I'm a 2d artist looking for some work. If you have 2d art needs, please consider my services.
My game art portfolio cane be found here.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!
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| Friday, November 14, 2008 |
  Life Refactoring | 
Posted - 11/14/2008 11:33:56 PM | No, it's not letting up.
I'm far too busy with too many things to give this journal the attention it deserves; This has probably been clear from the state of things for the last few weeks, if not longer.
If the purpose of this journal when I started it a little over a year ago was to discipline myself into a good work ethic and promote myself as an artist, then it has surely succeeded.
No, this isn't the end. I just need to refactor my work methodology. So: instead of updating weekly, I'll update this journal entirely at my leisure. I think that everyone will be happier.
(And yes, damn, my portfolio is down because a friendly hacker pointed out a major php problem. I only used php because it made it easier to dump pieces of html into a template, but considering how static the template of my portfolio is anyway I may as well just do the whole thing in plain old html. Once I have some time to waste.)
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| Thursday, November 6, 2008 |
| The Crazy, Work, Comic | |
Posted - 11/6/2008 8:09:15 PM | The Crazy & Work
Utterly crazy week in personal life, but crazy in a good way.
Also have plenty of work now -- time to convert these jobs into money!
And so because this is such a lackluster entry due to the above, I give you a
Comic
Work on monday:
(I must give Citizen D. credit for the line.)
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| Freelancing again, AO buildings, painting, writing | |
Posted - 10/31/2008 2:44:14 AM | Freelancin'
With Dredmor beta on, my graphical duties are greatly reduced -- so I'm looking for some freelance work.
Need 2d art?
Check out my freelance thread. (Working on getting it unlocked so I can do some thread necromancy.) I've updated my portfolio, check it out. New images there and in the thread, too.
Aragon Online Buildings
I actually finished these a while ago, just haven't posted 'em.
You know the drill. For Aragon Online. Dwarven buildings this time. I probably did too many tall towers for perfect thematic consistency, but that's just what looks cool.
Digital Painting
 
Insert text comparing heroic/commodity individualism of genre art with themes of individualism and irrationality in the Romantic movement. Contrast, perhaps, with some of my own influences from aspects of Social Realism and Impressionism. Note that 'realism' does not necessarily refer to rendering, but to subject, hence some Impressionism. And how about Futurism? Ashcan School? Much artschool wankery.
Or did I? Point is, if I had gone the commercial design route in school, I'd struggle less with the prevailing style of commercial genre art versus what I tend toward. But then I wouldn't have all other kinds of weird ideas ... as much? ... (and I would have totally hated advertising, and probably been unhappy with the program in general for a number of reasons).
Writing in Games
To follow up on the idea of making content creation easy for non-coders, here's the justification for it. (Which really should have come first, but I found the page just a couple days ago.)
From Fiction is free by Jerome Cukier.
"Over the last 30 years, the price of creating the various game assets has increased at a mind-boggling rate. Except one: story. Still, considering how much impact a good story has on a game, game developers are not spending enough on this essential component.
...getting the right people and dedicating enough resources to fiction is probably the most cost-efficient way to add quality content to your game."
That's what I'm getting at! If you're an indie game dev, story -- or just writing -- is a more efficient content medium than anything else. The key thing, of course, being finding the right people who know how to write in the correct way for a game. And this applies only to games that can use writing! Hmm.
...
Darklands post to come.
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| Wednesday, October 22, 2008 |
| editor design meta, game ideas meta, tiles | |
Posted - 10/22/2008 2:49:34 PM | So I was washing the dishes and I got to thinking...
Coder Design Bias & Content Generation Efficiency
Coders see and think about the world in a certain way because of what they do. To a non-programmer, what a coder understands and finds fascinating is meaningless and confusing -- like how the inside of a car looks to me, who knows nothing about cars.
