Recap 2

So it’s time for another recap already – it seems like I just did one a couple of weeks ago, my Semester B has gone by quickly: You know what they say, time flies when you are having fun, or when you are busy 120% of the time. In a strange sense, it’s been the bachelor classes I’ve attended and this last past week where I’ve been able to work on my Design Document for the Semester C project that’s kept me grounded and sane – quite a shame, really.

I’ve been looking at a lot of different drawing tutorials, and have tried to get a better overview of different artists – Aaron Blaise has some nice tutorials and videos, Feng Zhu is amazing and I have tried his style of painting a few times, Jin Kim is a master and his style of drawing is one I am aspiring to go attain. Ctrl-Paint has some really nice tutorials, I just wish I had had more time to follow some. I’ve practiced a bit in greyscale digital paintings, in order to get the value right before prepping for colour, and I’ve had some fun with that. Frank Victoria, a teacher here, has a certain style of doodling where characters are essentially all black/dark, and then he adds colours only where highlights would be – it looks really good, and I’ve been trying to do something similar, and have produced some semi-decent works – more importantly, I had fun doing it, so I’ll definitely be trying that out more in the future. Again, it is a shame I didn’t have more time to try it and show him my work, as here we almost are at the end already. I’ve also been reading a lot of Asterix, and I love the character design and visual humour in those comics, so that’s also something I’d like to strive towards. 

I’ve joined Facebook groups on Indie Game Design, and there are people posting their work constantly there – at some point, when I have something I’d like to show then I’ll do so there and hopefully drag some more fans onto my Facebook page. I’ve also found out about ArtStation, where a lot of artists post some extremely good looking stuff, and often get commented on. What I am seeking most is feedback on my work, but it is tricky finding out where to get it – usually, if you post something subpar, people are much less likely to comment.

Regarding games I’ve played, I recently started playing World of Warcraft again (vanilla, shh), as I tried figuring out which of my design proposals to go with – Warcraft had a great artstyle back in the day, colourful and full of character, even with very few polygons. The blizzard texturing team back around launch where absolute masters, and I will definitely look at their work for inspiration for my projects. 

Besides the mandatory projects and classes, I’ve been studying animation and storyboarding with Phil Valentin, and I’ve really enjoyed those classes. Besides being very talented, Phil is an exceptionally nice guy, and is always willing to offer feedback on my stuff, so I think those classes saved the semester for me. I am sad I missed the talks about how this kind of stuff was available during semester A, because I would definitely have enjoyed my time here more had I participated then as well.

I’ve also studied storytelling with Jeremy Clancy, and I’ve really enjoyed hearing about the power of storied and that kind of thing too – telling stories, through games or otherwise, is what I want to do, I just wish I had had more time to do it.

Regarding the actual live brief we had to do, we were approached by a famous choreographer who was interested in doing some VR stuff, inspired by some zen-like experiences he had had in Japan I think. As a group we had to design small rooms around this idea in the Unreal engine – I had never used Unreal before, so while I learned a little bit of it in the time we had, I would much rather have made something more game-like, but seeing it work with the Oculus was kind of funny, even though I prefer Unity to Unreal. Unreal is a massively popular engine with tons of technologically impressive features, especially in the lighting and rendering part I feel, so I should get more acquainted with it, even though I don’t like it much.

About the Creative Enterprise project, we had to conduct an interview, and I immediately set my sights on talking to some of the people from Playtonic Games, who are making Yooka-Laylee, a Kickstarter game I backed last year. The team are almost exclusively ex-Rare people, and I really like their artstyle and the idea behind the game. I got in contact with several of their members, but sadly none could help me with the time we had left, so that was a bit of the disappointment, as it was the only part of that project I was looking forward to. To make matters worse, due to a lot of technical difficulties on the hand-in day, I had to hand in 5 minutes late, which meant that my grade will now be capped at 50 – ouch. There’s something deliciously mind-rending about having spent more time than you should on something, when you have no time to give.

Right after I handed that in I got started on the Design Document which is also due today – I actually had fun with it, if such a thing can be real. I enjoyed doodling and drawing, and when it came to putting things together nicely in Indesign, which I had never used before, even that was fun. I just wish we had had more time to actually do it, so I could have produced something better, but oh well.

Failing to update the blog is my own fault, but when I think back on it I am still a little unsure of what I could have posted – I am inherently against just posting things for the sake of doing so, but apparently that was the task, so I need to get started I guess – digital bureaucracy.

To recap the semester in total, it was too busy, and I didn’t feel like I had enough time to do what I wanted, or learned what I wanted. It’s Ironic that such a semi-depressing semester, projects-wise, ends with the best bit, but I can’t complain about that.

-Mads

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