Guest Speaker Mike Bambury on Creating Ideas

Two weeks ago I attended a scheduled talk by Mike Bambury, an art director in Sony's London studio. The talk focussed on idea creation, and the methods one could use to create new untapped ideas.

Bambury began by showing us a quick introduction video, showcasing Sony games across different genres, and audiences. The diverse range of games previewed everything from, Little Big Planet 2, to Killzone 3, to several Sony Move titles like EyePet, and Sorcery.

Once the video was out of the way, Bambury began to talk about ideas and the different methods that exist to generate original ideas.

Bambury linked his talk to the author Edward Debono, and in particular, the books, Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step. Both of these books offer different tools for idea creation. Bambury talked us through three of these tools, random entry, concept extraction and lastly, provocation.

Random Entry

The first tool, Random Entry, is simple to explain but intriguing in premise. Firstly the user has to think of two to three random words. The next step is for the user to try to associate these words into a coherent whole, thus forming a random idea for a new game.

Here's an example from the talk. Bambury asked for single words describing a space station located on the moon. Members of the talk shouted out words like, "cold", "empty", "futuristic", and "cheese". The audience participant explained that the moon could be made of cheese, hence the association. Bambury said that the "cheese" example perfectly demonstrated the point of the exercise. He asked how many games are set on a space station, on a moon made of cheese, not many obviously, so the idea is original.

At this point, Bambury showed us the next tool, concept extraction.

Concept Extraction

The second tool, Concept Extraction, involves the user trying to guess the underlining theme behind a stream of words or objects. Bambury gave an example in the talk to demonstrate this. Bambury asked us to tell him the underlining concept of words he was calling out. "Van", "Car", "Plane", "Bus". In this case the underlining theme, the concept we had extracted, was transport. So the game idea would be to make a game based around the different kinds of transport that exist, and do something new with that.

Provocation

The final tool, Provocation, is to simply take an existing idea and turn it on its head.

Here’s an example from the talk. Bambury asked us to list the fundamental aspects of a typical FPS game. We responded with “weapons”, “enemies”, “killing”, “levels”, and so on.

Bambury proposed making an FPS without those fundamental elements, to create a new, original idea. As an avid gamer I have played many examples of the FPS genre, and I cannot think of a single game that tried to remove all of those elements. Games such as Half Life 2, and Halo have integrated near seamless level progression, but you would be hard pressed to find an FPS that at its core, doesn't rely on shooting enemies. (It could be argued that Half Life 2 makes some big strides in this direction, with its focus on puzzle solving and the clever uses of the gravity gun throughout most of the game. But that's a subject for another day, I'm aiming to play Half Life 2: Episode 2 over the summer, and then write a long review about the main game and both episodes).

A practical example of provocation that comes to mind, is the platform game VVVVVV. Now, the fundamental aspect of any platformer is the ability to jump from platform to platform. In VVVVVV, however, your character Viridian cannot jump. Instead he has the ability to reverse gravity at will while touching a normal ground or ceiling surface. This gameplay mechanic results in the player frequently platforming upside down, and changing the gravity constantly in order to progress through the game. To me, this seems like an obvious example of the provocation school of thought, taking an existing idea and reversing it, in action.

Screenshot from VVVVVV

Bambury summarised this section of the talk by saying "Using provocation game designers can come up with new ideas by reversing standard practises." I can definitely see the potential for this tool when trying to come up with new, appealing game ideas.

Overall I greatly enjoyed Bambury’s ideas talk. Best of all, it made me think outside of the box when considering game design, and reminded me just how important that is.

I've decided to buy both Edward Debono books via Amazon and attempt to read them over the summer. Hopefully after reading them I should gain a greater insight into the three tools covered in Bambury's talk.

As always, thanks for reading.

Bibliography

Debono Edward, "Six Thinking Hats", 1986

Debono Edward, "Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step", 1970

Games Referenced

Little Big Planet 2 (Playstation 3) , Media Molecule, 2011

Killzone 3 (Playstation 3) , Guerrilla Games, 2011

Eyepet (Playstation Move) , SCE London Studio, 2010

Sorcery (Playstation Move) The Workshop, 2011

VVVVVV (Steam) Terry Cavanagh, 2010

Half Life 2 (PC) Valve, 2004

Some Industry Reflections

One thing I have been thinking about recently, is the direction in which the indie game scene seems to be heading. This is something that can be seen in upcoming of games, various talks, articles and what is considered the largest recent successes. It is a direction that might have large consequences for the future of the medium.

Quickly summed up, there is a strong design trend of making games by iterating and extending a fun core gameplay mechanic. This is then incorporated to a game with heavy emphasis on re-playability and/or ease to make levels. The main perks of this approach being that the game becomes more fun to create (as you can have fun at a very early stage), it makes it easier to home in on a "fun" core and allows for an early beta to be released (thus allowing feedback and income to trickle in before completion). This is of course a rough outline of the trend, but I still think it represent the main gist of where the industry of indie game development is heading.

