Here's a video game trailer I finished recently for Nyu-Media . You can vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
For this video I created some composited text scenes to bridge and blend in with the gameplay footage, animated the logo splashscreen, captured my own gameplay footage (don't think I was particularly acing it...) and then edited it all together to the 1 minute mark.
Download a demo of the game here for some propa hack and slash lols!
Okay so I've been really slow on the blogging front lately. A good few weeks ago now, Curse invited me to help them cover the very special gaming event that is Minecon 2012 in Disneyland Paris.
It was an amazing weekend of Disney-Minecraft mashups, interviewing exhibitors, late-night editing and cardboard square heads.
My favourite video from the weekend is below. It was edited like a trailer, and shows various highlights from around the place. Check it out!
If you just love survivin' right now, how about one of these Wallpapers? Some of them are certainly a bit different from what you'd usually expect, so, enjoy.
Clicky clicky to get full size. Just make sure you have enough room in your backpack.
DayZ painted logo
DayZ logo - VHS edition
Murky DayZ scene...
Unmistakably Chernarussian; unusually uneventful.
Why did the sneaky survivor cross the road?
Makarov, y u no drop anything?
What are you eaathen doing runnind near my tent?
Enjoy the Stary Sobor sunset before the snipers get you.
Pure and simple Chernarus hills. Suggestive is all you need.
I have spent some spare evenings creating this short animation, which I finally posted on the same day that 'DayZ' reached 1 million unique players worldwide.
DayZ is a harsh zombie survival mod, built on a hardcore military simulator game called Arma 2 - which itself is the 2009 version of Bohemia Interactive's ongoing military simulation series I have been playing for over 10 years...would you believe it?
Yes, you would.
I found myself creating two different atmospheric styles simultaneously - the serious, but tongue-in-cheek night scene, and the childrens' book-style daytime scenes. I found them rather difficult to edit together, and keeping them at opposite ends of the video was the only way to do it!
The colourful daytime style is what I was intending to pursue if ever I produced more of these. The style is inspired by the old BBC series, 'Spider!' (In the Bath)...
The watercolour paintings were fun, and were mostly produced in about 5 minutes each. Splashy and quick.
For a couple of weeks I've been working on this gradually, and only today have I reached the final stages of touching up my nice big poof. Foot rest poof, that is. Or poofie, as I was brought up to call it. (?)
My house now requires its own 'terrain.png'. Zipped, of course.
For all the Minecraft people out there, you'll recognise this straight away, as it's based on the unmistakable ordinary dirt block.
I took the opportunity to use the same high-pile rug material from Ikea as I already have as my carpet, so they blend together very nicely. You can buy it in 1M squared for only £10, and this only used half of it.
It did of course involve cutting the rug carefully into various pixel-edged shapes.
Cutting rugs gives me...grass
The poofie itself started as some sort of dull, black square bean bag. In fact, it still is - I simply glued all my materials on top of it. I started by covering the bean bag in big sheets of felt as the base, then cutting out an annoyingly large quantity of 1-inch felt squares in every shade of brown I could find (amazingly, each side of the bean bag measured exactly 16 inches; 16x16 also being the resolution of all Minecraft textures).
I then got to work gluing the darn little things onto the cube.
In Arnie accent: "GLUE IT! GLUE IT NOW!!'
I used about 8 glue sticks in total fixing the whole thing together. EIGHT!! That's nearly ten!
I should imagine that's about half a pint of glue.
It wasn't as easy as it sounds, however, as often my rows seemed to go astray and I ended up having to trim some of the squares down, or use bigger ones. And the glue guns were super gunged up and faulty by the end, I was basically having to double-wield them. This is quite possibly the only Minecraft-related art project in the world ever that has required the use of two glue guns at once. Unbelievable.
TOP NOTCH
But overall, I'm quite happy with the result. I can sit in my rocking chair like a proper old granny and put my feet up on a Minecraft dirt block.
A couple of years ago I had a little idea to turn my desk fan into a Plants vs Zombies Sunflower. I only just got round to it. So this is well out of date of current trends, but I still think it's nice.
It's almost finished, I just plan to add a couple of zombie remains somewhere.
A quick Google reveals a similar project making a fan out of the other obvious choice from the game - the Blover. It would look darn cool without the cover on it, but it would also hurt if you walked into it...
