Halloween, JRPG-style October 30, 2005
Geekonstun came up with a great idea for what to wear on Halloween.
Shadow of the Colossus, attempt 1 October 29, 2005
Imagine if the first opponent you meet in a game is a boss. Can you say “Bambi Meets Godzilla”?
My personal code of honor now requires that I throw the game into the corner of my living room.
Update: My second attempt was more successful. Two colossi have bitten the dust. (Sorry, Tobe)
More update: Here is an interesting, a-ha, perspective on the game. Everything is sexy if you look at it the right way.
Spline Doctors
There’s a new animation blog called Spline Doctors, written by six Pixar animators.
Two entries caught my fancy: this one on attacking tigers - how wonderfully geeky to look at that from an animation point of view - and this one on hand poses.
Hand poses can be one of the most important tools that the animator has to communicate attitude. They also can be some of the most difficult to master. If that weren’t enough, computer animation allows for ugly hand poses never before possible in hand drawn animation.
I was wondering about faces recently - what if you picked only the ‘good looking’ facial angles, picked the one you needed for the current 3D orientation and made some kind of transition between them? Using morphing or custom code? Might work well for a cartoony style… How would that look I wonder? Same goes for hands perhaps, although they move around in space more. With a face, just rotating around the up axis can suffice, in terms of how the camera looks at it.
(Did that make sense at all? I haven’t had coffee yet.)
The other thing those hands reminded me of is Fumito Ueda saying the hand animations in Ico took the most time. And Ico took four years to make… Which reminds me, I should go play Shadow of the Colossus.
After my coffee.
(Via Cartoon Brew.)
Japan developing remote control for humans October 26, 2005
CNN.com - Japan developing remote control for humans - Oct 25, 2005:
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic.
A special headset was placed on my cranium by my hosts during a recent demonstration at an NTT research center. It sent a very low voltage electric current from the back of my ears through my head — either from left to right or right to left, depending on which way the joystick on a remote-control was moved.
I found the experience unnerving and exhausting: I sought to step straight ahead but kept careening from side to side. Those alternating currents literally threw me off.
The technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulation — essentially, electricity messes with the delicate nerves inside the ear that help maintain balance.
I felt a mysterious, irresistible urge to start walking to the right whenever the researcher turned the switch to the right. I was convinced — mistakenly — that this was the only way to maintain my balance.
The phenomenon is painless but dramatic. Your feet start to move before you know it. I could even remote-control myself by taking the switch into my own hands.
Amusing but useless IMO.
(Via Robin.)
To The Artist’s Eye Everything is Beautiful October 25, 2005
Making Light: To The Artist’s Eye Everything is Beautiful:
All the arts are related; modelwork and novel-writing. Both center on making a world in miniature, a false seeming that convinces the viewer/reader of its reality.
Herewith some lessons I took away, and use in my own works:
No matter how good your model is, it won’t be perfect. No matter how much praise you get, no matter what awards you win, you’ll never be able to look at that model and see anything but its imperfections.
The rivets on model cars are badly out of scale. To have visible rivets, they’d have to have heads the size of softballs.
No one counts the rivets on a moving car.
If you suggest detail, the viewer will add his own details.
Therefore, you don’t need rivets.
Painted plastic, painted wood, and painted metal all look the same.
It isn’t a model until you add people. Before that, it’s a clever machine, perhaps, or a toy. Characters bring their own reality, and bring the person looking at the model into the story. Your models tell stories; if you have a car that’s got mud on it, or rust, or scrapes and dents, it has a history. The viewer won’t know what the dent came from, but he’ll know that the car has been places, done things, and subconsciously won’t think of it as something that just came from a modelmaker’s workbench.
All of which applies to making games in general and making levels in particular, of course.
The Making Light post was triggered by this wonderful page with pictures of small model slums, which popped up in various bits of the blogosphere recently, notably BoingBoing. Very nice stuff.
War Photographer October 16, 2005
This (27.5 Mb) is an excellent, excellent music video, directed by Joel Trussell for the song “War Photographer” by Jason Forrest. I want a music game like this! (Don’t ask what a video filled with Viking rock transformers has to do with war photographers.)
Through this interview with Trussell I found out about the video he did for “The Illness” by kid606, which you can download here (5.5 Mb). The rapid editing set to manic electronic sounds reminds me of Chris Cunningham’s video for Squarepusher’s “Come On My Selector”, one my favorite music videos ever.
(Via Cartoon Brew.)
