Will be extremely helpful reading this.
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Call of Duty 4: MW2 Pushing the Limits
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Whats the next step?
Managed to find a youtube video of the fallout character editor, might be better posting videos up here rather than trying to find seperate images:
Spore has a very unlimited customisation process, but it is link in extremely well to the game. But in my own opinion it would be better that the creature evolved not how you choose it to, but depending on your actions during its life. This again would put the character artist in the driving seat and let people play a game instead of a simulator:
APB is the most recent character editor and one I should probably refer to a lot, it is very powerful and gives the users endless control over their characters, at the moment I don't want to give my users endless control, I just want to give them control over my final ideas which I feel fits into the gameplay. A video worth watching on it:
This video of Skate shows a bit from the character editor, a lot of sports games tend to have them I guess intending the users to create themselves, does anyone want to be themselves to an exact match though?
Yesterday I was talking to the Pre-Production tutor Mark and he made an interesting point about how game developers today allow players to customize their characters to generate income, buying things like armors and hats etc for real money. What are these people who spend their hard earned money getting in trade for it? Does it really add that much to the gameplay? Or just make them a bit more original than the people who don't spend their money.
From the post Craig made before I'll add the image here, it makes a good point about how all the suits of armor are basically the same but allows the player to make subtle differences to stand out.
Started a discussion on http://www.polycount.com/ to see if I could get some comments from some professional artists, didn't get a massive discussion but got some good input. Here's the link anyway just to check it out: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=67003
Not sure if I quoted this before, but I came accross this again and beleive it sums up one arguement of my project very well:
"the more input a player has, the less character there is for them to beleive in".
Monday, 26 October 2009
Monday (original title day)
These "masked" chararacters really appeal to me now. There has been a few small appearences of them more recentely with next-gen games. I wish I could find somewhere where I could veiw the discussion the developers had when deciding not to have a full character, but a suit which the users can place themselves in. I beleive a suit can have a story attatched to it aswell, so its like a bridge between users and storyline which feels like a win win to me.
The crysis suit here shows very modern character design strongly relating to anatomy. Even though the colours of the character point to him being quite dark and evil the stance is a very positive very human stance. I guess because it's a war game its veiwing war as dark and evil whichever side your on. Maybe all you'd want to edit on this character if your playing him is the sex?
Thursday, 22 October 2009
Early Morning Post
I also have been playing around a bit with fallout 3, maybe they were thinking along the same lines I am (though I should broaden my thought process)? So far my own opinion doing research is that characters need a strong history before even designing them, and this is hard to show when creating your own character (unless you create yourself but then maybe you don't belong)but Fallout 3 starts off with you being born, and you build up your own history which still might not fit perfectly into your appearence but you get the general idea.
On another note I've been reading the new Hitch Hikers guide to the Galaxy book and I completely forgot to mention the strength of characters in books and how they let the users know everything about the character but still make up their own image based on this in their heads. Maybe a lot to learn here? Or maybe I'm gonig off on a tangent because I'm not use to 9am starts.
Wednesday, 21 October 2009
The following day...
Game List: (character editors)
Spore
Fallout 3 (character editor is very smoothly introduced)
APB
World of Warcraft (basically most MMORPG)
Skate (same comment as fallout 3)
Sims
Wii (avatar systems, similar with xbox)
Lots of sports games...
(strong story games)
Gears of War
Halo
Call of Duty 4
Final Fantasy
Dead Space (faceless character like master cheif, will look more into him)
Bioshock
GTA
That wiill do for now..
I forgot about Half life... how could I forget about Half Life? Sorry Gordon Freeman
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
The Beginning... 4 weeks in...
Basically when I finish uni I want to go into the inudstry working on characters, preferably modeling them so the best way to go about this is to do my project on character creating (for games).
It is common knowledge that a character is a very important aspect for a game and during my research through lots of jounrals and books I noticed almost a catch 22 situation with designing for games. Basically, if I can explain this right, my idea for research is that users want to control the game, eg control how their character looks to get them more immersed in the game, but artists say the way a character looks depends on the history of the character which affects the story of the game and effecting the story of the game negatively effects the immersive expereince. That might of made no sense what-so-ever, I don't even want to read back over that, but hopefully you get the general idea of where I'm heading.
To quote a book called 'The Art of Game Characters' "A player will be more engaged by your imagination than by their own".
So whos right? Should we A) Ignore the users and create a character based on background and story.
B) Let the users create and character they want even if its homer simpson in a Call Of Duty game?
C) Create a character that doesn't tell you much, and let the user just use their imagination to creating a character in their heads or to place themselves in the characters body? (To make sense of this just think of Masks)
Ok so theres my focal point.
As far as Modules go - Done lots for concept development, been basically destroying my large collection of magazines for a scrapbook and printing out images for inspiration (mainly the amazing models on Dominance War and the great guys at Polycount). I also took a trip to London last week and went to the V+A to take photos of sculptures, these artist project character into their creations superbly so I got lots of ideas there. Also on a seperate note I went to fashion exibitions (yes that sounds odd, but my girlfriend is a fashion designer so it wasn't my idea to go) and had a good insight into how they project character through clothes, so photos of clothes will be going into my scrapbook soon enough. Some of these clothes gave me wonderful ideas for crazy characters too (some fashion designers minds are in such an insance place) so thats something im going to look into more. Alongside the scrapbook im working on a book of anatomy, something I wished I had worked on years ago because it is so vital to character creation, so that will be another hand in I guess if it contributes to my final output. As for the concept sketchbook... still havent started this yet, but I guess it comes in an order of scrapbook to sketchbook, but I have had a few moment of madness with good ideas so Ill sketch some things out tonight.
For the dissertation modules I've just basically been reading lots of books and journals and making notes on the idea I described before, not much I can say on that for the moment.
With the Pre-production module I'm having a hard time seperating it from concept development in my mind, specially because my final output is going to be along the lines of three different character models in realtime (not sure animated slightly or not) and I know the pre-production for character creation is mainly concept development...
I need to get a bit of a move on with Professional Practice, mainly just need to start filling in all the helpful sheets we got for this one, would clarify my thoughts more.
Anyway I've typed enough for the moment and I'm hungry.