It is often coders who implement UI, and specific to my point, the game content editing UIs (which surely undergoes less testing and revision than the final game UI itself) -- that is if there even is a UI for creating game content. But coders think and see like coders and are often content to make UIs and other content generation systems which are effectively hostile environments to non-coders.
If content generation is a hostile experience, then you can't get non-coders to generate content, or are least it becomes more difficult. I recall an interview with some coder on Baldur's Gate explaining that there were a lot of stupid item fetching quests because they needed a lot of quests finished quickly, and he knew how to do it quickly, so there you go. I've been reading a bit myself about how scripting in the Infinity Engine works, and it ain't pretty, so I can understand why that'd happen.
Which brings us to Neverwinter Nights, which was coded to be able to do pretty much everything the Infinity Engine could do but also came with an editor that should allow any old person to make their own game content. Ideally. See here:
These look something like an IDE and a spreadsheet, something a coder would be at home in. And granted, it seems that this is pretty good as far as content generation software goes. From what few I've seen, I imagine most editors used only internally are much rougher, if the content isn't simply written in scripts outright.
Maybe the hypothetical developer doesn't care -- if someone can't understand scripting and using one of these editors, they must be useless, etc. This, I contend, may be Coder Design Bias. My theory is that a fixed amount of effort on the part of the coder/designer to make the content generation software user-friendly can translate into a good percentage saving of effort on the part of all future content generating efforts and, ideally, the ability for non-coder artists and writers to build game content with a minimum of pain. Good tools make good work easier.
One example which is not necessarily great, but is interesting, is Eyesweb, a bit of media I/O and manipulation software that's geared toward being used by (fine) artists. See here:
It's a program that is expressed visually! I know a number of things take this approach, but this is a particular bit of software that I used in school to handle the first few steps of a motion-tracking setup. It's neat to see the thing running with values pumping through the diagram and all. Point is, complex scripting is handled here a bit like snapping Lego bricks together rather than being written in arcane code. It's accessible.
It's a goal of mine to design an engine that a non-technical person could create a game in. I hope that as someone who is somewhere between an artist(a fine artist, even) and a coder, that I will be well placed to deal with just this problem.
I'll have to get back to you on how it's going to actually be implemented as it happens.
Cultivating Ideas
Ok, just read this article on Lost Garden (If you have not read everything on Lost Garden, please do so now) : Rockets, Cars and Gardens: Visualizing waterfall, agile and stage gate .
In short: Designers should iterate and evaluate often over a wide range of ideas.
Discarded ideas should be saved in what the guy calls a "concept bank" so that even presently un-used ideas may inspire other ideas later on. This is like an artist saving their old sketchbooks -- they may be crap, but (I find) that looking back over them reminds me of what I was thinking, but I see it now in a new way which provokes further thought. The key action, then, in idea generation is documentation. If an idea isn't written down, it's been a waste of time!
Every game designer thinks they have great ideas, so the many-and-often idea approach should appeal to us.
Idea Scope
I know I've said this exact thing before, but game designers should have scope to their conceptual world outside of games. I specifically recall a post in the GameDev forums by some poor teenager who planned some Sci-fi game with psychic/magic melee fighters called Zealots. I'm guessing they weren't inspired by the first century Judaic religious movement, but rather by directly ripping off Starcraft without reflection upon their use of words or setting. Such is lacking scope! Read a book, ya damn kids.
Same deal for everyone wanting to make a WoW-clone. This isn't a fault of scope being small, but of scope being limited to a particular design. (And to be so limited to mainstream design as a prospective indie dev is deadly.) I mean, I applaud their passion, but .. oh, who am I kidding? No one learns to be reasonable until their projects fail over and over, like mine have. How's it go, "Experience is the teacher that gives the lesson after the test".
Dredmor
Dredmor beta pushed back a week due to coder 1's SO's bday and some other programming deadline and coder 2 having a bunch of finals or something. Plus, beta on Hallloween is just cool. Fine by me, I get a lighter workload for two weeks!
