OG’s BLOG

The Moon Shark is almost done. If you compare this Work in Progress rendering to the DESIGN, I hope you can see I’m trying to be very faithful to that sketch, as it’s one of the favorite design sketches I’ve ever done. (Click the image for a larger version).

I had hoped to have finished the model by now, but as so often happens, life intervened. Still, it’s coming right along. Only things left to do are the big fat rivets that bolt the front cowl onto the fuselage, and the big gun assembly on the bottom. Should all be done Friday night (tomorrow), but we’ll see what the days bring.

Also, in association with Podcast #6, I’m posting some process renderings. The first shows the low-resolution, faceted model:

And the next shows the MeshSmoothed, untextured model:

I’ve finished porting over the relevant Moon Town blog postings to a new blog that will only deal with the Moon Town stuff that was slowly but surely taking over the Steve Ogden news here, much as Moon Town has been taking over my life. Come see me at the new blog, drop me a line. Seeya there!

Sydney-based video editor and motions-graphics guru Paul Caggegi is working on a film as well. Like Moon Town, Paul’s film involves the moon, and like Moon Town, Paul is chronicling the development of his film online at a site he calls The Process Diary. Paul also has produced a series of lively, very entertaining podcasts – many audio and some video – showing you the nuts and bolts of his development process. Spoilers abound – beware early posts that actually deliver a portion of the screenplay – but it’s all very educational and entertaining.

Kudos to Paul. I’m going to enjoy watching this one unfold.

This week’s Moon Town podcast talks about character-based design in Myst and Riven. I also included a link to a small gallery of Myst and Riven pictures in the podcast page, which illustrate the concepts I discuss in the podcast. And of course I eventually bring it back around to the ways I’m using character-based visual design on Moon Town, specifically the Moon Shark starfighter and the security guard cruiser. Enjoy!

Be it resolved, blah blah blah. Remember when I told you that a lot can happen in 60 days? That you could lose 10 to 20 pounds in 60 days if you wanted, by a very conservative estimate? And that I could finish the first draft of my book in just two months?

Well. Some people say resolutions were meant to be broken. Me, I’m not willing to go that far, not just yet. True, we’re nearing the end of the sixty days, and I did break my resolution, but I had a really good excuse – I was too busy directing 3 animated ads. For a guy with animated directorial ambitions, this was too good to pass up.

And the ads had quite a bearing on Moon Town, which has taken another huge chunk away from my writing time. For more information on that, see moon-town.com, where the fourth of my weekly podcasts is currently live.

So, yeah. A lot can happen in 60 days, and it did. Maybe I didn’t finish my book, but I got a lot else done, and I’m pretty happy with that. And just when you’re convinced I’ll never return to working on this book, I’ll have you know I’m back in the saddle again – over 1600 words today. Not too shabby…

Frequently while I work, I listen to director’s commentary on different movies I admire. Currently, I’m listening to the commentary track on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and he has something very interesting to say on the subject of being persistent, at the risk of not being very well liked, in the aim of getting your way as a director.

Take the landing sequence in the beginning of the film. He wanted fog. “Everyone” told him not to have fog on the planetoid, because there would be no atmosphere on a rock that small. He said he wanted it anyway because without it, the models didn’t look so convincing. He wanted turbulence in the bridge during the landing sequence. Again, “everyone” said, there would be no atmosphere, so you don’t need to show the turbulence. Nevertheless, he had crewmen get under the chairs and wobble them just out of camera reach. He said the actors didn’t like it, and “everyone” was rolling their eyes and saying it was never going to work, never going to look good on film. Everyone said the engines wouldn’t glow like that in a vacuum, the science was all wrong, and yada yada yada. He said, “Oh, shut up,” confident that what he wanted would look good, and all else be damned.

Then, he goes on to state what I believe is great advice for any would-be director:

“You’ve just gotta stick to your guns. Every step you make, everybody’s a Doubting Thomas. But that’s where you gotta earn your way. I just wonder how many people fall by the wayside because they can’t push their point home, and therefore don’t quite get what they want.

