Creative Connections 2011

Last week (12-19th November) I participated in a Doddse Europe event called Creative Connections. It is an annual event in Oberwesel Germany where a group of 150 selected talented students from all over europe go for a week and participate in many different artistic activities raging from drawing classes to performing arts. I have attended this event for the last three years 2007-2010. While in SHAPE High Scho-l. Now my good friend and ex-art teacher Bill Root arranged my participation again, but this time as a staff assistant teacher. Here I would like to tell you more about my brand new learning experience.

Creative Connections takes place in a big youth hostel fitted with classrooms and seminar halls. For an entire day students attend their chosen class where they learn about different techniques and work on a number of projects. The finished work is than displayed at an exhibition.

I was an assistant to Weston Maggio, a digital imaging teacher and a Wacom tablet/Photoshop expert. My work consisted of helping out students with problems and questions, Helping out with getting their ideas out and making a quality digital poster. This proved to be very helpful for Weston since he could concentrate on teaching and lecturing and didn't have to be interrupted by little problems students might have. I also helped out around the hostel with computer related problems and at the exhibition I was in charge of the students that helped setting up the gallery. Me and a drawing class student also made a little colaboration, I used her pencil portrait of one fo the organizers and digitaly colored it in photoshop. At the end of the event we gave The portrait as a gift. Through out the week I was also asked to present my college work, And give students a presentation and lecture about getting into university and tips about making your portfolio. Also a small presentation about keeping a successful and productive sketchbook. I got some great feedback and many questions from the students after my two, hour long presentations.

Because of the romantic setting that CC is set in I decided to use some of the scenes as illustrations for my Zork re imagination. Oberwesel is a town on the Rhine river, A valley that is scattered with castles and interesting Bavarian locations. This proved to be a perfect setting for my Game. The youth hostel was right next to a beautiful medieval castle. I took lots of pictures and many are going to be used in my illustrations.

This week has given me so much, it was a wonderfull learning experience. Becasue attending an event that i was in back in the day as a student, and now going back as a teacher. It has given me a totaly different perspective, and a interesting view on a teachers life. And also waht goes behind the scenes of such event. After this week I am very much thinking about going into teaching after University. Even if I had a hard time getting used to speaking in front of people. I am sure practice will help. After I came up with an effective process it was really easy and very enjoyable to talk in front of people about something you love. I tried not to stick with any sort of guideline and just improvised and made up the order as I go. The students were very interested and asked lots of questions.

I really hope that I can come back next year. This was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. I learned so much but also gave a lot and served as a role model to many of the students.
After the event was over, I had a chance to talk with some of the teachers, Wes and Mr.root even suggested that next year if things go well, I could even teach a part fot he class myself. Which I am very exited about.

Pitch Concepts

Here is a few Concepts from my sketchbook, These are very rough and mainly just an initial visual idea of some of the characters. The Airships might make it into the final game possibly. The last image is a concept I did a few months back as my own side project. but I thought he might actually fit into the game really well as a character.

Zork: Lores of Boramia, Mock up cover art

First version/Final version

 This is a mock up cover page for the game, I thought that making the cover, or some sort of a theme based design will show how the game will look styleistickaly during the pitch. In the first version the font was too hard to read, The second one still isnt perfect but better. I also finnaly came up with a subtitle, Lores of Boravia. This title should be fitting since the game revolves around a legend and contains fantasy folkroles from the gameworld. Boravia is a made up kingdom, based on Moravia. Since the culture is based on the slavic culture. 

Doors

The main project this term was to create a 3d door in Maya. Since the directions of how the door is suppos to look like were rather free, I decided to go simple and creative. My image for this door was a ruined wall with an archway and a old wooden door inside it. It would not be attached to other doors rather a lone object possibly in the middle of a field or such. So a started working a rough concept in Photoshop. This was quite easy since i had a clear image in my head. The wall would be made of old stones and the archway would have runes engraved in it. This is what the first concept looked like:

The design looked good, and seemed easy to create as a 3d model, But i wasn't too happy with the wooden door itself, So I redesigned it, Gave it some Celtic knots and changed the main symbol on the archway. Now it was ready to be modelled. I didn't include a side view since i knew exactly how it would look from the side, plus the model is rather flat and the front is the most important.