Well now! Zen United, the official Western branch of Japanese game studio Arc System Works, have uploaded the official trailer for BlazBlue Continuum Shift 2 - which is coming to Nintendo 3DS and Sony PSP on the 4th of November. I took a 2-week break from Kudan's augmented reality fun to join Zen United (downstairs!) to edit this trailer.
As you can imagine, the most time consuming part was assembling the introduction scene, which involved browsing through Zen United's archive of game sketches and concept art for extended periods, selecting vaguely corresponding character poses and then filling in the gaps with stills from the final character art!
Unfortunately, there was no quick n' clever way to patch up these sketches into a fight scene. With the selected files at hand, I simply assembled them in Photoshop, frame by frame. Even (most of) the characters' slight movements were just down to the placement of the layer in each frame. With the addition of some random, Japanese notes from the sketches flickering around, I had a complete fight scene - totalling around 70 frames.
Exporting these frames as transparent PNGs to After Effects allowed me to do whatever I wanted with them - from changing and animating backgrounds, to masking and moving sections of the animation. Even the titles were just still PNG files knocked up in Photoshop.
I'm pretty pleased with how it came out, considering the short timescale. Safe to say there's loads more that could be done with more time. Before making this, we discussed loads of different options, more ambitious ones. Who knows, maybe Zen United will make more viral stuff soon!...
After my final uni project finished, I started rummaging through my hard drives to see what creative projects I had started last year. Like most arty people, I have a tendency to get excited about and start new projects in my spare time only to exhaust my enthusiasm within a couple of months because there is no real ultimate positive outcome (as there is in a uni project, for example)!
Nevertheless, I often still like the ideas, even if I may never continue them again. To cut to the chase, I started making a 2D side-scrolling shooter game last September. Take a look:
I did this in YoYo Game Maker 8 Pro, which is an amazing piece of software for anyone who wants to have a go at making games even through they have no coding experience. Through doing stuff like this, you gain some proper understanding of how coding works, and many people have started out in this program before progressing to real scripting platforms like Java.
It's also a great program for making pixely/8-bit artwork. One of my classmates - Tom Clark - made his entire final uni project animated film in an 8-bit style, but he said that the only way he could enlarge his MS Paint drawings without them being horrifically blended out was to zoom in and capture a screenshot.
GM has a built-in graphics editor, which is basically like an advanced version of MS Paint. Fundamentally it works the same as MS Paint, but with tonnes of extra features, not least the animation feature. For my sprites, I drew them in Game Maker first, then exported them to Photoshop for some precise shading and weathering - which is surprisingly difficult with such a small number of pixels!
It was particularly challenging trying to make the train's wheels look like they are spinning fast - with only 5 pixels making up each wheel!
I enjoy using GM to test out ideas. It seems that I always spend much more time on the sprites (graphics) in the game, as that is what I am most interested in.
For the past month or so I've also been working on a new game. It's inspired by a 2D version of Minecraft; which itself is not particularly original, but all I am interested in is creating the blocky, destructible environment, after which I will make it a game in its own right. Unfortunately I have spent all of that time working on the game's engine as oppose to graphics, so it still looks far too awful to show anyone...I am even using 'Billy the Garden Boy' from Lumen Soup as the character, because I haven't got round to drawing a new one! Maybe I'll post it here if it ever starts to look good...
I'm sure you've heard of Duke Nukem before - ya' know, that hedonistic game character who shoots alien invaders - Either from the new Duke Nukem Forever or the old skool Duke Nukem 3D from 1996. Don't worry, there's nothing 18+ in this post!
I have been playing Duke Nukem 3D since it first came out - when I was 6 years old. Is that bad? Safe to say Duke Nukem forms a decent chunk of my childhood!
I recently uncovered a small gathering of Duke Nukem drawings I had done when I was 7 - about half a year after the games' release.
The most inspiring thing about the game for me is the level design. 3D games before Duke Nukem 3D mostly involved endless, dull corridors as the setting; and not much better are the photo-realistic environments of modern games. Where's the creativity in that?
Duke's levels are an art. Not only can you explore the most wonderfully mediocre of settings, including police/fire stations, banks, subways and even a Japanese restaurant, but their layouts are simply brilliant.
Researches innovation, teaches kids stop motion, paints things rusty, collects toys, plays games, and makes After Effects content that lands in all sorts of strange places. Loves Gerry Anderson, carries a 7D, and always searching for the question to the answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
