The papercraft style treatment is ripped from a radial gradient tutorial I saw on the web, but I used it a differently for this logo.

The next one here is from a little hobby of mine. I keep a list of names for my super awesome game development studio that I’m going to start after I make my first billion. The name currently atop the list is Überifica. Nobody steal it, m’kay?

Based on Black Slabbath, the pixel-ish nature of the Ü letterform will make a great mascot for the company. I call him Ubie. On top I have the two color treatment, in the middle is my favorite color treatment, and the bottom is a little retro tribute to the demo scene.

On Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, one of the first things we did was work on the logo. We had to because the game had been announced before we ever started working on it. We did the logo so early on that the marketing team and executives couldn’t even be sure of the final name of the game. They knew that they wanted it to shorten to “WAR,” thus the “Age of Reckoning” bit. But, they weren’t positive that “Warhammer ONLINE: Age of Reckoning” wouldn’t become WOAoR, which is a really stupid name. So, the first logo I did was using this name:

There are two bits of work that survived to the end from this. First, I used the shield and hammer from the Warhammer rulebook to anchor the logo, after giving them a repaint. Second, I repainted the classic WARHAMMER logotype to lessen the color contrast and give it a more textured, tangible look. Here you can see a before and after:

I did this at a very high resolution, so it took a while. Some of the other concept aritsts took stabs at the logo as well. Later on, when we saw that the marketing folks had done a “final” logo, we took it and did another polish paint pass on it. At this point they had decided to add “ONLINE” back in, so I repainted that bit as well as the “Age of Reckoning” text. Michael Phillippi did a final pass on the shield and hammer, as well as painting the awesome Chaos axe to go along with it. Thus, the final logo (click to enlarge):

It’s something of a city made of tower-of-babel style mounds of architecture, strung together with massive bridges, themselves also civilized.

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Then watch the original of the clip I remade:

http://www.starwarsuncut.com/#/scene/428

And here is my version:

Star Wars Uncut – Scene 428 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.

This was so much fun to make. I did it in a few lunch hours, I didn’t stop to change something if it was crappy looking, and I worked as furiously fast as I could. Nick LaMartina here at Mythic did the audio, which I think makes the whole thing work.

UPDATE:

A second clip. This one was not as much fun as the first to make (and not as successful), but still good practice for embracing the spirit of prototypes. I’m hoping this “quick and dirty” spirit will spill over into my game dev. Once again, Nick went above and beyond with the audio.

Star Wars Uncut – Scene 206 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.

And an update:

We needed to do a ground up redesign of the UI in 6 months (it turned out to be more than 8). The UI for an MMO like WAR is a huge piece of the game, almost like an OS for the game. Beyond the HUD (which is very complex in itself) it has maps, chat, mail, a social network, maybe 50 windows total. . . basically everything you would find on Xbox Live and more.

The reason I enjoyed this gig was because I had the opportunity to come up with original features. One that made it into the game was the Open Party system. Players in WAR can see a list of groups sorted by distance, and just join up with them in one click. This makes playing WAR’s open RvR gameplay much simpler because you can find people nearby who are playing the way you want to play, be it fighting other players or fighting monsters.

I think there is a lot more we could have done with this system, and there are arguments to be made that it actually reduces community stickyness in the long term, but I think it’s a huge improvement over the old LFG standard, and a step in the right direction. This kind of functionality is a big interest of mine going forward – how do we take players playing cooperatively and help them form longer-term connections? Are open guilds the next logical step?

The process for building the new UI went like this:

Phase 1: HUD Sketching

My first step was to lay out the main HUD – the things you see on screen at all times. I sketched their shape and put them together in several “wireframe” layouts that looked like this:

These wireframes served several purposes:

• They were quick to make and remake
• The elements could be positioned in lots of different ways to see what worked and what didn’t (it’s in this phase that all MMO UI designers discover that there are a lot of good, undeniable reasons behind WoW’s UI layout, and despite all of our best efforts, unless our gameplay is fundamentally distinct, our UI’s will look somewhat similar).
• The wireframes could be shown to producers for approval. We didn’t get many change requests, but this buy-in bought us some armor for later on.

One goal of mine was to keep the UI seperated into chunks. Earlier iterations of our UI had looked like a more integrated “dashboard.” The modular approach gave us several benefits:

• We could build modability into the game. Instead of needing to download UI mods, users could move their UI around into whatever layout they wanted inside the game.
• One of these options could be to add tons of hotbars – one of the first things advanced MMO players want to do.
• We could start the game off with lots of things hidden (we are still getting this in). New players would see a very very simple UI, while elder players could show as much complexity as they liked.