Designing a game like this is of course perfectly fine. It makes sense financially and personally. By having a game where the fun comes in at a very early stage, it is much easier to discard bad ideas and figure out the best way to do things. Getting some kind of income before completion can be crucial for a start-up company, which is much easier when having an early playable version. Betas/alphas also help building a community and spreading the word. On the personal side, motivation comes a lot easier when almost every added feature add something to the gameplay and change is easily tracked. This can make up for other not so motivational aspects of being an indie (low income, non-existing security, bad working conditions, and so on and so forth). Summed up, making games like this make a lot of sense and it is not strange that it is a wide-spread trend.

However, what troubles me is that this kind of development is seen by most as THE way to design a game. While of course many great videos games can (and have!) come out of this manner of creation, it is not the only way to go about. I believe that doing games this way makes it impossible to do certain type of video games and to expand the medium in a way that I personally think is the most exciting. Because of the focus on instant gratification, gameplay will pull towards a local maximum and only take short term value into account. This disqualifies videogames that focus on more holistic experiences or has a non-trivial pay off (for instance, lowlevel gameplay that only becomes engaging in a certain higher-level context).

As an example of this, after finalizing the basic mechanics, it took six months before Amnesia: The Dark Descent became a somewhat engaging experience. Note that this time was not spend on perfecting the mechanics but on building the world in which they existed. Without the proper context, Amnesia's core mechanics are quite boring and it took additional layers, such as the sound-scape, high fidelity graphics, etc, to bring it home. With this I am not saying that Amnesia is the way forward for the medium. I am simply saying that a videogame like Amnesia could not have been made using the type of development that a large chunk of the indie scene (and mainstream for that matter too) is currently advocating!

Another thing that has also struck me is how many people that are interested in videogames with experiences not solely focused on a fun core. For example at GDC, we met many people, from many different places in the industry, saying how much they liked the game because of its non-gamey aspects. Also, most of the random people that we "dragged" in to the booth were very interested in this kind of experience and often surprised that videogames like Amnesia even existed. We have also seen this kind of response across the Internet, with many people wishing there were more games focusing on these aspects. Again, I am not saying that this means Amnesia is some candle bearer into the future. What I am saying is that there was an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards the kind of games where a fun core mechanic was not the focus.

However, because the current trend of developing games, this potential market will most likely go without many games.

A positive consequence of this is that it creates a potentially very profitable niche with almost no competition. So while the preferred way of making games might be more secure, these projects will be launched in an extremely competitive environment. I think this evens out some (all?) of the risks involved in a development not focused on quickly iterating fun mechanics.

A negative, possible devastating, consequence is that the lack of these kinds of video games might remove the market altogether (or at least limit it to a very niche one). What I mean here is that if the general population's view on view games is that they are just about "cheap thrills", people will never bother looking for anything else. Thus most people who would have been interested in more holistic video games, will never be exposed to them. In a worst case scenario, this would mean that these kind of game will pretty much be stopped being made.

I consider this is something worth thinking about and believe the critical cross road will come very soon. The video games we decide to make today, will shape the future for quite some time.



End note: For those wonder what other ways of designing games there might exist, check this post as a starter.

The Good, The bad ...

What's so cool about casual games anyway?

Angry Birds creator Peter Veserbacka lashed out during the south by south-west interactive conference in Austin last weekend announcing that mobile games are the way to the future and 50$ games are on their way to join the dinosaurs.

Angry birds indeed 

While this might sound like an overstatement, let's take a brief look at the state of the game industry today; almost all major companies have established social development branches to develop their own IPs on facebook, many companies are making millions off selling iphone products, console game title release rates are significantly lower and just two weeks ago Bioware released a facebook version of their smash hit title Dragon Age - a hardcore game of it's own right - simultaneously with their console release (first time for such a major title). 


It's obvious that casual gaming is on the rise, but will it take over the world?


In order to analyse the matter correctly, it's important to understand why people are shifting towards casual games at all and what's so cool about casual games anyway:

• Smart phones

Like never before, technology has allowed better graphics, enhanced network player interaction and wide variety of gaming techniques. The gimmick of touch screen that was once innovated by the Nintendo DS is now available on most phone brands; enabling same level of playability and innovative controls to be right there in your pocket. 

• Life in the fast lane

In today's competitive environment, maintaining a job and being constantly in the move is the life style of many. Most people spend most of their day on the go only returning home to sleep; these individuals demand a type of entertainment that can be obtained through short intervals of time and can be disrupted at any time. Players want 5-10 gaming sessions in which they can turn off the game almost immediately without losing progress. Typical casual games shouldn't require much time to learn and pick up. 