Here's part of a tileset for the Crypts:
It's my second time drawing it because a power failure on the day before (Canadian) Thanksgiving killed the psd file of my first effort. Now I'm all paranoid about power failures. It is better the second time, I do admit, as anything is.
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| Fey Mood | |
Posted - 10/17/2008 11:04:25 PM | dbaumgart withdraws from society ...
dbaumgart sketches pictures of a 2D game engine.
[It's a Dwarf Fortress thing. I think Tarn Adams really struck on something that obsessive coder or artist type people do. You know, when you are possessed by an idea ... and possible way too much caffeine... and you must create to the exclusion of all else.]
[Not that I'm not damn busy already getting things done for the Dredmor beta and, of course, taking care of a self-enforced freelance deadline. Still: it is good to be filled with creative energy; I just apologize because it isn't the sort that makes me want to write in my GameDev journal.]
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| Thursday, October 9, 2008 |
| Dredmor screenshot, AO buildings | |
Posted - 10/9/2008 10:10:41 PM | Dredmor
This is N's mystery project and he has OK'd a posting of screenshots. I'm basically revamping all graphics except for the characters, which are all finished except for two.
All I can think to say for now is that it is going to be a pretty weird game. That is a magical sombrero, yes. One of the artists got really stuck on drawing hats, apparently, so we have a lot of very strange hats in the game.
We should be in beta in two weeks.
Also, to follow up on last week, here are some potions:
What other game has a potion in a drinking horn?
[more]
Upon consideration, I feel that I should say something useful about working on Dredmor.
It's almost entirely a matter of pixel art and boy am I ever getting practice at pixel pushing. Previous artists on this project were 'traditional' pixel artists and worked in intentionally restricted palettes. So, for example, while they could have been using 255 colors per item/character/object/tileset, they tended to use somewhere between 8 and 16 colors. I've spoken before about how I don't like this artificial use of small palettes ... while conceding, of course, that it can be an aesthetic of its own.
Perhaps my real trouble with working on the existing assets is, ah, the fact there there was previously little intentional art direction. (I'm trying to be nice to N here; He's a maniacal engine coder and can't be expected to worry about puny human emotions and such things as art assets.) So given assets in a variety of styles I figured I could just lock down on the assets that were pretty consistent and which I didn't want to re-do -- the characters (not the least because character animation is not my favorite thing in the world), then re-do everything else in a consistent style based on previous designs. In a cartoony sort of game characters can get away with looking a bit different than the backgrounds. And further, usuable items have black outlines while background tiles and unusable objects do not. In other words, the look of a thing implies something about its game function. To some degree.
This isn't the easiest solution but I think it's the best compromise I can come up with that will look as good as possible.
And, no matter what, no new engine N makes is ever going to use crazy outdated sprite formats from the early 90's ever again. I'm putting my foot down on this one.
(I hope that wasn't too much complaining; It's just a process of identifying problems, solving them, and making sure they never happen again. It's quite satisfying in the end.)
AO Buildings
I thought I'd take a moment to talk about how I think about making the Aragon Online buildings distinctive in a low resolution style because it is an interesting thought process. To me at least.
The tileset I'm currently is for the dwarven city, and dwarves being dwarves, there should be a particular emphasis on metalworking buildings.
As a general style for the dwarves I'm making all the buildings of stone, and somewhat low, even underground with openings to up above which for my purposes end up looking like holes in the ground. Roofs are either earth, stone, or copper (which I think is a particularly pretty metal) And yes, copper would weather into a green color -- this is magic copper roofing; I'm keeping the color scheme as a whole earthy and warm. Everything is squared off, practical, and sturdy. They're not Elves, after all.
I've been making the weaponsmith for all the races somewhat tall and pointy. I suppose it's obvious -- the idea is to make the building look kind of like a weapon. Of course, for the dwarves, the tallness contradicts the general style. Maybe that's ok though because it especially emphasizes the function of the weaponsmith apart from the other structures. There's also a crossed swords sign, if nothing else works, and racks of pointy looking lines that should look a bit like weapons around the building.
