My Little Knight

Now for something a little lower poly.

WIP

Brushing some Z's

Getting some practice with Zbrush.

I like your Pancho

I need to draw and paint a lot more.

Columns

Just making a few columns and getting to know the different orders a little more. Here's Doric, Ionic and Aoelic for now. Next I'll get to Corinthian and Composite.

Colt

Here's a gun.

Thoughts on Visual Style and Games

Versatility of style in video games has expanded tremendously in the past decade. I'd say there are more styles found in games than in any other form of entertainment. With such dramatically different visual styles and the advanced technology that games now have I'm actually finding it a little disappointing at the implementation of these visual styles in games. Many of the times it's used to match some other successful style, or it's style for the sake of style.

When it comes to games it's gameplay is king and everything has to . As of now the most successful games use their visuals to help explain direct the player through spaces and indicate how to solve challenges or set the mood of the story. This is all good and well but should be expanded on to make room for making the visuals their selves interactive and tied even closer to the gameplay.


Hazard: The Journey of Life is a game that has a visual style that I can't really describe. It's visuals don't serve a purpose to anything other than being different. It's visuals are an attention grabber but has no depth or connection to the gameplay.

Team Fortess 2. Awesome art direction but while it's exaggerated shapes and style create it's own visual language for it's players to understand the gameplay, there are some aspects of the visuals that just don't go as far as others. Still a very successful visual style and should be something other games styles try to achieve.

Minecraft is an example where the visual style is based entirely off of the gameplay. The core mechanic is building with blocks. The art is all blocks and squares. The visuals tie their selves to the core experience of the game entirely. While it doesn't look to be anything better than programmer art, I still consider it to be an elegant approach for it's visual direction.

With the diversity of styles that games have now the developers should be choosing and molding their visual styles around the gameplay and user experience much more than they currently are.

Art of Zone

I had worked on some artwork for an indie project called ZONE: The Battleground a few months ago. They finally got around to updating their IndieDB page with some of my designs and illustrations. Here are a some pieces I contributed to the game, I've made many more but those are secret for now.

 

Odyssia: The Thesis

I've posted artwork for one of my thesis pitches in a post just a little below this one, but I never posted any work of the second thesis pitch. This one is what I'm working on in my senior year.

It's game where you try to escape an underwater resort that is being destroyed by a giant sea creature. The only thing at your disposal is a tool that can harvest energy from electrical devices and place it into other devices (a sort of high tech master key). The creature however is attracted to electrical energy, so the more you gather, the more the creature will begin to shake the place and attack.


Here are a few environment sketches that I recently did. You'll probably see more work in the coming months

Follow the Odyssia Development Blog here!

Hot

It's the hot months.

So I made this.

My other job is a Space Man

Been working on a character model in my 3D for Games class. Just finished the project and while I'm still going to work om it some more, it's still decent enough to see the light of day through my blog.



We actually began working on this character in the previous semester, in our Drawing for Games class. Then after developing the concept art we brought it over to our 3D class this semester and brought it into UDK. Textures still need work but that'll get done later.

Project Aurora

One of my thesis ideas has passed Pre-Production. This means I have a passing grade for that class and will be allowed to continue to Senior year! Yaaay! Now I can come up with any random thing for the next half of my thesis pre-pro class. (We need to come up with two in the semester.)

The passing idea is based off of magnetism. It's set in the near future where the Earth's magnetic field has weakened and faded away, allowing solar winds and radiation to bombard the surface of the planet.


The player has to maneuver a magnetic ball through an abandoned city and reach a giant machine that can restore the planet's magnetic field.


Once the machine activates however, an intense wave of solar winds enter the atmosphere and destroys the machine. The balls magnetic properties get transferred to the player in this process and they now become the magnet.


A friend of mine, Michale Hosticka, had developed a functional version of the mechanic last year
We worked together to develop the story and concepts, theses are a few of the pieces I created for this project

In the beginning of this project we had an entirely different world and story
that involved a society of robots and an evil corporation.
We abandoned it because it made the project too large for us to handle as a two person team.

Youtube Channel

I have a YouTube channel set up to showcase some of my work. Currently I have the camera fly throughs of two environments I showed in the previous post but more videos will be posted later.

All of these videos are of projects done collaboratively with fellow students. The first is a five man team and the second is a three man team.