Than I started modelling, It took a while to get used to the modeling techniques in Maya, but after a while it seemed natural and the model was coming along well. I took an approach as if I was building an actual stone wall/door from bottom up making each individual brick and placing them on top of each other.

After my door was finished and I was happy with it, I unfortunately found out that triangle polygons are going to cause problems when exporting to mud box, this was a problem since my door was filled with triangles. So instead of painstakingly removing the triangles i redid my entire door, making sure the brick contained no triangles.

Now that my model was ready. I had to go through the pain full task of UV mapping. But with the use of some very help full online tutorials, I managed to make this much easier for myself. Since I learned about the automatic projection option. This has helped me out greatly since i didn't have to go trough the "tetris" process. After that I brought my UV map to photoshop and started texturing, which was a surprisingly fun process and with the use of some high res textures it came out very nicely. Finally I added some details like the grass on the bottom of the stones and the platform which the door is sitting on. If I had more time I would have textured the platform itself as well, and added some details like little stones scattered around the door and making the model look like a miniature terrain for a fantasy board game. But overall am happy with the result.

Flash Game Dev - 5

This week the goal was to follow the set duedates and try and get as much done as possible. We had a discussion on how to get things moving faster. Since there is so few of us, am we cannot dedicate our fulltime to this project things have been getting rather slow. But I managed to finish up all of my ship sprites, plus try some animation. Shannon the made the first version of a possible theme tune. Zach created a wiki to put all of our ideas together, which made the whole project seem more tight. Alex started working on the tilesets for the islands. And Steve did a great mock up of the UI. This is all great, but its not like we have moved on much further from where we have been. One idea for geting things moving faster, is to imrove comunication between the team, So Zach has set up a group chat on mibbit.net where we can go whenever and chat as a group. After one session we have come up with a decent plot, and a story board for the first mission.

Making something so simple as a flash game, is much more time and thought consuming than one would think.

Bouncing Balls

Flash Game Dev- 4

The week started of with another skype call on sunday. The main points of discussion was how to get thing moving faster, since we are behind schedule. I suggested more specific deadlines. Since we havent got any actual personal goals for each member other than the main one. So Zach came up with a calendar for each member with specific deadlines for each of the required game assets that the memeber was assigned to. This made things so much easier and clearer.

During the week I had my first try with pixel art, since thats what we decided that the units and assets be like. With a quick tutorial from Alex i put together the players ship in 100x100 pixel resolution.
I found this different art style very fun to work with. But unfortunatelly later in the week we had to change the game size due to some technical problems Zach came across. Which ment my ship had to be remade into a smaller resolution. We also came up woth a table of sizes for each fo the assets.
During the week Steve was working on the game UI, and also asked me to come up wth some concepts because we decided the menu will be in the style of an interior of the ship. In the end of the week, we have moved much farther, and things looked steady. I started working on another pixelart ship.

In the next conference call, Zach told us that Jaime had to leave our project. This ment we dont have anyone to work on backrounds and tilesets. Which ment we had to look for another person. Zach took charge of that. Meanwhile me and Alex have devided work among us two as to who will do what pixel art assets. In the end I was going to continue doing ship designs, and alex will do villages and enviroments. With more and more things coming together we have finally moved on. But now that Jaime is not here, more work will fall on us three.
Zach has found a musician who might be able to help us with the music in the game, plus a very talented artist who might be willing to take up Jaimes place. Meanwhile I finished some pixel art ships and started working on more:

Life Drawing

Flash Game Dev- 3

In the first week we communicated through a personal forum, where we posted threads about each individual part of the game. Like Concepts, Game name ideas, Schedule, Various Spreadsheets, General idea pot, Testing.

During the first two weeks everyone started putting up sketches and concepts these are some of mine:

Ship Designs

Sketch of the players home

Environments

Ship Concept

Flash Game Dev -2

Our Game Development started of with a Skype conference call. Our Team consists of 3 artists, 1 programmer, and 1 audio person.

Things we discussed in the meeting:

1. Basic Game play/mechanics - Our game will be a 2D shoot em up/Tug of war/Strategy. Basically the player takes control of a ship which he can fly around in a level, him and his enemy each control a village, from which they can sen out units to attack the enemy town. Or they can attack the village themselves. One f feature discussed was mining, or the possibility of sending out a mining bot to mine for minerals, another feature was neutral capturable villages

3. Story/Theme Ideas - Many ideas discussed, From amnesiac robots, to Steampunk zeppelins.
I Came up for the idea for the theme, A dieselpunk post ww2 world with flying islands and zeppelins and planes. Inspirations: Metal Slug, Crimson Skies, World of tomorrow, Fallout.

