Rooftop Mania

A quick look at my Rooftop area. I put this together in 3DsMax quickly just to see if the level would look coherent.
This area is adapted mainly from the workshop area outside Fletcher as it provided me with enough reference and the layout looked rather appealing and interesting to me.

Rooftop Mood-boards

Day 1 of the rooftop project and so far I'm sticking to my schedule.

Today's task was to source my own reference to make moodboards, so armed with my camera i set off for Leicester - or at least as far as I could go due to the EDL protests. But have no fear as i came across a fountain of endless reference right here on the DMU campus. Pipes, vents, alarms you name it I found it.

Well as you can clearly see i put together 3 moodboards showing the different aspects I felt make up a successful rooftop environment.
Moodboard 1 shows rooftops in general so that i could get a feel for layout, size and height.

Moodboard 2 shows assets found on existing rooftops so that i could determine what assets my own rooftop would need.

Moodboard 3 shows the textures, materials and colours found on my travels and from these i created a colour table so that all my concepts will follow along the same colour scheme.

There's a Zombie on your lawn

Oh dear, my latest obsession is yet another Popcap game.

It’s a challenging, problem solving and intellectual game that pushes the boundaries of in-game humour

Oh yes, and it all centres around zombie eating plants.

Plants vs. Zombies is the latest sensation to take over my life. I would be ashamed and embarrassed, what with major upcoming titles being released but I’m not.
Because it is awesome.

As my loved one sits glued to his PS3 drooling over the latest Final Fantasy, I can be found sat at my pc, fending off a horde of brain-eating zombies with sunflowers and wall-nuts (I said it was intellectually witty). The simple, colourful 2D art and cheerful jaunty music can keep me entertained for hours.

Which has inspired me to do a bit of detective work. I am now curious how Popcap has such a huge following of casual gamers…what is their secret?

Let’s start with some background info, which I’m pointing out I didn’t pull straight from Google.

Popcap was founded in 2000 and currently has around under 180 employees under it’s control. Their major-title ‘’Bejelewed’ sold almost 50 millions world-wide over all major consoles such as the Xbox 360 and PS3 and their efforts have won them over 25 industry awards.

Their latest title ‘Plant vs. Zombies’ was apparently an App store record breaker selling 300,000 units in the first 9 days of its release onto the I-phone.

The audience of most pop cap games is on average a 43 year old woman playing on social networking sites such as Facebook. This audience alone generates more than $1 billion which is mostly made from virtual currencies and buying in-game gifts. This specific audience gave reasons to their gaming addictions as to play with relatives and friends.

So it would seem that casual gaming is mostly comprised of a female audience. Simple rules and addictive gameplay is vital to draw their players into purchasing in-game products to keep this multi-million pound industry afloat.

Bye-Bye Z-brush, hello pixel art?

A Crisis of Faith

If I were to describe my university experience for the second year I would say it was demoralising.

The start of the year was great, I was engrossed in an interesting project, testing out new software and visited interesting places, overall I was a happy bunny. This led on into a relaxing Christmas holiday and some encouraging feedback that spurred me on into the second term but then everything seemed to collapse underneath me.

I had fallen out with my flat-mates and my self-esteem took a huge knock in which I still haven’t fully recovered. Not only that but I was asked to improve my life-drawing skills with no model, I was asked to stay sane with no weekly therapy sessions and I was asked to make a working group level with practically no group.

Now in all fairness some of these events are unfortunate, due to circumstances that couldn’t be helped and so I took fate into my own hands and tried to make the best of things.

I used my loving boyfriend as a life model, so that I could catch-up, I held make-shift therapy groups down at the pub with fellow peers so that we could vent of steam and having been re-assured that the group projects were individually assessed I began to concentrate more on me.

But this is where it boiled down to the main problem for me, what was said and what was done didn’t quite meet.

After having presented our group projects I was told that the lack of work from other group members wouldn’t reflect on me, but I think it has. I can’t help but think that the projects were assessed in the blink of an eye and those initial prejudices have stuck.

What hurt me even more was that after initial concerns with the overall size of the level, I personally explained our brief and our ideas with the new-improved layout, fairly early on in the semester and got the go-ahead, but then for some reason at the presentations we were told that it wasn’t good enough and too small. If this is the case then why weren’t these issues brought up sooner instead of just patting me on the head and sending me on my way?

I have apparently wasted hours of work on a brief that was never going to be good enough.

I also couldn’t help but notice that the main concern during the reviews was the lack of work with frequent references and comparisons to the 3rd years. I personally believe this is grossly unfair. Surely assessments should be based on the individuals capabilities and under no circumstances should comparisons to students who have 2 years more experience than us should be made, I have found the whole experience demoralising and now I am just focusing on improving my skills and planning the best-damn FMP there shall ever be :P

Although this sounds fairly rantish or possibly even rude. It is not at all intended this way. I am merely trying to keep my self going and to stay sane. These past few months have been testing for me and i have had to change as a person, but by no means am i giving up. I am learning and growing as a person for every day i am on this course and i have developed a repetoire of skills that i hope will be invaluable to me for the rest of my life. If anything, this year has taught me to keep fighting. Not to make excuses and shift the blame, not to run home and hide in the comfort of a mother's love. It has taught me how re-assess my life and instead of giving up on problems, try approaching them from a different angle.