• Economy

With today's unstable economy, 50$ is a considerable sum of money, especially for individuals who have more responsibilities and would rather spend that amount on necessities rather than entertainment needs. Casual games offer prices that range between 0.99$ to 4.99$ tops while others offer play-for-free-pay-for-item methods, a cheap alternative is now available. 

• Complexity for new comers

Many of older gamers started playing games along with industry beginnings, and as they completed different titles, games started to evolve to offer players more challenges and things they haven't seen before. It got to a point that games got too complicated and had too much prerequisites that it's no longer accessible to new comers. 

Super Street Fighter 4 is a very successful fighting game, but not exactly noob friendly

For example, it would take players a relatively long learning curve in SSF4 for them to be able to battle players that have been playing the series for 10-15 years. Casual games, offer simplistic game design techniques that make them instantly accessible to everyone introducing a whole new generation and age group to gaming in general. 

Chart demonstrating new comers to social games and their gaming history 

• Easy to set up

On average, it takes almost 30 seconds to set up a game on your smart phone or portable gaming device to start playing directly. Obviously it takes more time to set up a game on a PC and even after that is accomplished the player is forced to be knowledgeable of technical issues - such as video card compatibility and memory - to know for sure that they can run the game or not. Current Gen consoles, expect the player to install some features and take perhaps longer time than their predecessors to run and play a game. 

• Interaction with friends made easy 

Social games especially excels in offering communication for the player and his/her friends. Sharing game achievements and experiences is vital to succeed in today's competitive social networks, games provide those features with a click of a button.

 A graph demonstrating how social games work 

Social games thrive on building the right combinations of emotions in players; provoking - and rewarding - them for sharing information and playing with their friends. 

• Casual games are easier and cheaper to develop

Console games require one year to develop at the very minimum, some games even take five in extreme cases; during that time the studio's running cost is only covered by previous successes; in the case of start ups the development house is basically gambling: the product under development usually makes or breaks the company. Casual games on the other hand takes around 2 weeks to a month to develop. Developers can view the success and failures of their products and work immediately on solutions and patches. in general shorter development spans are much more effective in figuring out company direction and failures cost intensely less. 

• Casual games are easier to publish and market

Social media is the thing now; it's strength has been demonstrated on a wide range of marketing campaigns to world changing political events. It's safe to say that social mediums are now the means to market any given product. Console games are using it as we speak, which strengthens the position of casual games since the social networks are their basic habitat. Currently most successful casual games are games built specifically for social networks. 

• Incorporation with portable gaming 

After the GameBoy's massive success back in the 1990's a new realization was well known. Portable gaming has a massive appeal, target audience and is definitely the way of the future. Today's casual gaming is closely tied with portability, proving the success of Nintendo's winning formula. 

Angry birds has 100 million downloads with over 80% of users keeping the game installed on their devices. there are almost 200 million minutes played a day on a global scale. Such numbers clearly indicate a massive success. But how much does this success influence other sectors of the gaming industry? and how long will it last? 

Birth of Monster. Part 2.

(Not read part 1? Do so here.)

Molding the Abomination
by Olof Strand (www.OlofStrand.com)

As a modeler the first thing I noted about this character was that the concept design demanded it to be completely unique in all of its parts. Usually it is possible to mirror some parts (e.g. an arm, a leg or some cloth piece) to save texture space and maybe some production time when modeling game characters. Not so this time.

The character was based on a human body type with various deformities and modifications done to it. This meant that I could easily use a regular human base mesh as a starting point. Using already existing meshes as a starting point is, when possible, very important for production efficiency.

Another thing that needed to be taken into consideration was how the character would be rigged for animation later on. In this case the rig would be shared with another character from the game and therefore needed to be built under certain specifications (joints in specific places, etc).

The basic mesh created before importing into Zbrush. (Click to enlarge.)

When the the base modeling was done, the mesh was taken into Zbrush for a sculpting pass. The purpose of the sculpting pass is to create details that can be projected on to the final in-game mesh to make it look more detailed than it really is. Since the proportions and general shape where already defined on the base-mesh these should not be changed too much and mostly only minor details were added.

All the separate parts of the base-mesh where imported into Zbrush as separate sub-tools. This made it easy to hide, show and mask parts off. It was also possible to assign different materials to the separate parts as a visual aid. In Zbrush the mesh was subdivided several times giving me more polygons to work with. Once there was enough polygons, new details and shapes could be added by pulling, pushing and using other various tools, almost as if it was a piece of clay.

The different subdivision levels in z-brush. (Click to enlarge.)

When the sculpting was done the lowest subdivision level was exported in obj-format to use as a starting point for the final low-polygon in-game mesh. The reason to make a new low polygon mesh and not use the mesh from sculpting is to optimize the number of polygons in the final mesh. This can be very important for performance when added in the game. The mesh used as a base when sculpting has a a relatively uniform tessellation (distribution and a size of polygons) and mostly a quad layout of the geometry (meaning that most polygons are four sided). The in-game mesh then had to be modified to only have geometry where it was needed. By doing this, more details could be added where really needed without decreasing any performance of the final mesh. This process is sometimes called retopologizing and can be done several different ways. Some people like to use the specialized retopologizing tools within Zbrush, but I personally like to use the regular modeling tools in my 3d software.