2. General overview of the game play - Since we have a playable mock up done already we knew how the game relatively plays, But this was just to get things straight and to add ideas.

3. Timeline - We will be shooting to 4-5 weeks to get this done. First two weeks is concept art and ideas. than we start to get things done.

4. Game size - We are limited to 10mb of space for the entire game.

5. Jobs: Work split:
alex - characters
jaime - backgrounds, and tiles
martin - characters (with alex)
steve - UI (with martin)

6. Monetization/Legal/money: Monetization is primarily through sponsorships, organized through Flash Gaming License (FGL). There is also an option to self-publish and make money from advertising and microtransactions as well if we get in a really bad situation where the game is too big. (larger than 10mb)


7. Legal Agreements

Flash Game Development - Intro

So a few days ago I was contacted by Zach Goldstein. He said he is looking for some artists to help him develop a flash game. He himself is a programer and has already made a rough playable mock up of the actual game, all he needs is artists to help him give the game some style.

The deal was, we have a few weeks to get a "demo" of the game out. Publish it on this one website where flash game websites can "bet" on the game to beposted on their website. If our game is good enough, we will get sponsored.

Ofcorse, This seemed like quite a blind shot that in the end might bring me nothing. But I decided to go for it. Take the shot, and even if we dont get through in the end, At least its experience.

So I decided I will post up the development of our game here on my blog. Since we are curently learning about the development of games in small studios and all that. I can now link the things I have learned to my own personal experience.

Principles of animation - The good

 Bad animation can be seen almost everywhere on the internet, people use animation to show an idea in a slightly more advanced way than just making pictures. Unfortunatelly many of these fail miserably in many of the principles of animation that make animation acceptable. One of the movies I have watched recently was "Treasure Planet" made by Disney. As i watched it I could easily see that the people who made this knew what they were doing. As thats true with many of the Disney films they are just top notch. Than I looked at youtube and some of the older tv shows I used to watch when i was a kid. And when looking more deep into them, I noticed they were just horribly animated. Using cheap techniques and the overall quality was just poor. But than again, do these low budget movies have to be as good as lets say Disney, No. They can be animated in the most horrible way, but as long as the idea gets through, and it is at least possible to see whats going on. Than bad animation is completetly fine. And example of this is "South Park", Even though the show has improved over the past couple fo years. It still can be concidered very badly animated. But this is an exampe when the idea behind the show overshadows the actual animation. Furthermore, over the years South Parks bad animation has been one of the thngs why the show is so poppular, its bad animation is also its personal style.
So here is a look at all the principles of animation in the good and the bad.

Staging: presenting an idea so that it is unmistakably clear

 In this scene Jim and Silver meet up for the first time, and silver gives jim a hand which ofcorse is made up of sharp knifes and whatnot. Therefore this scene sets up the stage of them two meeting. And the idea is very clear.

Anticipation:

1. the preparation for the action (silver is about to cut the squids with his scissors)

2. the action (he cuts the squid tails)







3. the termination of the action (he spreads out the squids on the table)






 Secondary action : the action of an object resulting from another action

 Silver is on a boat which is descending down while he himself is waving and moving.

Follow through and overlap: the termination of an action and establishing its relationship to the next action - Object being thrown, hand still in motion while the object leaves the hand and keeps on moving.




Squash and Strech: defining the rigidity and mass of an object by distorting its shape during an action - When the lamp character squashes the letter I.

Timing and Motion - spacing actions to define the weight and size of objects and the personality of characters - Wall-E's actions in this scene show his personality through movement.



Straight Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose Action
Straight Ahead Action:
Pose-to-Pose Action: 

Slow In and Out - the spacing of the in-between frames to achieve subtlety of timing and movement

Exaggeration - Accentuating the essence of an idea via the design and the action - Extreme character exaggeration

Appeal - creating a design or an action that the audience enjoys watching - Wall - E was aimed at a younger audience, just like many of the pixar movies, Therefore many of the characters are cute and friendly.

Solid Drawing