Concept Art Discovery

I have collected video game art books for a long time. I just love concept art. Following are some new favorites:

Ray Lederer - I really admire his concept art for Skyrim - http://raylederer.com/
I feel that he creates the right atmosphere perfectly - and that the rest of the team really captured the look and feel of his concepts in the actual game.


Peter Mohrbacher - concept artist and illustrator at CCP North America - http://www.vandalhigh.com/. I really enjoy the surreal quality of his works.


Sean Andrew Murray - concept artist for Kingdoms of Amalur, a new RPG I just got my hands on. http://seanandrewmurray.com/
I like his detailed, illustrative style. The characters really seem to come to life.


Arnie Jorgensen - lead concept artist for Star Wars the Old Republic. I could not find a personal portfolio site for Arnie, but there is a great gallery of SWTOR concept art here: http://www.swtor.com/media/concept%20art
I am amazed by the variety of work and how much thought seems to go into each design.
Interview with Arnie Jorgensen.

Collaborative Web Sites:
Concept Art World - http://conceptartworld.com/ Publish Post
ConceptArt.org -.http://conceptart.org

Death to the Ghost Pantone Swatches!

Sometimes I end up with unused Pantone swatches in an InDesign file that I can't remove, for whatever reason. I'll go through the separations preview, and find nothing. I'll look at all the linked files in Bridge, and see nothing that contains the offending swatches. After much tearing of hair and searching online, I finally found a tip to remove the ghost Pantone swatches.

1. Create an EPS in Illustrator that contains the Pantone swatches you want to remove.
2. Place the file in the InDesign document.
3. Delete the file from the InDesign document.
4. You should now be able to remove the unused Pantone swatches!

Game Development Job Positions for Graduate Students

I am taking a class about video games in order to develop interactive design skills specific to video games. I have been an avid gamer since I was a teenager, and I enjoy a wide spectrum of games from casual games to classic point-and-click adventure games to single-player role-playing games to massively-multi-player MMO’s. I am interested in creating educational video games for museum exhibits and websites. Video games are some of the best examples of interactive design in the field. Games are a great way to engage people in fun and meaningful ways.

For graduate students looking to get into the game industry, there are many entry-level jobs that enable them to get a foot into the door. One of these is I.T. support. I.T. staff are responsible for maintaining computers so that the artists, programmers and engineers can keep doing their jobs. Quality assurance is another entry-level position. Q.A. testers test the games for bugs and glitches. They play the games systematically, exposing issues that the programmers may not have expected. Another entry-level position to consider is render wrangler. Render wranglers monitor and control the computers where rendering is being done and manage the render farm. They continually check the machines so that the artists don’t waste time on technical issues and watching render output, even working 24-hour shifts.

There are also entry-level programming positions in most game companies. Programmers tend to specialize in different areas: network programming for online play, security, graphics, A.I, interface programming, engine programming, database, game play and optimization programming.

By obtaining an entry-level job, a person has a chance of moving up into a higher position. Engineers are more experienced than programmers; engineers create the structure of the game as well as the tools that the artists and level designers use to design the game. Higher-level jobs can open up in the art department as well. The art team creates the look and feel of the game and user interface. Positions here include concept artists, 3D-modelers and animators. I like coming up with the ideas for games and designing user interfaces, so this area appeals to me the most.

A person might even move up to a management position in the engineering or art department. The engineering manager and art director in turn report to the producer or production manager. This person oversees the entire production of the game, communicating between the artists and the programmers. He or she creates schedules and prioritizes tasks for the art and engineering teams, keeping a clear picture of the shape of the game. This person also knows a lot about game design, and usually some programming and art skills.

The marketing department holds additional roles in a game design company. The marketing department creates the image of the company that the public sees. It is responsible for promoting the company’s image and products. They develop marketing campaigns, create ads, websites and more to generate public interest in the games. I do have some experience in marketing, and I am very aware of the role of marketing in a game’s success. I have come across several great games that suffered from poor marketing: Okami and Beyond Good and Evil. Both are exceptional quality games. Sometimes game sales can suffer if a less-known title is released among many blockbuster titles. Sometimes a good game doesn’t get enough publicity. The marketing department has many factors to keep track of.

Some marketing departments may have a user community administrator. This person interfaces with the public via the company website. He/she manages the forums on the company website or other user communities related to the company’s products, and gathers feedback.

Business administration is an area unto itself. Several roles in a multi-department game design company lie in business administration. Accountants track and maintain the company finances. In a small company, a certified public account may be hired for these tasks. A lawyer may be retained for the company, or it may have it’s own legal team. Copyrights, trademarks and patents are issues that all game companies must deal with. The lawyer or legal team protects the company’s intellectual property from copyright infringement and ensures that the company is not violating others’ copyrights. Although these aren’t the roles most game design students see themselves in, these functions of a game company are worth noting.

At the very top of the corporate structure of a game company–other than a sole proprietorship or partnership–presidents, general managers and CEO’s oversee the company. They have strong interpersonal and organizational skills and keep projects on track. They either have business management experience or years of specialized knowledge and skills related to the industry. I do not see myself in a management role in a game company. If I create a company, I see myself as the sole proprietor.

There are many aspects to game development, reflected by the different departments–engineering, art, business administration–and corporate hierarchy. A graduate student may be able to find an entry-level position in his or her desired area, or start off in a support position such as I.T. or Q.A. Filling one of these positions may help him or her land a higher position in the company. I don’t see myself working for a large company but it’s important to understand the structure of companies that I may be working with. Someday I may wish to create games of a larger scope than I can handle all production of myself.

Print Section Massively Updated

I have created a lot of print projects for the Pacific Northwest Section PGA since late 2010. I have added 7 of them to the site, encompassing a wide variety of pieces from book covers to flying banners. Check them out!

