Life long game developer
Do you like silly stuff? Ridiculous comics? Well, if so, get on over to Pop Gun Comics for some great indie tomfoolery.
Please, please, if you like stupid stuff that makes you laugh read Bastard Road as soon as you can. Highly enjoyable! Warning: extreme cartoon violence against mini mariachis!
I’ve already discussed how much I like Wipeout’s graphic design and now the developers behind Wipeout HD have done an awesome job with the 3D design and technology for the recently released Wipeout HD. Not only does it look great, they’ve included a feature in the game that allows you to take “photos” of your favorite moments using many camera options such as simulated motion blur (see above).
Graphic design wise my favorite mode by far is called “zone”. It’s a gameplay mode that has been around in the Wipeout series for a while. The player’s ship gets faster and faster over time until it takes too much damage and eventually explodes. The player is scored based on how long they can survive.
The design aesthetic in the past for the zone mode was a sort of clean room filled with neon. It was definitely unique and visually pleasing. The new design for zone mode is even better though:
The colors and gradients of the world change as the player reaches new zones (i.e. faster speeds). I love how the entire look of the game is changed so drastically from a futuristic metropolis to an ultra-stylized world of gradients and silhouettes using the exact same level geometry. There aren’t many games that look like the screenshot above and it is refreshing to see Wipeout HD taking a new direction.
Here is KJ Sawka playing some impressive jungle / drum & bass beats live. Even if you don’t like electronic jungle music you’ve got to appreciate Sawka’s skills.
I love how he uses two hi-hats on top of each other at around 1:07 into the video.
Insane Pixel Art dance-off madness by the super brothers. I’m digging the synchronized music and graphics at the beginning of the video.
Today I went to “Geisai #11“, an art festival organized by Takashi Murakami’s company Kaikaikiki. It was presented at Tokyo Big Sight, a large exhibition hall near the Tokyo Bay. Artists can rent spaces of various sizes to display their work – whatever they want. The artists are then judged by a panel of international art critics and the winners are boosted quickly into Tokyo art world prominence.
The experience of seeing so much modern art in so many styles was really inspiring. If you can, I highly recommend going to the next festival which will be in March 2009.
Over the course of the show I took as many pictures as I could to catalog my favorite pieces. I took a lot of time editing these photos after the fact to try to reproduce the display environment as closely as possible. Foolishly I did not ask the artists – many of whom were present – what the titles of the pieces were so I made up the titles you see on my Flickr photo stream. Please treat the photos as my interpretation of what I saw. Many of the photos themselves are only small parts of larger works by the artists.
Nothing beats seeing the art in person so next time please try to go yourself!
Click here to visit the full Flickr photo set.
And now for my favorites:
Statue of Child
This beautiful, yet dead, statue was really well made. I had to look at the eyes very closely to see what exactly the artist was trying to convey.
Purely from a photography perspective I think this photo is the best I took today. I feel it accurately reproduces exactly what was shown with clear detail.
Destroyed Tokyo
This artist’s works solely revolved around imaging what Tokyo would look like if it was abandoned by humanity and left to rot for hundreds of years. He incorporated many of the most popular neighborhoods of the Tokyo of today. Really creative work.
This is a tiny part of a huge painting.
Gelatinous Formation
I love the colors and texture.
Girl in White
The contrast between the details and shading in the face and hand versus the clothes and background is key.
Finally comes a picture that I definitely do not call a favorite piece of art but I think some of you may enjoy.
Power Twins (Quadruplets?)
The “power twins” as I call them claim to be cyborgs from the future. I think they made a wrong turn on the way to the anime convention though.
Yesterday I met up with Jean Snow – a writer who runs a great blog on design and Japan stuff; check it out – to chat and have a beer in Ikebukuro. We have a lot in common least of which is a love for games. At one point we started talking about the art styles in games and got on the topic of games from the past that still hold up visually today.
This topic was brought up because Jean recently re-played the classic LucasArts adventure game Full Throttle (1995).
Full Throttle still looks great. Sure, the screen resolution is not nearly as high as today’s standards which does give it a slightly dated pixelated look. But the well executed cartoonish and exaggerated art style allows the game to still hold up visually today. It can be hard to go back and play older games that are graphically so far separated from what we have today. A game like Full Throttle is mostly exempt from that since it was developed with an art style that emphasized design over pushing the limits of technology.
