Art assets are the name of the game these days, kids! The game introduction was a good way to get ramped up, work out glaring bugs and get back into drawing (I had not even touched my tablet in at least six months). But it feels pretty good to be working on actual in-game assets, I will say. I decided to knock out a few trees today for the pastoral-type areas (although I only managed to get one done due to a late start — weekends!). Anyway, I figured I’d blog the art process again for fun. As usual, click the pictures for full-sized versions.
I started off just drawing the outline of the tree in the darkest colour. I wasn’t super worried about dimensionality at this point, since I was just trying to get the silhouette down. I put too much time into the smaller branches, since none of them really ended up remotely visible. However, at the time I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to do the leaves.
For things with a strong outline, I often find it easier to get the silhouette first, lock transparency on the layer and then just throw all the detail on top of it. Once I got to detailing the trunk of the tree, it probably literally took five or ten minutes at the most.
Instant leaves! I pretty much exclusively use a round brush because I’m boring and terrible at Photoshop. All I did here was plonk down two layers of colour (which I think I picked off the grass), to try to suggest some general idea of dimension. After I finished that, I started in with a lighter colour doing some stippling to work in basic highlights.
A little bit of stippling and the leaves start to take shape! The step from vague detail to a medium level of detail is always, I think, the hardest, because it’s easy to try to go too far in a single step. If you wind up getting one part really close to finished before everything else, it gets really hard to bring everything else up to speed and make it look like a coherent thing. In this case, if I’d started trying to actually detail leaves it would get very difficult to get the general shape of the leaf masses. On the other hand, just roughing in the leaf masses makes the detail work mindlessly trivial. I’m no master of art, but I find that 90% of the time, just getting stuff down in the correct order is the most important part.
The trunk is almost entirely in shadow and required basically no work. I put rough highlights on the exposed portions and worked in some darker grooves in a few places for the bark texture. I didn’t want to overdo it. Typically you want to keep shadowed areas to pretty low contrast to avoid things looking weird.
There’s sort of an elephant in the room here, which is the background. I dropped some grass over the rock tiles I put together last time and somehow managed to convince myself that this was a good idea and didn’t look like terrible, but after some time working on this tree, I’m pretty much just completely sick of looking at this. First of all I need to make up some proper dirt tiles for this area, and secondly I need to work on the grass so there’s a more natural transition.
So I did:
Man, that is so much better. Nice, saturated dirt with all sorts of random-looking striations. You can sort of see the tiling if you’re paying attention, but the trick I used here is that none of the tiles are really anything close to square, and they’re all manually feathered at the edges with a bunch of wild strokes (I lined them up over each other and just kind of painted one into the next one until I had a tile that fit nicely over itself). Since there are a couple of them and they can be stacked in different orders, it kind of breaks up the image a little bit and keeps your brain from realizing (at least immediately), that it contains repeating patterns. The rock tiles could be rotated to make it a bit harder to pick out patterns, but with these most of the striations are going in largely the same direction, so they pretty much have to maintain the same orientation.
Anyway, all that’s left to do is the final leaf detailing:
There are times when you could probably get away just with some light stippling for leaves, but since the art in general is at a fairly high level of detail, this is not one of those times. This was a pretty tedious task. I just went in with a very small, sharp brush and picked up individual leaves. I was doing this kind of zoomed in because I have all the fine motor control of a Parkinson’s sufferer in a centrifuge, so I just made sure to zoom out often to make sure what I was doing made sense. I threw on some rim-lighting to try to pick up the subsurface scattering look. It worked okay.
Here it is running in-engine:
Now that I’ve got my editor all fixed up it’s super fast to drop in new assets and see them all together, which is pretty handy. This looks a little spartan right now, but once enough assets are in place I’m hoping it’ll really come together.
Next up, I’m going to do like ten more of these guys. Stay tuned!
Yes, I completed the first background assets for the game proper today. I feel like, after almost a year of working on this project, things are finally getting started for real.
Hurray!
I know, it’s not much. A few plain rock tiles do not exactly make an entire game, but it’s a start!
I keep wanting to release some writing or dialogue or more information on what this is actually about (and yes, it is about something; it is about a great many things!), but at this stage that feels pretty spoilery, so I think I should probably hold off.