The final version of the low polygon mesh. (Click to enlarge.)

When the modeling was done it was time to create the uv-map. A uv-map is basically a way to show where parts of model belong on a flat surface, the texture. This is called a projection, and in this case a 3D to 2D one (the model is in 3D and the texture 2D). Unless the 3D object is a very simple one (like cube or plane) this is a very tricky operation and it is almost impossible to maintain the same ratios as on the model. A good example of this is to look at the various ways our planet earth (a 3D object) has turned into maps (a 2D surface) and all of the distortions and/or strange layouts that follow.

There are some conventions that should be followed when laying out this uv-map. The most important is probably to make sure to put seams (places where polygons split up during the 3d to 2d projection) in places where they are not very visible. This since it is often very hard to match up colors of pieces not next to one another on the texture. Seams can also mess up shading when using normal maps. On a humanoid character a good place to put them could be on the inside of the arms and legs for example. This character also have some irregular areas that have to be given some extra thought. For example the head had an unusual shape making the uv-mapping extra tricky. Once the placement of seams in the uv-map have been established the chunks where laid out to maximize the use of the texture space.

The uv-map layout. (Click to enlarge.)

Before starting the actual texturing work I generated colors for some of the texture maps from information in the high poly mesh. The textures produced this way were the normal map and an ambient occlusion (AO) map. The normal map gives the mesh some extra detail and makes it seem like it is made up from more polygons than it really is. The AO map was to be blended into the diffuse (the base color) texture to give a greater sense of detail and form. Basically, AO is a calculation of how much light reach each point on the mesh, making creases darker and pointy details brighter.

The diffuse map represent the base color of the character and was created in Photoshop by using a mix of various photos, custom Photoshop brushes and the previously mentioned AO map. The diffuse map was extra important as it was also used as a base for creating some other maps like the specular and gloss map. These two are black and white maps that control how light will affect the model. Specular determines the strength of shininess on an areas and gloss how sharp the shininess is. Some of the detail in the diffuse was also used to add extra details in the normal map, like wrinkles and scars.

The final normal, diffuse, specular and gloss maps. Notice that all use the uv-map layout as base. (Click to enlarge.)

Once the texture was completed, the model was ready to be used in-game!

Renderings of final model using different setups of texture maps. (Click to enlarge.)

It's Alive!
By Thomas Grip (Frictional Games)

Before the model could be used in game, some other things was required. First the model needed to be rigged and skinned, a process where the mesh is connected to a skeleton. This skeleton then need to get animations and not until that was done where we able to get a it into the game. This job was made in part internally and partly by an external company. There were a lot of job put into this, but is unfortunately outside of the scope of the article. To some sum things up: we got the creature moving and it was now time to put inside the game.

For Amnesia: The Dark Descent we use a proprietary engine called HPL2 which is a vastly improved and revised version of the engine that powered the Penumbra games (although quite old now as we are developing version 3 of the engine for our upcoming game). It uses a rendering algorithm called deferred shading at its core, a technique that is very useful when rendering lots of lights. It works by drawing out the the normals, depth, specular and diffuse colors to separate buffers and then use these to calculate the final color of a light. Normally when drawing a light, all models that intersect with the light needs to be found and then redrawn based on the light's properties. The nice thing about deferred shading is that models are only need to be drawn once, saving tons of rendering time and allowing more predictable frame rate.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent can be a quite dark game in places, sometimes making it hard to see enemies properly. To remedy this we added a rim lighting algorithm that made the creature's outline light up when in dark areas. This proved extremely moody and when walking in dark passages the player could suddenly get a glimpse of disturbing silhouette slouching off in the distant. After this final touch, our creature was ready to frighten unknowing players!

In-game screenshot showing of the rim-lighting on the creature. (Click to enlarge.)

Hopefully this article will give you some insight into the work that it took to create an enemy for our game. It was quite a long process and took several months from idea to finished asset but we think the final result is well worth it!

An in-game screenshot of the final rigged model in a scene. (Click to enlarge.)

Birth of a Monster. Part 1.

(The following was supposed to be an article in a Russian magazine, but was never published. So because of that, I decided to post it on the blog instead. It was written in June 2010 by myself, Jonas Steinick Berlin and Olof Strand. Jonas and Olof were working as contractors for Frictional Games at the time. )



Creating Unspeakable Guidelines
by Thomas Grip (Frictional Games)

The following article outlines the process of creating a creature model from scratch for our first person horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It will go through the basic thinking that went into the design of the enemy, how the concept images where made, how the mesh was built and finally how it was put into the game. For this work we used two extremely talented external artists and they have themselves outlined how their horrific creations came about below and it a future part. Before moving on to their work though, I will detail the thinking that went into the basic design of the creature.