Nobody respects you later for having been a nice guy and giving up. You gotta get it. You have to get it NOW. Because you’re gonna wear what you got. You can be very unpopular on the route. But if you’re right, all is forgiven.”

Frequently while I work, I listen to director’s commentary on different movies I admire. Currently, I’m listening to the commentary track on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and he has something very interesting to say on the subject of being persistent, at the risk of not being very well liked, in the aim of getting your way as a director.

Take the landing sequence in the beginning of the film. He wanted fog. “Everyone” told him not to have fog on the planetoid, because there would be no atmosphere on a rock that small. He said he wanted it anyway because without it, the models didn’t look so convincing. He wanted turbulence in the bridge during the landing sequence. Again, “everyone” said, there would be no atmosphere, so you don’t need to show the turbulence. Nevertheless, he had crewmen get under the chairs and wobble them just out of camera reach. He said the actors didn’t like it, and “everyone” was rolling their eyes and saying it was never going to work, never going to look good on film. Everyone said the engines wouldn’t glow like that in a vacuum, the science was all wrong, and yada yada yada. He said, “Oh, shut up,” confident that what he wanted would look good, and all else be damned.

Then, he goes on to state what I believe is great advice for any would-be director:

“You’ve just gotta stick to your guns. Every step you make, everybody’s a Doubting Thomas. But that’s where you gotta earn your way. I just wonder how many people fall by the wayside because they can’t push their point home, and therefore don’t quite get what they want.

Nobody respects you later for having been a nice guy and giving up. You gotta get it. You have to get it NOW. Because you’re gonna wear what you got. You can be very unpopular on the route. But if you’re right, all is forgiven.”

OK, I’m migrating the Moon Town content off of the Steve Ogden NEWS here and over to moon-town.com. The BLOG and all the other pages except the CAST page are live. There are now three episodes of the podcast to keep you entertained while I put this show together. See you there!

My friend just sent me a link to another, much more balanced article trumpeting the impending release of Myst for the Nintendo DS. Unlike previous articles that alternately bashed Myst and called it a “shareware” game, explaining away its unprecedented sales as a factor of its many lucrative and successful OEM bundlings, this one seems to recognize Myst for the impressive cultural phenomenon it was. This one also correctly attributes the development of Rime Age to 2000’s realMYST release.

They even correctly ascertained the reasons why most people have never heard of realMYST. The parting line is great, really hit the nail on the head:

[realMYST's] 3D engine proved detrimental to the experience and so it was largely ignored even by fans.

And the hell of it is, I wish I could argue, but I believe the article summed things up nicely. Ignored even by fans! realMYST was a spectacular, glorious failure. Partly this was due to the fact that realMYST was buried under the other Myst title released at the same time, the illustrious Myst III: Exile. For years, I’ve been blaming the publisher, because that’s what developers do. The publisher, for their part, of course blamed us for creating an unsellable game that no one wanted. Not even the solid golden reputation of the best-selling franchise-spawning name of Myst could rescue realMYST.

But it wasn’t the publisher, was it? Not really. Read the reviews from the time of its release. The fact is, we released realMYST on an engine that had not yet matured, and it was beset with seemingly un-fixable physics bugs (fall through the world, anyone?) and a punishingly low frame rate on the typical consumer-level computer. This ensured that those few people who actually did buy the game and play it would up with a thoroughly unrewarding experience. That earned us tremendously bad word-of-mouth.

My friend Richard Rouse III once famously said to me: “A slow game is only slow until the processors improve, but a bad game is bad forever.” The obvious conclusion to draw is that you’d be better to make a good game that ran slow than a bad game that ran smoothly. But there is a Pyrrhic truth here. realMYST was a good game and still is. And, true, you could play realMYST on today’s computers and have a wonderfully fluid experience. But slow games get killed by the marketplace the same as bad games, and who really cares about the distinction? If a game doesn’t run on the machines available in the time it’s released, then the point is moot: it might as well be a bad game as a slow game. It will sell the same, which is to say, poorly. Ignored even by fans, indeed.

Lessons, boys and girls? Bad technology will kill you. Here’s to mature, stable technology and the brainiacs who create it efficiently. Go tell your kids to read a book and do some math. We need ‘em!