Still working hard. Stores are finished and working. I refactored the music system to juggle independent tracks a little better. There’s going to be some live switching of music for certain areas in a way that will eventually be made clear.
I put this down today for the introduction text-over, which I still feel is too verbose, but I’m not really sure what else to do with it. Oh well, I’ll figure out how to cut it down somehow or maybe just rewrite it.
Distant Memory (some apologies to Erik Satie, I guess)
Tomorrow I plan to paint backgrounds. All work and no play make Chris something something.
And with it, a title screen:
It looks a little nicer animated (the clouds sort of move and do cloud stuff), but there you have it! Click on the picture for the big, wallpaper sized version.
Work is proceeding, albeit slowly, on the first part of the game. I wrote my last exam yesterday, so I’ll have a few days to put some good work in on this before work starts.
Edit: still not sure how I feel about the little house. I might take that out.
Edit edit: I pulled the house from the title screen for my own, secret reasons, but it still makes a fun background.
Why, I do believe it’s a stage select type screen! The still shot is a bit of a jumble, so you’ll have to trust me that this looks a little better in motion.
The blurry text effect took goddamn forever to get perfect: voices from the beyond.
The HUD is not quite finalized, but it’s mostly there. I still need a spot for “money,” which is used to purchase extras, basically — short vignettes, hints and information — which go into your journal. I’d love to rope some guest writers into doing a few short items. The empty bar there is for your only statistic, which I’m tentatively calling “faith,” since it needs to be called something in the code, even if I’m mulling the name over a bit in my head (alternate possibility: “crunk juice”). It’s empty whenever you enter a stage, but fills up as you do things. If you lose, it gets wiped out, so it pays to be on a winning streak, since then you get more flexibility to do awesome stuff.
The bottle at the left, you’ll notice, contains the rose petals also featured in the stage select frame in the middle. That’s because stages are represented by “relics,” or foci which act as both areas you can explore and equipment you can use for passive effects. The rose petals, for example, let you converse with plants, which opens up new puzzles and dialogue in certain areas. I’m trying to fill the game with as many idiosyncrasies as make sense, just to make things less one dimensional. There’s also a core exploration mechanic I’m really happy with, but that’s going to be another blog post.
It’s a tough call how frequently I’ll be updating and with how much, since I’m kind of entering the realm where it’s really easy to give too many spoilers. I’d like to keep people who are interested in the loop, but I’ll have to balance that out with leaving lots to discover in the actual game.
This is old now. Everyone’s seen it, but I’m keeping it in my Firefox quick bar just because.
There’s been a lot of debate about the second half, about dialogue in games, but that’s neither here nor there, because the first part is by far the most important.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of days second-guessing myself, and the work I’m doing, both in the somewhat grander “what if it sucks and no one likes it” sense (working on a multi-year project that a lot of people treat as trivial is not easy; game dev is pretty much the hardest kind of art you can do and is replete with places where doubt can creep on in), but mostly just in the “what if this is a bad idea? What if I should really be doing this part this way? Is this going to make sense to anyone?” kind of way.
Does it make any sense to find a handful of rose petals in a moon lander outside your house, or to pull back your bed sheets to reveal a tunnel to… somewhere? I don’t know, but this is an invitation for something, at least. Ideas are pretty fragile things, and when you’re emotionally invested in something, it’s easy to turn it over and over and try to force it into some conventional shape where you know everyone is going to get it, but where you’ve effectively discarded all the magic and mystery that made it a compelling idea in the first place. Maybe just put someone there to explain shit to you, in case you got too confused about what was going on (when ambiguity was the entire point of the exercise).
Games are a weird art movement, because they didn’t come out of an established art background. They happened because someone who was a computer scientist really enjoyed caving, and wanted to use a computer to show people what it was like to explore a system of caves. They kept happening because someone else was obsessed with (who else?) J. R. R. Tolkien, and got the idea to people the aforementioned caves with dwarves and monsters. The artistic language of games stems from a strong surrealist undercurrent which came together almost by accident through the incongruity between escapism and strict technical limitations.