When creating a horror game, making sure that the antagonistic creatures are properly designed is an extremely important issue. One wants to make sure the player faces something that feels frightening and works with the game's atmosphere and story. Another important aspect is to make sure that the enemy fits with gameplay. Certain movements might be required and it needs to fit, size-wise, into certain environments and situations. Finally you need to make sure that it is within the constraints of the available resources, something that is really important for small company such as ours. Having these three guidelines in mind I will now walk through the process of coming up with the core requirements for the enemy codenamed “Servant Grunt”.

My favorite way to go about when creating a creature is to take something normal and then add a disturbing twist to it. I also wanted some kind of character that the player could easily project agency to and believe it has motivations, imagining it more alive than it might actually be. Because of this I decided that we use some kind of human or at least humanoid entity, which is a shape that is easily recognizable (no other animal walks like a human) and which we all assume have feelings, desires and motives.

The problem with having a creature which gets the characteristics of a human projected on to it, is that the player will also assume it is intelligent. Because game AI is notorious for doing stupid things, this could easily break immersion. Having enemies do simple tasks like opening doors, avoiding obstacles and investigating strange noises in a believable human-like way is very hard to do. Hence, we had to have something in the design that hinted of stupidity, making it part of the immersion were the enemy to do something silly. Usually this means making something zombie-like, but I really did not want have something that cliché. This mean that I wanted the creature should look and feel stupid, yet still be as far away from a zombie as possible.

Avoiding clichés is usually something that ones does to keep things fresh, but in horror games a lot more is at stake. It is vital that the player does not feel familiar with the dangers faced as it drastically decreases fear and tension. It is when we are unsure about something and not able to predict or makes sense that true terror really emerges. For example, when building one of the game's maps, there was a vast difference in perceived horror between using an old, familiar enemy model from Penumbra (our previous game) and the new one discussed in this article.

Gameplay-wise the main constraint was that it had to walk in some human-like fashion and not crawl or move on all fours. This because we wanted to have a base collision that could easily fit into a cylinder, making it easier to code. For the first Penumbra game, we had dogs as the main enemy which, because they where four-legged, caused tons of issues. Something we wanted to avoid that this time around. Making sure implementation of the enemy is simple ties into saving resources. It was crucial that we did not want to have too many unknown factors when making the enemies. By making sure that most of the game's elements where familiar to us, we could much easier assure that we kept to the timetable and could spend time on polishing other parts of the game instead of trying to find AI bugs.

It was actually not until all of the above was determined that I started to figure out the story behind the creatures. This is not always the way we do it in our games, but this time it fit very well. Our basic story designs only referred to the enemies as “the servants” and did not talk much about their appearance or where they came from, so I had a lot of freedom to make a fitting background story to the guidelines. The finalized idea was that these “servants” were actually beings from beyond that had been summoned into bodies of humans. Once inside humans, they did their best to deform the host into a body that they are used to control, shattering bones, tearing flesh and producing cancer-like growths. This in turned resulted in a scene where the player witness how some humans under great pain are taken over, showing how designing graphics can shape the story, as well as the reverse.

With these basic guidelines completed, I contacted Jonas to start on the concept art.


Conceptualizing the Horror
by Jonas Steinick Berlin (pudjab [at] hotmail [dot] com)

Thomas gave me almost full creative freedom. The basic guidelines were that it had to be a humanoid and nothing like standard zombies, "The Infected" in Penumbra: Black Plague or the creatures in Dead Space. It should also fit the the story of demon-like creatures taking over human bodies and be super creepy. Apart from that, I was free to do pretty much what I wanted.

This was my first character design for a commercial game, so I was a little bit shaky. The great freedom was both exciting and quite overwhelming. So many choices! I first researched and got inspiration from unusual anatomy, photos 18- and 19th century clothing (the time in which the game takes place), surrealistic paintings and various disturbing stuff.

I then continued brainstorming and did a lot of small quick sketches of character silhouettes and different faces. I really wanted to avoid stereotypes and do something unique and memorable. Every single doodle got assembled on a collage and I then showed it for Thomas. He said which parts he liked and from that I went on and created something more detailed. At this time I had a design in my head that I really felt would be perfect. I drew it down with details, colors and lots of love. The result was something of a hunchback with interesting clothing fitting the era and a really grim face. This is perfect I said to myself! Excited I showed it for Thomas. However, I quickly got knocked down to earth again when he said that it looked too funky and resembled “Grodan Boll” (which is a character from a Swedish children's book taking the form of frog). I got instructed that I should avoid the cartoony style and make something more realistic, something that you almost could find in real life. Thomas also thought that it should have a lot less clothes.