My biggest challenge here was trying to keep all of our progress bars from competing visually. In most MMO’s you gain XP. In WAR we have XP, Renown, Influence, Victory Points, Morale, and some classes have a combat mechanic that fills up over time. . . yikes.

The other major challenge was groups. In WAR you will often find yourself in a Warband with 23 other players, which can look like this:

We made it look like that because it’s good to keep tabs on all of those people if you are playing in a highly organized Guild. It’s also good if you are a healer and you need to know if somebody is dying. But, most people don’t give a crap about all of that information, they just want to know how many people they are grouped with and if they are dead or not. I think we could have done better with this by keeping more clutter off the screen and offering the option to “show all.”

There is also something clunky with the quest tracker and all of the event announcements we do (things like achievements and “You Have Entered:” messages).

There’s way too much information presented for it to be interesting, but I’ve never been able to settle on a solution that works elegantly. I think there’s something to be found in news feeds, fading information over time, and separating the information by the icons we use in the main menu:

Phase 2: HUD Design

After settling on the wireframe layout, I worked my way around the screen texturing all of the individual elements and giving them detailed designs. By mocking up every possible state of the object I gained two valuable things. The mockups were both a detailed functional design and all of the art assets needed. I would put these mockups together into documents that we could give to programmers and to producer-types for final approval.

After we wrapped on the HUD, that same process rolled right into all of the windows. Here is a smattering of some of the mockups I did:

There were some interesting tasks that came up during all of this. I made a custom font for our player names, called Age of Reckoning.

I developed the style for our maps and a workflow that allowed us to cheat and complete 30+ of them very rapidly.

Here’s an early mockup that I’m also fond of, I think it captured a nice warhammer feel:

There was a metric assload of tiny icons to draw. There were probably 20 artists who pitched in on the various sorts of icons.

The UI touches all aspects of the game, so it was a great education in MMO game design. Everything from the second-to-second flow of combat in the action bars to the months-long metagame of the campaign was under our noses:

I had some other pet features that never made it in (we only had 6 months!), but I’ll restrain myself from posting them publicly. Ask me sometime about the quick commands ;)

That’s the overview of my role in the team as the hybrid designer/artist. There were a lot of fine programmers working with us, as well as Terro Veun, the other UI artist, and Carrie Gouskos, the UI lead. Given what we were up against, I am extremely proud of what we were able to accomplish.

(less than an hour)

This was a painting for Dominance War 4, an art competition for game artists. I’ve been so busy with UI, that this is the first painting I’ve done in a few months.

Everything Rests on the Core Loop

Sometimes called the “game mechanic” or the “30 seconds of fun,” the core loop is the series of actions the player will perform over and over again in the heart of gameplay. The core loop of Gears of War might be: 1) Encounter bad guys and take cover 2) Move to a good attack position 3) Kill the bad guys using a selection of your weapons 4) Re-arm and move on.

Everything else – vehicles in a shooter, dialogue in an RPG, cutscenes, minigames, QTE’s, set-pieces, traversing an empty environment, etc – it’s all pacing for the core loop. If any of these elements were solid enough to stand on their own, they would be their own genre. Sometimes they are, like vehicles in a driving game, but often they aren’t, like dialogue or QTE’s.

Every other aspect of the game – the art style, the story, the amount of content – everything needs to gel with that core loop. We talk about an elegant alignment of features as the key to creating a sublime play experience. The core loop is your initial axis to align to.

It doesn’t matter what else you have figured out, if you don’t know what your core loop is, you are up a creek. If you are spending all of your pre-production time figuring out what the story for your game is, the marketing plan, the art style, but you don’t know what your core loop is; STOP. Figure out what your core loop is first.

A great shortcut is to steal somebody else’s. This is how most games get kicked off. Developers borrow the core loop from their previous game or somebody else’s. But, be careful, because now you have to over-deliver on every element surrounding your derivative gameplay that you somehow elevate the total experience. Minor twists on proven core loops can work, but they can also backfire. It’s best to figure out which situation you’re in as early as possible.

In non-linear games you also need to consider the mission loop. In MMOs this is the quest loop. It will usually include several iterations of the core loop. RPGs are an exercise in mission loop trumping core loop.

A great core loop with supporting features is what creates a wonderful, “flow” experience. Know your core loop, it is the soul of your game!

Design to your Constraints

Can it be done, done easily, and done well? Don’t propose features that push the technology in ways it won’t easily go. You only get one or two of those features a game and chances are you aren’t the guy who gets to make those bets. Instead, understand your tech and the capabilities of your programmers. How much money, time and people have you got to spend? Is your design worth it?

This sounds like common sense, but these constraints are moving targets, and this is exactly what makes design a important skill and not blue-sky, schoolboy-daydream, tighten-up-the-graphics-on-level-three, wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if, bull crap. The farther along you are in production, the more you must design to your constraints.