As a point of contrast, here is a screenshot of Destruction Derby (1995) from the PS1. It’s from the same era as Full Throttle and is a game I thought looked and played great at the time.
Frankly, it looks terrible by 2008 standards. The cars are extremely box-like and the billboard trees give it a Hollywood back-lot movie set atmosphere. It has not aged well.
While Full Throttle is a 2D game and Destruction Derby is 3D I don’t believe this is a 2D versus 3D issue. I will say that it is likely easier for a well designed 2D game to hold up for a longer period of time but there are exceptions. Take The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002) for example. This game in the Zelda series was released in late 2002 and uses a clever stylized cel-shaded art style.
It has now been nearly six years since this game was released and it still looks great. The expressiveness of the main character, the clean and simple ocean waves, and the stylized visible wind gusts all contribute to a unique style that doesn’t emphasize polygon counts and technology. Visually it is an extremely well designed game that I believe will continue to look great for years to come. The latest Zelda game, Twilight Princess (2006), uses a realistic 3D style and is already starting to look dated when compared to the latest high-technology 3D games.
Another recent game that will hold up for a long time is Pixel Junk Eden (2008). I’ve already blogged about my love for that game’s style here.
The graphic design lacks specific details but still manages to look very clean and harmonize well with the gameplay and music. I think it is that “less is more” design sensibility that will make PixelJunk Eden continue to look fantastic 10 years from now and beyond.
So what lessons are there to learn from these games? I think it boils down to two things:
A lot of this comes down to current technical limitations. Great artists can’t create their best artwork because of limitations on texture sizes, polygon counts, number of simultaneous objects that can be simulated, etc. I believe that in my lifetime photorealistic graphics will be achieved. Once that happens success will be much more about the artistry and entertainment of a game than in supplying the latest technological eye candy. It will also become much harder for a realism focused game to become quickly dated visually.
But before that graphic plateau is hit if you want your game to be looked back upon fondly for its visual style then a realistic style is not the way to go.
Here are some other games whose visuals still hold up today:
Another World / Out of this World (1991)
Street Fighter 3 (1997)
Super Mario World (1990)
There are many others, those are just some of my favorites.
Clearly realism focused games sell well in the market because the large majority of games that are released are realistically rendered. I think that will continue to be true for quite some time but as the graphics hit a realism plateau gamers will become more and more bored and seek alternate visual styles.
Someone with a better art history background will have to correct me where I’m wrong but I believe it will be similar to what happened in the art world. Realism was the primary goal in paintings and sculpture for hundreds of years. When artists moved from the Renaissance art period into Impressionism, Abstraction, Cubist, and Modernist styles the visual presentations changed dramatically. The extremely realistic paintings created by the masters of the Renaissance period still look amazing today. I feel like the current realistic 3D games are stepping stones to reaching the master level of realistic quality that artists like Michelangelo achieved. They are necessary stepping stones but will not be looked back upon 500 years from now as pinnacles of artistic quality.
Eventually the art of games will achieve photorealism but in the current era developing games with non-photorealistic artistic styles will result in games that are much more likely to age well.
Last week PixelJunk Eden was released on the PS3 Playstation Store. It’s the third game in the PixelJunk series by Q Games. As the title makes it abundantly clear I think the visual art and graphic design in this game are exceptional. I highly recommend at least playing the free demo.
The picture above is a wallpaper made from many of the plants that the player can jump on. Gameplay wise it’s a platformer. The player touches pollen that is floating around to open up new seeds. Once opened the seeds turn into the plants you see above which then allows the player to climb higher. The player’s sole goal is to collect “spectra” which are special pick-ups you can find in each stage. The game gets progressively more difficult as you play further with the introduction of enemies and different types of surfaces that affect the player’s movement. But enough about the gameplay – it’s a straightforward and fun platformer; recommended.
The art and music, which matches the visual aesthetic quite well, was developed by a Japanese artist who goes by the nickname Baiyon. Q Games has began to make it a habit of working with up and coming artists. They also worked with a group of really creative musicians for the PixelJunk Monsters soundtrack. It’s not unusual for game companies to work with outsourced artists for concept art and music. That said, in the case of Eden I think it is a bit special in that the same person developed both the artistic and musical styles.