This is not the last you have seen of this Game Art student.

An End of an Era

As the end of the year rapidly approaches I can’t help but feel sad that our group project must come to end.

Even though I no doubt have grey hairs now and have more than likely shortened my life span by a good decade due to stress induced rants I’m kinda going to miss working with my team.

At first the thought of working with unfamiliar peers scared me, I thought it would be hard to forge new friendships so late on in the year and I really did think our work would suffer because of it. But I can happily say that I have forged new relationships with brilliant, talented people that I am glad I had the chance to work with.

Had I written this blog merely a week ago, im pretty sure I wouldn’t have been so laid back. I took my responsibilities of team co-ordinator too seriously and saw the possible failure of anyone on the team as my own. But I feel I have reached enlightenment. I have peered into the inner depths of my understanding and now realise that self-motivation of others is not something I should worry about. It also helps that our level is coming on in leaps and bounds and everything is fitting together so perfectly I should be scared we’ve done something wrong.

Well one thing that does concern me is the size of our level. Other groups have chosen vast areas to play around with but I feel that the work we have done is well within our capabilities as I wanted the team to feel comfortable and to see work that puts into practice everything we have learnt so far.
The majority of the team have really impressed me and I really hope they are proud of what they have achieved. Even though communication between our group members has been lacking I’m really moved by how exicted they all get when they see our nearly complete level.

I can honestly say that most of us have slaved away at this project, literally putting our blood, sweat and tears into it (so much so that unfortunately my VD is lacking) and now I just pray that everyone gets the marks we deserve for our awesome collaborated effort.

Prince of Disney

Nestling down into my seat and stretching my legs as far as they could go, I trained my eyes onto the silver screen, taking in car advert after car advert after car advert, awaiting the feature film.
And then an all too familiar concept flashed up on the screen, dazzling my senses and appealing to my inner geek.
Prince of Persia: the film.
I was quite intrigued until a friend of mine leaned over my assorted packets of sweets and whispered in my ear,
“They’re making this film into a game”

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Ohhhkkayyy

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WHAT!?! No seriously, what?

Have I been living in an alternate universe or am I mistaken? I’m pretty darn sure that Prince of Persia : Sands of Time is already a game.
I’m actually a little confused, are they going to revamp a classic, which doesn’t really need doing or are they doing something much, much worse.

Have Disney sunk they’re money grabbing claws into a film they are completely going to ruin, so much so that actually the new game isn’t anything like the old one?
(in which case, the game is surely infringing on some copyright laws.)

The pure fact that Jake Gynlenhaal is meant to be the prince. A prince of PERSIA I would like to point out is troubling me enough. But then it is directed by Gore Verbinski, who didn’t do too bad a job of Pirates of the Caribbean, which in all fairness was based on a ride.

But I’m still bothered about the whole 'making a game into a film into a game' thing. It’s just a shame to see that the games industry has resorted to such tactics and seem to have completely abandoned making anything original. Most games now seem to be remakes or movie based games which just makes me sad. Here we are in graphical standards that were merely seen as dreams a few years ago and we are wasting our talent and capabilities on replicating a film. A film that uses real people, real textures and real world lighting. So needless to say but however good we make the game it will never look as good as real-life, which happens to be the film.

Gah! Not sure if this is making much sense as I’m going around in circles but that’s my entire point! A game into a film into a game is a never ending cycle that boggles the mind.

Cheers to you Prince of Disney for giving me one big headache.

A New Perspective

Being a Team Coordinator was a task thrust upon me by my fellow teammates. At first I was rather flattered that everyone had deemed me approachable and hardworking or it may have been that only minutes before the vote I was seen screaming down the phone at a lazy peer.

Either way I wasn’t going to let them down.

Naturally I thought that everyone else in the team would eat, sleep and work on the same hours I do.

How wrong I was.

Usually I would plow on with my work, jump head first and finish it in a matter of days or weeks but as I sat in labs nice and early, furiously texting still-asleep teammates, I realised how long and infuriatingly slow this project would be.

On the plus side we learn from our mistakes and I flat out refused to let the team start modelling before we had our detailed concepts. A stage in game-production I will never overlook again.

Having clear-cut concepts and a well prepared schedule has proved invaluable when it comes to production. As a result fewer mistakes have reared their ugly heads and what stressful problems we do encounter are mainly down to self-motivation.

One thing that has surprised me is some people’s complete disregard for deadlines. I understand that sometimes life just doesn’t go your own way but that seriously can’t happen every day for 3 weeks. If this was the real world and a real game-pipeline, I’m pretty sure your boss wouldn’t care that you’re hung-over or having a lazy day. Face it you wouldn’t have a job anymore.

Having voiced my concerns and letting off steam, I have now become more level headed. I now understand that not everyone works and behaves the same and most of my stress stemmed from a sort of motherly instinct to see everyone in the team do well and be proud of what they have achieved.

I have now tried to relax more, I clearly inform everyone of jobs and deadlines through various forms of communication and now it’s down to them and how far they want to go.