Been a while since I have posted, crazy busy summer working on AIR and my first fall quarter teaching full time. I thought for a change of pace, I would show some of the work my advanced level design students did this quarter. Their goal was to emulate the World of Warcraft/Blizzard style; something students often do when they have the desire to work for a specific company.  Every texture is hand painted, every model and particle effect their own. I am sure they would be curious to see what everyone thinks.

If you have ever tried to offer feedback to artist on their work and things went badly, you probably ended up wondering, “is the artist oversensitive, or am I just a jerk?” Perhaps the problem was largely one of language. It’s pretty well understood that most artists are probably going to be lost in a swirling mass of programming terms when trying to talk to a coder, but have you ever considered that art has its own vocabulary? Terms like value, hue, warm, cool and saturation all target very specific features of a piece of art. People not familiar with these specific art terms are going to throw around all sorts of words that are ambiguous, or even worse, actually imply an art definition which is not what they mean at all. As my goal here is to try and offer some workarounds for those untrained in the arts, my solution is not simply for you to go out and start reading art lexicons. You will pick the language eventually, but meanwhile, there are some very important things you can be aware of that will help this process that artists call a critique. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you have collected your reference material, you will need a way to organize it, or it’s going to be a nightmare trying to find what you want when you need it. Putting the images online into a wiki or ftp site is be a great idea— though you will need to scan the images from the printed material. This is probably what you will have to do if you are working on an indie project with multiple artists across the country (or world). However, you want more than just a catalogue of images. What you want is a something like an Art Bible, which is a collection of images, colors, moods and other visual reference for artists to use. This is the job of the art director, so if there is one on your team, you can assign it to them (or just work on it yourself). Read the rest of this entry »

All design starts in the conceptual phase, where it must soon be manifested into physical form to be useful. In the game art pipeline, this important first step takes the form of concept art. Later in the pipeline, concept art is what all the modelers reference so they know what it is they are supposed to be modeling. Trying to explain to the artist using language what visual concepts you want them to manifest is difficult, and if you are not familiar with the artist’s vocabulary, it can get messy very quickly. Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve decided you want to make your own video game. Your programming or design skills are good enough to meet or rise to the challenge, and you’ve chosen a game engine or begun creation of one of your own. You are looking forward to a working game, but on the horizon looms the ever approaching matter of the art assets. Maybe you are aware that there is something called the art pipeline, and you know that it’s eventually going to have to be sorted out. Sure there will be some challenges getting the art assets into your game, but that is technical stuff and you can figure it out. Maybe you even wanted to make some custom content, so you download an open source modeling program like Blender. That turned out to be a bit more involved than you expected. Like all technical challenges, you know you can get it figured out, but you are painfully aware that your time would be much better spent elsewhere. You’re not concerned because there are lots of artist out there, and after all, the art just makes it look pretty, the hard work is in the coding, right? Read the rest of this entry »