The first batch of sketches. Contains the infamous “Grodan Boll” (“Frog Ball”) on the right. (Click to enlarge.)

After this setback I started putting a lot of attention on the head of the character. I think this is the part of the human body that you can make the most disturbing because of the emotions it can show. I instantly chose to give him a crushed jaw with parts of skin hanging down and eyes with dilated pupils which pointed in different directions. Thomas approved of this and I moved my focus to the rest of the body. Important here was to get the feeling of a demon possessing a body that it was unfamiliar to. The creature should try to deform the body into a, according to its own twisted standards, more familiar form, breaking bones and bending joins while doing so. It should also have accidental injuries and be held together with bandages and ropes.

The create is starting to shape up and the design of the head has been approved. It is not yet decided what to do with the lower jaw though (an issue discussed until the very end). (Click to enlarge!)

Because of the lack of clothes we had a discussion about showing genitals or not, but soon scrapped that idea after we realized that it would be best not to tease the rating systems too much (this turned out to be a non-issue as other part of the game show /Thomas).

Clothes have been determined to be nothing but a few bandages. Also started studying how the head might look viewed from the side, which turned out to be not a simple task. (Click to enlarge.)

One thing that was hard to decide was the final look of the left hand. It had to be deformed in some way, but yet be usable and able to be used as a weapon. I did at least 10 different arm designs before coming up with something that we could use. For example I did an arm in the shape of snowballs with spider fingers and one arm twisted in a spiral, with its bones pointing out. The final hand-design was more of a claw with bony fingers that we thought would be perfect for both scaring the player and give a good scratch on the back.

Before settling on a final design, many different version were tried. The left arm was the most troublesome part and changed a lot. (Click to enlarge.)

When I did the detailed final concept I started by drawing it up traditionally with a pencil. This may not be the most effective way to work (because it makes it harder to do big changes and also caused unwanted coffee stains), but I feel more in control this way and find it easier to do the smaller details. After that I scanned it and quickly colored it in Photoshop using multiply layers. I first tried a bluish skin tone, but it made it feel too much like an alien, so I changed it to a more desaturated one, warmer colors with elements of purple, blue and yellow to create a pale corpse-like look. At this point it didn’t feel too professional and had to go over the concept with Photoshop to add the final touches, such as highlights, noise removal and sharpening. The Photoshop-file ended up having forty plus layers, most of them containing small and unnecessary changes. Nothing I recommend, because of the insane file size, but this time it did the trick and I managed to convince Thomas the concept was completed.

The art was now done and could now be used by the modeler to create the actual 3d asset.

This was the final sketch of the enemy. After this was done I started painting it digitally. (Click to enlarge.)

Final concept for the enemy. Note how the lower jaw has been removed, something that was made after the entire character was fully colored.

Continue to the second part...

On Video Game Censorship

Mortal Kombat has never been a bloodless series, to say the least, but Warner Bros.' appeal on behalf of the gory fighting game won't get it a release in Australia.

The game's publisher appealed Australia's Classification Review Board to ask it to reconsider its decision to deny classification for Mortal Kombat, but was rejected -- WBIE says it's "obviously extremely disappointed."

This is the original Mortal Kombat Arcade promotional poster 1993 emphasising how the game was more 'real' than the competition (it was a simpler time)

As Australia lacks an R18+, or 18-and-over rating for games, those that would fall into that category are unable to be released in the region. Many adult-oriented video games have lost their shot at an Aussie release as a result, and appeals generally fail.

Mortal Kombat is only the most recent in a long history of game developers fighting against censorship; my argument is how come the film industry gets a more appropriate rating system that enables films with explicit violence, gore and sexual content. I'm a strong believer in games being a valid artistic medium of expression and entertainment; such restriction over publishing games only takes that idea further away. 

Rule of Rose on the PS2 is an example of a game that made lots of controversy at it's time 

Again, why the special treatment towards games? 


is it because games are for kids? and it would corrupt future generations by exposing them to adult themes? That is ridiculous, for a lot of reasons:

• such claim assumes that the current rating system isn't being followed and thus questions the responsibilities of both consumers and vendors
• they question the validity of an already proven successful - both critically and financially - entertainment medium 
• Movies have such rating system that allows admission to viewers of certain age groups; video game rating acts in the same way. 
• Interactive mediums have more destructive consequences than traditional ones asking for extra attention in terms of allowances and publishing. 

to summarize I have one word to respond to anyone who is an advocate of video game censorship: Freedom of speech. 

It's a constitutional right, as long as the consumer is in the appropriate age group, he/she has the right to purchase whatever material they view suitable. Period. 

It's about time review boards world wide come to an agreement and create a world standard that would make rating much easier for everyone and guarantees their constitutional rights. 

