OG’s BLOG

In a post the other day I showed you some scribbled designs for the Flying Ace and Melvin Tripline. I told you that buried in those scribbles was a design for another character, a mechanic named Jimmy, and asked if you could figure out which one he was.

Sardtok and Mathias made light work of it, guessing correctly right off the bat. Jimmy is indeed third down on the right in that sketchdump, the guy with the baseball cap. Or… see above.

Congratulations and I’m sure I’ll come up with another puzzler thats just as fun as that one, if not MORE SO… very soon. OK, back to it.

There is currently an article up at Firaxis about creating 2D art in the midst of the predominantly 3D world of computer games. Oh, the article’s by me, and it’s about my work (along with the mega-talented Brian Feldges and the uber-programmer Don Wuenschell under the ever-watchful eye of super-producer Clint McCaul) on Civilization Revolution for the DS…

More of my process… (or failed scribbles?) HERE is a page of sketches on the main character of Moon Town.

As you can see, there have been plenty of revisions over the years. This is partly due to the changing nature of Moon Town. It started off as sort of a tribute to the cool TV shows of the late 50s and early 60s – Rocketship XM, Thunderbirds, etc. At one point, it was really dark, sort of Blade Runner, future noir (sketches on this to come). And in the back of my head is Marc Craste and StudioAKA pinging at me to Keep It Simple, so you’ll occasionally see little capsule-shaped characters with just a circle for a face.

HERE’s another page. Variations here include Whacky 60s Spaceman Flying Ace, Future Noir Caricature, Super Simple, and some strange cross between Buzz Lightyear and Mister Incredible. This character’s name used to be Ace Tripline, and he was to be the Coolest Flyer in the Sky. (yawn)

But here you can also begin to see the design turning toward his new incarnation, a miner named Melvin. I thought it might be interesting to see one of these stories of interstellar intrigue not from the point of view of the Super Cool Flying Aces, but from someone like a miner or a space truck driver. That’s where the story is going, anyway, and you can see the sketches turning that way. Or at least I can. Maybe you had to be there at the time? But there are pages and pages of sketches featuring this sort of schizophrenic design where sometimes it’s Ace, and sometimes it’s Melvin. *shrug* At some point they diverged and I was the last to know.

Also hidden amongst the many characters here is another character, a mechanic named Jimmy. Can you guess which sketch he is?

Friend-of-the-Blog Mathias was asking me about my process, in light of the fact that he liked my Moon Shark ship design (see previous post). I told him I’d been sketching and sketching for quite a while before I came up with anything I liked very much.

In digging through my sketches, I’ve discovered it’s worse than I thought. I’ve been drawing, sketching, and designing stuff for Moon Town almost subconsciously (even on the margins of pages meant for other stuff, and notes done in meetings) for over two years now. There’s practically not a scrap of paper in this house that doesn’t have a spaceman, spaceship, or alien scribbled on it, and looking back, I can see I’ve been trying to puzzle something through.

HERE’s a typical batch of doodles, this one featuring spacemen and aliens. I should point out that I’m sure the spaceman will look nothing like these sketches, and neither will his spaceship. The alien… well, I may be onto something here, but we’ll see.

One of times of my life I enjoyed the most was working on realMYST, Cyan’s realtime version of Myst. In particular, I enjoyed working on the new age, an icy world named Rime. I will bore you in the future with stories of how Doug McBride and I were allowed to help design this place along with the puzzle(s) leading to its discovery.

Today, Rime in general, and Myst in particular, are on my mind as I see Myst is coming to the Nintendo DS. Hallelujiah, I say, although I have to wonder if a game which was built upon immersive graphics and sound will have the right effect on the DS. The original Myst graphics were around 600 pixels wide. The DS has a resolution of only 256×192 pixels. (For comparison, the graphic above is 400 pixels wide). Although I can see using the DS’s double screens for some interesting displays of the journals, with a page on each screen turned sideways ala Brain Age, I think some of the puzzles will be very hard to see.

However, the general disdain with which the game community still seems to regard Myst is evident in the article I saw which announced the DS release. It announces that Empire Interactive, (the people who brought you Big Mutha Truckers) were remaking Myst, “the classic freeware game.” Justification for that freeware label is further given: “While it was considered the best-selling PC game until The Sims came along, this is largely due to the fact that Myst often came packed in with new computers.” Well, OK. Bitter?