Redirecting Old Site Pages to New WordPress Site

Do you know how many sites link to your old sites' pages? Is your site referenced in Wikipedia? Do you want to keep your old site's search rankings? Then you'll probably want to do a 301 (permanent) Redirect. You do this by creating or editing your site's .htaccess file.

Your WordPress site probably already has a .htaccess file. I copied mine to my local machine and underneath this:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

I followed this guide and added this below:

redirect 301 /chapters.htm http://www.pnwpga.com/chapters

... etc. until I'd included all the important pages from the old site and their new equivalents (one on each line).

I uploaded the new .htaccess file and saved it over the existing one in my site's root folder. All the redirects are working perfectly! Now I don't have to worry about breaking links on external sites or losing pnwpga.com's good search rankings.

Free Frutiger without Piracy

If you're like me, you feel guilty downloading pirated fonts. Font designers are artists, too, and they deserve compensation for their work. To turn around and use their work, without license, in your own commercial work is just wrong. However, fonts by major type foundries are expensive. Is there some way to legally acquire fonts for free? I've been on the lookout for such opportunities, and learned that sometimes fonts come bundled in with software--software that you can download, legally, for free.

To legitimately obtain the font family Frutiger, you can download Microsoft Reader from the Microsoft website. What is Microsoft Reader? Who cares. Frutiger is a beautifully simple sans-serif font designed by Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger. It was commissioned in 1968 for the directional sign system in the newly-built Charles De Gaulle International Airport in France.

Flash AS3 Tutorial: Keyboard Class

In this tutorial, I will be taking the Pong demo from Week 3 of class and will be changing the paddle to be keyboard-controlled instead of mouse-controlled.

1. First let’s talk about the Keyboard class. “The Keyboard class is used to build an interface that can be controlled by a user with a standard keyboard. You can use the methods and properties of the Keyboard class without using a constructor. The properties of the Keyboard class are constants representing the keys that are most commonly used to control games.” (Action Script 3.0 Language and Components Reference).

2. Make a new folder called “keyboard demo”. Create a new ActionScript 3.0 FLA file in Flash and save it in the folder as “keyboard.fla”. Create a new AS file and save it in the folder as “MoveWithKeys.as”. Give keyboard.fla the class “MoveWithKeys” .

3. Now let’s get a paddle to move. Create a paddle on the stage and make it into a movie clip, or copy the paddle from m3_pong.fla’s library and paste it into keyboard.fla’s library. Here you can see the paddle movieclip in my library.

4. Instead of storing the paddle on the stage, let’s make it into a class that can be called dynamically into our application. Check the box to “Export for ActionScript”. Here’s my symbol properties for the Paddle class:

5. Add an instance of the paddle in the Actions for keyboard.fla. Here is my code:

6. Now let’s work on the MoveWithKeys class. For our class, we will need to import parts of the Flash ui into our package: flash.display.MovieClip, flash.events.KeyboardEvent and flash.ui.Keyboard. Let’s just get all Flash events while we’re at it, too, in case we need them later.

7. Here is the rest of the code, which I adapted from the Adobe help site.

7a. You can specify how many pixels to move the paddle. “ -= 5” will subtract its position on the stage by 5, and “+= 5” will add to its position on the stage by 5.

7b. switch and break statements are similar to if/else statements. If the conditions of switch are true, the code will be executed until the break.

7c. The evt is an instance of the keyboard event that was created when the key is pressed. You can use any name you want in the place of evt. The colon and the word “KeyboardEvent” indicate the type of event. “event” would also work; “evt” is commonly used because it is not a reserved word in Flash.

8. Save and test keyboard.fla. Output will show our trace message “function fired”, and you can now move the paddle left and right with the arrow keys on your keyboard!

9. Now to put this to use in our pong file. Copy your m3_pong file and paste it into the keyboard demo folder. I renamed mine “m3_pong_keyboard.fla”. I copied my paddle class from keyboard.fla and pasted it into the library of m3_pong_keyboard.fla and removed the paddle instance from the stage. Assign the document the class “MoveWithKeys”.

10. We don’t need the code for the paddlePressHandler or paddleReleaseHandler anymore, so rip all reference to those out of the Actions, and add in our new paddle code. I positioned my paddle a little higher than in the keyboard.fla test so that it wouldn’t hit the reset button or the score area. Don’t forget to remove the references to paddlePressHandler and paddleReleaseHandler at the bottom of the Actions code, too.

11. Test to make sure everything is working! You should now have a pong game where you control the paddle with the LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys. If it moves too slowly for your taste, increase the value of “case KEYBOARD.LEFT paddle.x “ and “case KEYBOARD.RIGHT paddle.x”.

12. Notes:

12a. KEYBOARD.UP and KEYBOARD.DOWN are also commonly used.

12b. Public properties of the KeyboardEvents:

Public property - Data Type
altKey - Boolean
charCode - uint
ctrlKey - Boolean
keyCode - uint
keyLocation - uint
shiftKey - Boolean

12c. The primary difference between the key code and character values is that a key code value represents a particular key on the keyboard (the 1 on a keypad is different than the 1 in the top row, but the key that generates “1” and the key that generates “!” are the same key) and the character value represents a particular character (the R and r characters are different). Useful link for finding keycodes: http://www.dakmm.com/?p=272

Sources:
1. Adobe ActionScript 3.0 website: Capturing Keyboard Input: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ActionScript/3.0_ProgrammingAS3/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e3d118a9b90204-7d01.html
2. Edutech wiki: AS3 example Keyboard control: http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/AS3_example_Keyboard_control
3. Grover, Chris. Flash CS5: The Missing Manual; O’Reilly, 2010