ESRB Video game rating system

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) is the most well known, it is a self-regulatory organization that assigns age and content ratings, enforces industry-adopted advertising guidelines, and ensures responsible online privacy principles for computer and video games and other entertainment software in Canada and the United States. The problem with the rating system is simple: there isn't one, but many!


Fact is that many countries still haven't put on regulations of their own, making room for speculation and moral debate; laws are needed to be put down and enforced without taking people's right of expression and selection of content. 


It is the 21st century; the word 'Ban' shouldn't exist any more; well, maybe just for internet trolls. 

test

This is my test page.

Satoshi Tajiri Alive and Well

There's a rumor on Twitter so persistent that it's caused "Satoshi Tajiri," the creator of the game Pokemon (pictured), to become a Twitter Trend over the assertion that he, as well as "Hello Kitty" character creator Yuko Yamaguchi died.
Both Satoshi Tajiri and Yuko Yamaguchi are still alive.
In the case of Mr. Tajiri, the Pokemon creator was, in part, the focus of a Nintendo Twitter Tweet reading:

NintendoAmerica Nintendo of America Thanks for your concern! During the earthquake no one at Nintendo in Japan was injured and there was no apparent structural damage. 17 hours ago

Additionally, the blog Mauritiushot.com reports:

Satoshi Tajiri,45 years old live in Machida, Tokyo. Satoshi Tajiri fainted while seeing the destruction done by the Tsunami but he is not dead.

In the case of Ms. Yamaguchi, there's no evidence or reports of her death in the Japan Earthquake or the Tsunami.
For reasons that add up to insensitive mischief, Twitter has been a cosistent source for rumors of the death of celebrities, and in the wake of the fifth largest earthquake in history, someone elected to play on fears and launch tweets that have turned out to be a hoax.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail?entry_id=84889#ixzz1GQ8HcPGi

The Life and Death of Guitar Hero

Game Development in the Middle east: an introduction

Interlude 

In 2006, I was part of a team sent to the Tokyo Game Show; our objective was to meet as many companies - publishers - as possible within a three day time frame, and present our game to them to garner feedback and follow up on those who were interested in taking our business relationship further. 

That's me at the TGS 2006; crooked glasses, full of hope and no sense of fashion whatsoever; a geek in Otaku heaven  

Our first meeting was with the Konami reps at 8:00am; needless to say that we were really nervous to head start the day with such a big name, but we put on our best and we wanted to present our best! we were really hoping we could make it. 

Meeting time came and the vice president of Konami of America came into the room; we introduced ourselves, offered our business cards and started a bit of small talk before the presentation to break the ice. He noticed our names were peculiar - mine especially since the other two with me were Joseph and Osama both household names - and asked where were we from, and when we answered Jordan he was shocked; Not only because there's a game development house in Jordan, or in the middle east, or that they came all the way to Japan to do business ... no, he was shocked because he didn't know people played games in the middle east to begin with. 

Now when you hear such an esteemed professional from a company that brought perhaps the middle east's most popular game: Winning Eleven - that they didn't consider the Arab World/ Middle East as a market for their products you'd realise that there's something seriously wrong going on. 

Naturally he'd think: "how come a lot of people play of our games and we're not getting sales figures?" the answer was simple: Piracy. But that's a subject to another post. 

And as the meetings went on, we heard the same thing over and over from Japanese and European companies alike: Nintendo, Namco, Eidos and lots others did not realize that there are enough gamer base in that region to even begin to establish their game development scene. 

I remember something that one of the Nintendo guys told me that day, he said that we have something no one else has, we have a new cultural influence to offer to the world; that there are Japanese, European and American schools of design, you can look at a game and tell were it came from; they also presented their cultures relatively highly in games, we played Samurai games, western games, medieval games and so on. 

We have the opportunity to view the game world from a fresh pair of eyes and whole different background. 

The Ubisoft CEO said, that even when European studios tapped the middle eastern culture with Prince of Persia, it was a major success because it was simply "something new" and we had the making of that 'something-new' everyone is looking for. 

Five years later we are still to deliver on our potential. 

First development houses 2005 - 2008 

While the middle east has been an active gaming hub for almost two decades, it's explosive period is without a doubt 1996-97 onward; with the playstation becoming a standard home purchase. when that generation matured enough to want to take on creating games themselves they formed numerous fan-boy clubs; a bunch of guys working on their own project/mod. 

Most noteworthy accomplishments of that era were teams that created mods on the half life engine or other games that offered complicated map editors for their respective fan base. The mods mostly dealt with political issues and ideals which greatly limited any chance of success outside their limited circles. 

This is an example of such games; marketed as the first 3D Arab game that deals with the events in Palestine; it was a half life mod

The main problems that faced those teams were lack of community; internet was still in it's development period, and Arab technical forums - all though now barely starting to rise - were virtually none existent; there was no way for a mod/game to find audience outside a small circle of friends and supporters. 