I have to applaud Q Games and SCEA as well for taking a chance on creating something that is quite different than the average commercial game. It feels like a well polished “indie” game… which is basically what it is. The PixelJunk series must be selling since they continue to be made which is a great sign for the future of smaller budget and higher risk games.
It’s rare that a game catches my eye these days by trying something new (in this case, art style rather than gameplay). I believe this lack of innovation is not just economic pressures from the market and publishers either. Developers who have been in the industry for a while and have played many games can begin to become close minded. I’m not a hypocrite nor am I trying to preach – I’m saying this because I suffer from it as well. It’s so natural sometimes when thinking about a game design problem to reach into your previous experience of hundreds of completed games to borrow a solution that has been tried and tested. That’s one of the reasons I’ve personally been trying to learn more about artistic fields outside of game development – something I recommend for all developers to broaden their perspectives.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with building better ideas from ideas that already exist. As successful companies such as Blizzard have proven implementation is almost always significantly more important than the idea itself. PixelJunk Eden is well implemented technically and artistically which is what makes it work. I hope that we will continue to see more creative risks like this taken as the game market changes and digital distribution continues its inevitable rise.
“Layout Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Building Pages in Graphic Design” covers the course of building a graphic design layout from conception to completion. It isn’t specific to magazines, business pamphlets, websites, or any specific industry. It simply goes over the process many professionals take to identify client needs, brainstorm ideas, layout imagery, use grids to strengthen various aspects of the layout, the use of typography, etc. Given I’ve never worked in the design field before, it opened my eyes to a lot of the thought process that goes into building a design from scratch.
Up until this point I’ve been doing all of my graphic design with a stream of consciousness process. I don’t think that is bad at all, necessarily, because what I’m doing is just personal work and goofing around at the moment. But I do want to make designs that have a specific purpose. For example, making the viewer feel that a particular website has value and that the brand value is communicated appropriately. If the website is trying to communicate “fashionable” but the design says to the viewer “technology” then the design is failing.
The first half of the book details the thought process that goes into preparing a design for a specific purpose. The second half of the book is filled with examples and analysis of designs that were successful and comments by the designers as to why. Many of the designs are not ones I would want to create myself but reading the artist’s comments does reveal how they were able to create designs that were successful for the industry they were commissioned for. Having an explanation for why certain text is turned sideways and is larger than other text gave me insight not necessarily into how to make something that I like but how to better think about how to design something that carries more meaning.
Like Brian Tracy said in his book on the rules of success, the difference between the professional and amateur is in the amount of preparation the professional does before starting their work. Unsurprisingly that is also true in the graphic design field. I now have a basis for understanding the kinds of things a professional thinks about before starting their design work. I’m obviously no professional but the “Layout Workbook” helped me get a little bit closer.
And then, and then and then and then
This weekend I went to see an art showing by Takashi Murakami and his company Kaikaikiki in Hiroo, Tokyo. Murakami is an internationally famous artist whose work has sold for multiple millions of dollars. The concept of the show was “my first art” which presents a more affordable way to own a limited edition print that is signed by the artist. Over the past 7 years the showing/sale has been run 5 times.
Clearly the art presented are all not originals. They are prints of paintings. That said, the prints are of astonishing quality. The color reproduction and paper used just looks incredible close up. Japan is the world leader in printing technology and it shows.
The image above is of “DOB”, a character created by Murakami. Entitled “And then, and then and then and then” the image itself is a variation on his original painting. This variation is called “Gargle Glop” but there are perhaps about 20 different variations of this image with different color palettes and textures. I love the way that Mr. DOB is looking at us with that really twisted smile.
Since the numbers of art pieces are limited you can’t just buy what you want unfortunately. I’m going to try to put my name into the lottery to be selected for the ability to make a purchase. Although there are a variety of other pieces of art on sale I want a version of this image. In this years offering, my favorites are “yellow jelly” and “cream”. Wish me luck.
As a side note, I thought this building in Hiroo was really cool:
The contest winners for Into the Pixel 2008 include some really beautiful game related art. From Guild Wars to Wipeout there is a wide selection of art styles in the 16 winners represented this year. I’m really happy to see this organization recognize the great artists we have in the game industry. If you’re an artist be sure to submit your work!
That said, it looks like Into the Pixel is primarily concerned with paintings and concept art. It’s great to recognize that but I would like to see recognition of great 3D artwork as well for a broader representation of the art of games.
Personally, from this years winners, I like “Four Knights” the best. How about you?