Best-Selling means it was SOLD, not given away for free. Myst and Riven made millions of dollars and were top of the industry for years. I myself paid for the game three times – the original Myst, then Myst Masterpiece when I upgraded from Win98 and the original would no longer play, and then finally the 10th Anniversary edition. I’m not sure if that means I’m an idiot, or that maybe I just missed the announcement where everyone was lining up to get it for free, but either way it was never free to me nor anyone I know. Or maybe the writer of that article was in diapers when the original Myst came out, very likely considering this young industry. Still, the game community has long derided Myst. Face it, anything that popular with the General Public must have been bad, right?

Last, the announcement touts the addition of a brand new Age, “Rime”, which as I outlined above, was something I worked on waaaay back in 2000 (see screenshot above). Nothing new about it, but it is very cool, and a much better finale than the original Myst. Perhaps the writer of this article didn’t know anything about Rime because he, like 95% of the people out there, never heard of realMYST, because our publisher at the time buried it under the hype for Exile, which was releasing at the same time. Unfortunate because we all worked very hard on that game and built some really great environments that far surpassed the original game and ran in realtime. Shame that so many people never heard about the game, but there we are. What? Me, bitter?

I proudly present the first design for Moon Town. THIS is the Moon Shark, the chosen mode of attack for the Bad Guys.

I’ve finished the script for the first episode of Moon Town. I actually wound up writing twice as much as I thought I would, and as usual, it was mostly preamble. So I pulled that stuff out. I guess that’s officially the first deleted scene for this series.

Next job: designs. I hope to have something to show you in the next couple of days.

As a side job, I’m directing some animated adverts for a Swiss real estate company. You have to understand… Real estate firms are generally pretty conservative. And I don’t think I’m being overbroad to say the Swiss are generally conservative. So when I tell you I’m doing animated adverts for a Swiss real estate company, and I say they are conservative, you need to understand how conservative the client is. Not Conservative in the Right Wing American way necessarily. Conservative in their aesthetics. They tend to like middle-of-the-road solutions, and if I try to put too much flavor in, they will rein me right back. As a director, it’s a pretty easy line for me to ride. I’ll push for flavor where I can, but in the end, the client gets his way, and that’s fine with me.

Thing is, I’m also helping out creating the assets for the adverts. Part of the job is building a nice little conservative house interior. You know, tasteful wallpaper, subtle fabrics, a Persian rug, a shiny wooden upright piano. I had a little fun with the design of an overstuffed chair and a stairway that is stretched very vertical, but still it’s a pretty tame looking room. However, part of the design calls for portraits to be on the wall, so I decided to have a little fun. See above. Those are the portraits I’ve seen fit to paint and hang on the wall of this house. I can’t help but wonder what my conservative Swiss friends will think when they see them? Or if they’ll notice them at all?

Also, I would like those of you beating me up over my lack of progress on the novel to take this side job into account. OK, yes, I know if it were important to me, I’d find the time to cram in those extra 300 words a day, but holy moley. End of a day leaves Oggie tired doncha know.

OK, OK. I resolve to do better on my, uh, resolution. And to those of you who point out that I’ve written almost 300 words right here in this Blog entry, and that it’s a shame I didn’t put that writing energy into my novel, all I can say is, “touché”.

I had a few spare hours tonight. Although I should have perhaps done something else with that time, I took the evening to do whatever I wanted. And for once, rather than writing, I played around with some spaceships, stars and effects. You can have a look HERE.

Although this doesn’t have the whimsy and charm that I hope Moon Town will have, I will be needing to handle the things I’m testing here – sort of a hand-held camera in an action chase scene, uniform starfield (believe it or not, I had to create a new procedure to get what I was after) and engine-glow effects.

The other thing I was working on was to see how quickly I could get it rendered. I spent about 3 hours on this tonight from start to finish, and I got the renders down to around 5 seconds a frame (my goal is to keep my renders under a minute a frame, and so this is acceptable) and above all, to see if I could do it all “in camera” – in one render pass, as opposed to compositing layer upon layer as one does in “real” visual effects work. *shrug*

Enjoy. And now, I sleep.

My recent experiences have brought this Oscar Wilde quote to mind:

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
–Oscar Wilde

Of course, quoting that brings another Oscar Wilde quote to mind:

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
–Oscar Wilde

Sigh.