The buildings that make up the armorsmith are shorter and sturdier than the weaponsmith. Again, the idea is to make the building look like it's product, so the armorsmith is defensive and even has a low wall surrounding to further connote protection. There are racks of shields and a shield sign as well.
The smelter is where metal is made from ore, where it all goes down, and for the Dwarves I wanted it to look like a place of serious industry, so it has 3 clusters of smokestacks rather than the two that the weaponsmith and armorsmith have. Surrounding are piles of coal and short horizontal lines to show ingots.
As a rule I'm trying to balance having building types show similar signifiers between all races while also having each be drawn in a distinctive race's style. When I finish them all I'll probably look back and be horrified at how much I didn't do it properly, but at least it's a noble ideal.
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| pixel pushing, id retrospective | |
Posted - 10/3/2008 5:43:17 PM | Pixel Pushing
I'm getting back into doing buildings for Aragon Online; My last set took way too long to do, so I've been trying to refine my 'asset pipeline' to more efficiently employ my time. Previously, I worked entirely in pixels in the final form, but now I'm trying to work in a few intermediate stages: 1- concept art to get building shapes and colors down, 2- drawing components in pixel form, 3- then assembling components into the final buildings. This way I won't have to spend the whole time fretting over and re-doing my bloody pixel work.
For the other project I've been drawing various small items in 32x32 boxes. Potions in particular are interesting because they entail rendering translucent liquid, transparent glass, and gloss.
I'm trying to bring the color of the glass into the potion so that the viewer can see that the contents are a different material than the container, and the gloss to show that the container is shiny, ... and maybe gloss of a secondary color to bring out the color and depth of the potion even more ... with varying levels of success. You can't see the glass material in the first bottle, so it looks like maybe the bottle is just made of green glass. The gloss highlight on the second bottle should be white, not cyan like the glass material, I think. And the potion color is kinda boring, or at least too close the the third. The third bottle ... well, I was trying for some lighting of a secondary color from the lower-right, but it's rather ill-defined at the moment. Plus the shape and color make it look a bit like ketchup.
(Upon consideration, I think my sensible side could give a damn whether every bottle is rendered beautifully; There's a game to ship! Heh heh; Us artists are obsessive types.)
Check out how Blizzard handled the problem in Diablo 1 / 2:
Clearly rendering the bottle from a straight-on side view makes things easier, and the little cords add contrasting texture. And the potions are generally pretty dark, as befits the gothic atmosphere. Masterfully done, to quote Cain.
Quake 1 and old id games
I got the id pack on Steam largely for Quake, maybe some Doom.
The Doom3 expansion was pretty lifeless (heh); The plot managed to bore me almost entirely very quickly and I'm still trying to think of how it happened. Maybe it was the piled on cliches of space-marine skiffy, like third-rate Aliens regurgitate. Hrm. And I liked Aliens. Event Horizon, perhaps?
Heretic 2 (the one on the Quake 1 engine) was bizarre; I remember when this was ground-breaking stuff, loading up the Heretic 2 demo in anticipation of breakable objects and a catapult. The art was executed skillfully but in a low-resolution, small-team manner we don't see much nowadays on what passes for AAA projects; Yes, it's aged terribly in many respects, but my eyes see the product of artists' work, not just fixed images of the game as-such ...
I got that feeling with Quake 1, as well: "Hell, we could do this". The animation is crude, the textures are minuscule, the engine archaic, the sounds lovingly weird (thanks Trent Reznor) but for the time ... And I found it quite a passable game experience, at that. Especially when I went and got someone's pet Quake engine project (FitzQuake) to play the content in rather than the old glQuake which runs so fast that it's slow (which I know from coding is not that strange a problem).
The CD audio tracks by Trent Reznor did not come with the Steam download and that, sirrah, is total bs.