In Castlevania II for the NES there is a man in a town who says, at the prompt of a button-press, “DON’T LOOK INTO THE DEATH STAR, OR YOU WILL DIE.” There are no stars in the game that kill you. In fact, there are no stars whatsoever, just a man wandering back and forth on a levitating street ranting in capital letters when you press a button at him. Was this thematic? Was it supposed to represent some terrifying portent? Was this dialogue originally highly relevant before it was attacked viciously by a Japanese-English translator who spoke only Korean? I know that if this were made now, the comment would be, at best a Chekhov’s gun. Chances are there would be a ten minute cut-scene explaining to you the significance of the death star. You’d probably have to fight it later. It would almost certainly shoot lasers.
I have no idea what the original significance, if any, of this comment was intended to be. But this is the environment in which games have grown up, and possibly why successful (narrative) games tend to be more hallucination than movie. The annoying-for-English-speakers-to-pronounce “Demon’s Souls” has an element of this. You get dropped into the game and told you’re supposed to fight a soul-eating demon called The Old One. Straight up fantasy escapism, only the Old One seems to be a simple animal with no intelligence to speak of, but very powerful, like a force of nature. And everyone, each of the people you’re supposed to rescue as the big fantasy hero, is trying to use it in some way. You spend the whole game piling up bodies, including some possibly downright saintly figures, and there is no one to tell you whether or not what you’re doing is moral. You start off thinking you’ve signed up for some “rescue the kingdom” shit, only by the end you feel more like animal control. It’s ultimately ambiguous and, in a sense, your victory is hollow.
And it really works. It works as a critical response to the simple, badly translated games we grew up with, and that, I think, is where there’s real progress to be made*. Like the death star story, there’s no one standing behind this to tell you what you’re supposed to think about it. It just exists as its own, weird thing. Because (probably by accident rather than by design) ambiguity is the real artistic legacy of chunky pixels and beep-beep-bloop music, and careful consideration is the sworn enemy of ambiguity.
I’m keeping the article on hand to flip through every so often, because as a technical person it is very foreign for me to do things without thinking about them. But if I shift my focus to working everything out in advance, to making the ethereal concrete, I know I’m just going to crush the life out of this thing, which is supposed to be, essentially, ambiguous, subversive and almost insidious. You’re playing a fun game, and making a little man jump around! But maybe, just maybe there’s something else going on, something kind of strange. But it has to stay a maybe, and that’s why I should really just shut up and get back to work. Less talk, more rock.
* I’d like to note I’m mostly discussing narrative games here. Puzzles, brain teasers, simulations, etc. all have their place, but they’re clearly a different kind of animal from the narrative game.
Time for a quick status update! I wrote my last serious exam yesterday (two more, easier ones to go, but nothing for ten days now), so today I have been back at work. I made this little environment mockup in a half hour or so:
A quick mockup!
I wanted a reasonable-looking environment to use in working on implementing some of the additional leaping, hanging and climbing, all of which are now scripted and animated, and work quite nicely. I also played around a bit with different types of cliff face, etc. trying to find a look that sort of works for this environment. Tomorrow I’m going to get started on finishing off the art for the introduction/main area and, if I have time, nailing down some of the remaining interface components.
I’m still working hard, obviously. I finished (basically) all the background art for the brief intro/main area. It’s been a big time expenditure for things that aren’t strictly “game” sections, but a fun artistic exercise nonetheless. As you can tell, I did decide to go for painted backgrounds despite my limited artistic abilities. If I don’t push myself to do stuff, I’ll never learn, after all.
SPOILER ALERT!
Yes, the house featured last time also has an exterior. It isn’t really a spoiler. Unfortunately I won’t be able to work for the next week or so due to final assignments. School is too much sometimes.
It’s Angelo Badalamenti’s birthday! As he is a major musical influence of mine, I chose to celebrate his birthday by making a ridiculous synth and strings version of the main theme for my project. It isn’t actually particularly Badalamenti-esque — I got really carried away with staccato strings and the end result is quite a mess:
On the Surface of the Moon
And yes, this is making its way into the game. I don’t have much time these days to make non-game art or music; this thing is eating all my spare time!
Edit: On retrospect, this may actually be too silly to use in anything. It was still fun to write, at least!
Edit #2: Nope, can’t do it. The arp is gone. In its place is SPACE ORGAN. Try saying that without giggling.
Why did that window have no curtains? What was I thinking? Maybe I need to sleep more. I’m going back in and adding some curtains.