There is the rare occasion, late in a product’s development, where a risky new feature is worth it. Sometimes you don’t know your game until then and its impossible to come up with those brilliant ideas before you do. But that is a rare gem. When you’re working on a game day to day, you have to design to your constraints to get anything done. The best designers on the job are proposing 10 easy wins to every risky bet, and most of those easy wins are directly touching the core loop.

Games are often designed incrementally, through thousands of little decisions that result in little improvements. Designing to your constraints will get you down the path to a fun game that much more quickly. It’s the job of technologists to loosen these constraints and open up the possibilities, and it is the role of prototyping to cheapen the risks of those big bets that break the constraints.

The basic idea is that the momentum from successes like the Wii and the social games market will focus the device down to a casual, cheap box. It will be like a Wii that runs Xbox Live and has all the great content available on the web (like what XBL has done with netflix). Then, the hardcore crowd can go and buy a plug-in bit that will kick it up a notch and let it run Gears of War 5 in 1080p. The hardcore market has proven in this generation that they don’t mind a fragmented, multiple SKU console with the 360 and PS3.

Pressure from quasi-open devices like the iPhone, open platforms like Facebook, and digital distribution of games in places like Steam will push things in this direction. Somebody is going to realize that if they open up their console and go against the traditional Nintendo model (tight grip on the content, complex certification), they can win. The manufacturer of this box should profit from hardware sales, but also from owning the marketplace. They can take it away from Wal Mart and Gamestop, and I believe they will try.

These are the top three (or 6, depending on how you look at it) books that I’ve returned to after I’ve finished them, and the books with the most to offer to a game artist:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, Beautiful Evidence: Edward Tufte

These 4 books (all studies of the same subjects) have value that is difficult to explain. They are filled with images, and they are about seeing, so it’s better to look at them than to describe them in words. If you find them in a bookstore, pick one up and browse, you’ll know if they’re up your alley. They’ve benefited me with a better instinct in what the player’s eye will catch on, and how to present visual feedback to the player.

Understanding Comics: Scott McCloud

This book is a great at helping you think about player experiences. There is a lot that goes on moment-to-moment inside the players head, and the same goes for comics. A lot can happen for the player in less than a second – especially if you’re talking about the core gameplay loop that you’ve trained him to connect with. That loop becomes this visceral “feel” thing that you can’t really verbalize or express except in gameplay. Understanding Comics will help you get a better grasp on “feel” and what it’s made of.

Plus, it’s a great summary of comics as an art form, which leads us to:

The Illusion of Life: Frank and Ollie

The best summary of visual storytelling as an art form. I’ve got the out-of-print original of this book (lots of extra chapters on Disney studios and specific animators). When making art for games, you have to constantly make decisions about where to spend your time – what aspects of the visual presentation that will matter most to the player. Frank and Ollie give you an understanding of “The Illusion of Life.” This is the oft discussed “believability” or “suspension of disbelief.” Frank and Ollie are the guys who figured this out in the first place for the realm of moving pictures. This is the principle you must constantly apply in deciding where to put your paint.

This is also a foundational book on animation techniques. All of these books focus on topics that are, at best, adjacent to game making. You’ll need to read a lot about things that appear irrelevant, but, thankfully, these are all really interesting topics on their own.

–UPDATE–

I’m only halfway through Jesse Schell’s “The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses” and I can already tell that it’s the best book on game design ever written. It’s actually the only good one ever written, in my opinion, but it’s a pretty difficult subject to write about, and Jesse’s book is comprehensive. So, well done, Jesse!

Just some sketches :)

What I’m going to say here has been said before by many others and probably said much better. But, this version is focused squarely on how stylization relates to games. What I’m interested in is how to make a game more attractive and make it cheaper to produce with a single style.

Games Need a Unique Approach to Stylization

Games are so dense with content these days that the old ways of polishing every pixel are dead and gone. As artists, we’ve got so much canvas to fill that we don’t know what to do with it. Most game developers have scaled up their time-tested techniques and continue to grab photosource for their textures, relying on it more and more to fill in the big canvas. But the old techniques don’t hold up in HD, and we end up with hi res crap.

Just look at what idTech5 has to offer with Megatexture technology and it will be obvious that the biggest constraint put on us as game artists is no longer finite textures or polygons, but technique. How well can we fill the space we have with the limited time we have? Don’t spend time on every pixel, just the ones that are important to the final frame.

Special Effects houses like ILM have always had big canvases. They go and photosource and game artists see that as good justification for using the same approach. The difference is those guys are typically matching live action, real world footage. Game art is more comparable to what Pixar does.