The period of 2006 to 2009 saw the rise of investors creating serious companies that aim to make it or break it in the game industry. It was also a different time, and these start up companies wanted to tackle it in what now we view as a questionable matter, they wanted to dive nose first into the game business the only way they knew how: creating AAA titles. 

They went about it in one of two ways: either build a team and create their own original IP or purchase a complete product and localize it for the Arab market. 

Both strategies failed. 

Lack of experience of the management as well as the staff of those companies made them miss the difficulty of their task. Talent was hard to acquire and when met it would be raw and require training; programmers never dealt with virtual 3D spaces before and graphic designers mostly never know what a UI is. 

But that wasn't the major issue, there are several issues that attributed to the companies eventual demise:

• At the time most these companies started developing their titles the gaming industry was moving into the next gen consoles (questionable forecasting?). 
• Most companies who had some product worth discussing for the overseas market were met with the global economical crisis at the time they finally reached their first playable demo; with wide spread layoffs across the industry no publisher had the luxury to invest any of it's liquidities in a start up company no one knew about sending them emails from the middle of nowhere. 
• Management pretty much doomed projects from the start, instead of creating and constructing dependable feasibility studies, market research and knowing what's 'hip' in choosing their games genres and systems they just followed their childhood dreams, or typical Arab stereo types. They either worked on remakes of their childhood favourites (way out of date at the time) or just any game that has Arab,desert, Bedouin ...etc disregarding a very crucial factor: game play!
• Most companies built business models without understanding a typical game development house structure, months of chaos roamed offices as people were trying to understand what they're trying to do and who to report to. 
• Managers following their typical state of mind ran development houses as if they were supermarkets: gave more time to meetings concerning cleaning the mugs in the kitchen and coming back from the lunch break on time instead of brain storming sessions, game play analysis and thorough play testing. 
• Most development houses wanted to make a profit before finishing the product: studios in Jordan and Dubai wanted to make a profit when making a financing deal with the publishers. the presented exaggerated figures in hope that they would make enough money to sustain the development and then some, sales afterwards were just the sugar on top. Ignoring the royalty driven method made the developers focus less on creating a quality product (since they don't care if it sells or not), which made publishers consider it even less. 
• Executive personnel making creative decisions; since most people higher in command have less technical knowledge, they intervene less in the development department than they do in the design, they have an opinion about if the game looked good or not and thus always making the modifications they requested the highest priority; the end result is always what's easy on their eye not everyone else's and a nightmare shuffle in project plans. 
• The gaming industry was changing: prices went up, people spent less on 50$ games and more on casual free of charge games, instead of releasing 200something games for the PS2 a year there are now around 70Something games for the PS3 a year or even less; Games became an extravagant show of technology and talent that developing a console title became a multi-million dollar investment;  there was simply no way for smaller studios to compete with the big boys. 
• Companies that purchased finished titles and wanted to mass market them had to compete with the fierce pirating community. The games they picked out weren't that good to begin with, they didn't chose games based on it's market value, they chose them based on getting the cheapest Arab themed game they could get. Selling them for the bare minimum didn't even cut it. thousands of copies remains stacked on shelves to this very day. 

I'm not just saying this because I was part of the team that developed it, but CROSSROADS was perhaps the best ME game to never see the light; it was developed in house 100% by a team that started with nothing but passion

The companies that survived this period were the ones that shifted to casual flash games or the ones that started with mobile game development to begin with. As the console market got harder for everyone world wide, the rise of Facebook and the internet made casual gaming the optimum space for development. especially for start ups with relatively volatile capital and little experience. 

The rise of Casual games 2009 - Present

Perhaps the only success story from the previous era was a browser game called Travian. All though it wasn't developed by a middle eastern house, it was localized and aggressively marketed toward the gulf region. it was a great success; millions of players joined and thousands purchased virtual goods earning the company almost 200,000$ a month for a period of two years. 

inspired by Travian, 2009 was the beginning of a more mature era of game development in the region; particularly in Jordan with 6 development houses starting up aiming to go head on with the casual gaming market, only 2 survived in Dubai (one of them was initially Jordanian before moving their offices). Companies have learned a very hard lesson from their predecessor's that didn't make it and made it their objective to take it slow and one step at a time. 


but perhaps a little bit too slow. 


Two types of companies emerged those who decided to do their own development and those who decided on getting final products and localize them for the market, that market being the web.

to this day, the most popular casual games marketed for Arab players are card games (Tarneeb, Trix and Baloot) 

In the light of the Yahoo-Maktoob deal, aiming for the web wasn't a bad decision at all; and every start up had that target of ultimate acquisition by larger firm. 


Who knows, maybe it would happen again.

to be continued  

Zerg cake

I can't figure out if this is yummy or disgusting 

Pac-Man Level Design

This is a 30something year old piece of paper by Toru Iwatani documenting the design of his timeless classic.