Back to Quake: What really shines in the single player game from a gameplay perspective are the Ogres and the grenade launcher. This is a 3d game, these are the elements that work uniquely in a 3d space -- so many hallways and corners seem set up just to let Ogres spam grenades down and around the bend you're hiding in, it's brilliant. An inversion of this is the nail-shooting scorpians from the first mission pack: they could basically only shoot in a 2d plane, so if you-the-player took advantage of the 3d environment you could dodge their attacks.
I realized that the sounds the Zombies make is a sort of nasal snoring -- I think this burned into my brain when I was young so now I can't stand the sound of snoring. Plus, they throw chunks of themselves at you. That's so gross, it's awesome. Yes, I was really freaked out by the Zombies the first time I played the Quake demo.
The general eldritch Quake atmosphere is still there too (though maybe not as much as my nostalgia and overactive imagination lead me to believe); The cosmic Lovecraftian horror is what I love most about Quake, and it is by the 'trim' nature of the game almost entirely unexplained. What's with the slipgates, demons, castles, metal-hell, and eyeless lightning throwing yetis? They don't ruin it by trying to explain it (badly). The setting of Quake 2, for example, was Ok I suppose, but the Strogg are really just Borg with less goth, a more radical take on body modification, and inexplicable macho/feudal social overtones that probably say more about the creators than anything about an interesting setting, cough cough. Quake 3 is right out of the discussion for the nerf weapons, not that it had a setting anyway. I could really go for a science-fictionalish game that didn't take every element of its plot and setting from a bad copy of Hollywood movies.
Or maybe it's nostalgia speaking. But man, Quake was good times like will never happen again; The creative energy of the entire FPS community will never again be focused on one game in a force that spawned almost every FPS sub-genre we know today.
Next up is 3d-accelerated Doom.
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| Friday, September 26, 2008 |
| "Weird news, sir!" | |
Posted - 9/26/2008 8:53:16 PM | Vacation was good. Both a combination of a much needed break with so much work vacationating that I'm eager to get back to life. Right, I need to just ease back into this.
Necessity
We're going to crank out a small, simple project N has had sitting around, quote, "85 percent done". Famous last works 'eh? But on the other hand, the best way to start a project is to start almost done!
Right, so I've got to figure out how to bring together assets made by 4 artists contracted over a few years. Yeah, they're all low-resolution 2d art, but you'd be surprised at the variation in style that artists can come up with. I'll fill what gaps I can in with what style I can manage and modify as little as possible of the existing assets (so I don't have to simply re-do everything) to make the graphics of this game consistent. The true test is what beta testers notice, heh heh.
Painting
A couple done before I left, a couple after.
   
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| Friday, September 5, 2008 |
| Animation, Powerplay, Tiles | |
Posted - 9/5/2008 12:08:36 AM | Clockwork Fantasia
1: Animation methodology
I missed some steps in here (chortle here), but I made some gifs of my work on drawing a character's walk cycle:
   
Try as I might to go quickly, I keep noticing areas that badly need touching up, like the left side of her head-kerchief thing... I'm not sure if people actually notice this stuff in the heat of a game though, so I wonder in turn if I should be spending time on making everything perfect.
Anyway. Here's a shot of drawing the between-image between two frames; I don't usually set it up with color that nicely, but it shows clearly what's going on.
2: Experiment Week
N likes to proclaim "experiment week"(s) during which we are to attempt crazy, innovative things that may forward game development in unexpected ways. (He explained that he picked this up from some place he interviewed at once.) Neat!
Of course, to repeat my quip for the third time, I said that "I am going to experiment with getting animations finished.", because damn if I don't have enough work to do. At least N accepts that only having one gender per class to start will cause me to go less insane. About now is when I wander off, mumbling to myself, drawing figures in the air with listless, withered fingers.