But, there’s a problem with Pixar as well. They have a Renderman, pure-CG heritage and tend to use things like procedural textures. They can get away with it because they combine them with complex, layered materials – things game artists have to fake and bake into textures.

Gameplay is not going to be mistaken for real world footage, so the art should match it through stylization. But we still have enough constraints in our renderers to prevent us from copying our big brothers in film. The world of games needs an approach to stylization that is all its own.

Immersion is Believability, not Realism

There’s a funny thing about style. It is individual expression – nobody is really going to understand where a particular visual style grew from just by looking at it. But, paradoxically, people will nearly instantly notice something that clashes with a given style. Its as if your subconscious groks style while your conscious mind remains blissfully unaware of what is going on under the skin. Why does this happen?

Stylistic consistency creates its own internal reality. You don’t need actual ‘realism’ to create the holy grail of gaming immersion. You just need two things:

- Believability
- Consistency

Consistency lets you get away with big fat painbrush strokes across your textures. It sets certain expectations in the players head. Now, if they encounter something that is smudgy or cartoony, their imagination fills in the blanks. If you do it everywhere, nobody will notice. For an example, look at WoW.

Believability means that those paintbrush strokes have to be just expressive enough to let your eye know what kind of surface you’re supposed to be looking at. Is it wood or stone? That’s it. Pass that test and your world is believable enough. Another example: Team Fortress 2.

Consistent stylization is going make your game more immersive than trying to be the extraordinarily rare game that achieves that next leap in virtual realism. Good stylization is a win every time. Realism is trying to break the world record.

The correct progression is not 2D -> 3D -> Normal Maps -> Virtual Reality.

Lots of folks fell off the train at Normal Maps. They were overreaching, missing the point. I’m looking at you: Everquest 2.

The goal has always been believability; The Illusion of Life. It just gets confused with realism sometimes.

Win Win

So, stylization lets you make a great looking game. That should be enough for you to explore establishing a unique look for your game. Yet, the biggest benefit comes when you can establish a style that gives you a visual shorthand. Look at this cut out from a Studio Ghibli background painting.

The stylization gives the movie backgrounds character, but it also let the background painters avoid detailing the whole painting. They let their brushstrokes show through, which also lets the viewer appreciate the hand-crafted expressiveness of the painting.

For a game: Just because some other game out there has every pore of a character’s skin in their textures, or every gritty grain of sand shown on the ground, doesn’t mean you have to. You can choose a style of that lets you emphasize what is important to your particular game, and smudge over the rest.

This can mean massive time savings, and it will let you accomplish greater things in the areas that matter.

Final Words

There are two key elements to successfully coming up with a great style for a game.

1: There are infinite visual styles to choose from. The best choices for games are the ones that let you take production shortcuts and also look great under the limitations of modern game renderers. An understanding of shader and lighting tech is necessary if you are going to establish a style for a game. Any illustrator out there is going to be able to come up with a cool, unique style. What’s challenging is coming up with a cool, unique style that is easy to implement in your game engine.

2: Figure out what is most important in your gameplay and emphasize that with the style you choose. Deemphasize everything else and establish firm restrictions on how much work can go into the unimportant things. This will help your fellow artists from getting too precious with something the player should not be looking at.

When they make good decisions, Art Directors can not only immerse players in the game world, but they also have more time to make the game look great. Style, when done right, is substance.

——-edit——–

The discussion has shown up on Polycount, here.

Environment work is more typically done with proprietary systems and tools for a given game. For example, Unreal’s use of terrain, structures and static meshes is probably very different from the Battlefield engine’s use of similar tech. Lighting systems can get very complex. It’s hard to just create an environment for a game without groking a specific game’s tools and tech (which tend to be harder to use and understand than something like Max). It’s easier to experiment with character work for fun and really get a sense for how it would look in a game.

You could always make an entire game level, but that’s a huge undertaking and requires level design skills in addition to art skills. So, when you’re interested in creating some game art but not getting into all the technical drudgery found in game dev, it’s much easier to make characters.

If you have hobbyists or modders, everybody is going to want to make the characters because there is less game-specific drudgery to learn. If there’s a conflict over who gets to do the characters and who is forced to do the environments, the better artists are going to get their way and do the characters.

None of this means that characters are more important than environments in games. Characters and environments are at least equally important in most games. But, I think this appeal is responsible for why environment work often gets neglected and why good environment artists are harder to find.

With newer tech like Unreal Engine 3, we’re finally able to do environments justice and create really engaging and detailed architecture, complex lighting and color balancing. I think environments are going to start getting a lot more attention than characters in the new generation of games.

This is an imbalance that we need to fix. For our games to get better, we need our best artists working on environments.