Other Stuff
3: PowerPlay by Mike Dosey
I made graphics for this fellow and he's made a neat little game. I really enjoyed some of the pixel work I did for this and some of it came out very well. (Other parts were damned hard and turned out ugly again and again.) I ever got to do a little digital painting thing for the launcher!
 
I don't have a webpage for Mike as such, but I'll have to plug his project whenever he gets online with one.
4. Pixely Tiles
I've been working on 32x32 pixel-arty tiles for a project by some people that doesn't seem to have a webpage either. They're fun, and here are a couple tiles I think look particularly nice. I'm not sure what it is about food, but I was reading this Robin Hobb novel that had very rich descriptions of food so I was thinking a lot about it...
Anyone need some 32x32 medievalish tiles? The agreement I made with the client was to do the work at a much lowered price for non-exclusive rights. Er, meaning that I can re-sell the tiles.
I've got pretty good records of time for this project, too, so once I'm done I'm going to calculate how much I charge per pixel...
5. Vacation!
I'm outta here from September 11-23, I may not post between now and after then. Or might I?
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| PAX demo, random character art stuff | |
Posted - 8/29/2008 4:04:54 PM | CF Tech Demo at PAX
D is heading down to PAX with a laptop and a super hacked up build of CF to show off the game to whoever is receptive. Look for the blond guy with the laptop and who is not dressed as Megaman and ask to see Clockwork Fantasia, I'm sure you'll find him.
And it should suffice to say that yesterday was a crazy work day, but even I did not keep going until, well... let's see what the SVN log says:
Last update time, by team member:
Me : 6:02 pm
J : 10:41 pm
D : 1:35 am
N : 3:55 am
Yes, N is nuts.
(He said something about how I make him seem authoritarian, or something, in my posts, but really it's just me trying to add non-existent drama to the narrative of game design. N is obviously passionate about his work, but he is a mellow and exceedingly understanding guy in interpersonal dealings, honestly. Would you like to hear stories about N's firebrand diktats or would you rather hear about how we sort of talked for a minute and he was all "it'd be cool if we could get this done by Friday". I mean come on.)
Oh, yeah, here's a shot from the PAX tech demo:
Old character art, being revised. And otherwise, as perhaps you can see, N overhauled the lighting and it's seriously awesome even if the shot doesn't show much.
And ooh, creepy:
Those are crates filled with evil, mind you. J called me at 10pm to find the texture for these to put them in to the game. For you!
The UI doing its thing with some fun new graphics (that'll surely be replaced again):
You can see a radial menu sort of thing going on here. I do think that the format of this menu as such is more suited to consoles than PCs because it is of a design that is more easily traversed with a gamepad/joystick than mouse.
Dialog system doing its thing with the monk Berzelius who acts as the narrator of the game:
The image, text, and position of each are coded in xml and all sorts of things are possible. ... and I think we need a new panel background texture at a higher resolution.
PAX tech demo loading screen, just because it's fun:
It features the witchdoctor class (the witchdoctrix?).
I can't show you a picture of it, but the music for the game is really, really well done. Sure, there are only five and a half minutes of it, but it's a good five and a half minutes.
Characters
Just fun stuff. I've moved the content below to the shots above, so there's just the animation to show. Fo' sho'.
...a tinkerer wrench attack:
I'll admit now that, incredibly, I managed to avoid taking an anatomy class in art school. Partially I just didn't want to do it even though it'd be good for me, and partially I was busy taking all kinds of interesting classes like stone lithography, sculpture, and sound art. In the end I have to do anatomy anyway through animation, though as I've said before, it can be fudged. And ha, it's not that any games ever actually pay attention to actual anatomy, considering some of the character design. But I jest! As N, who seems to be surpassing dcosborn* in mentions on my journal here said, games get away with all kinds of crazy crap you wouldn't believe if you looked closely.
* It's strange, actually; N and dcosborn both give me a psycho graphics coder vibe. I want to put them together in a room and see what happens. Perhaps, like Protoss Templar, they would meld to form a being of pure 3d graphics programming energy.
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