I hope you’ve not been worrying after me, weblog, as I’ve been perfectly fine. Things have merely been busy and hectic lately, is all. Some months ago I was fancifully working on my first FPS map, for Team Fortress 2, and considering dabbling with the Python programming language. This all was swept to the side though when some opportunities arose. Things really came together all at once last week, when I was suddenly very popular, and within a small handful of days, a number of people contacted me to express interest not only in my past work, but also potential future work. I do mean to eventually return to the TF2 map and to the newbie programming, but for now, I’m seeing where these new rabbit holes will lead me.

Aside from these new rabbit holes, I don’t think I have a lot to talk about. I’ve been on a bit of a WoW kick lately — though I dare not actually re-subscribe to the game (not quite yet anyway)! I’ve got to stay productive, after all. This WoW kick, then, has found form mostly in reading forums and listening to whatever listenable WoW podcasts I can find.

Speaking of MMOs, the main pre-release Warhammer Online community held a career (class) poll, which has received nearly 4000 respondants thus far. Of course, this really only reflects the hardcore enthusiasts, so the Greenskins are probably overrepresented and the more vanilla ‘good’ races underrepresented. Interesting trends though: the tank and healer classes are much more popular than one might expect. I look forward to seeing if this trend continues post-launch, when the most offensively potent options tend to be the most popular.

For the record, I voted for the Knight of the Blazing Sun, one of the poll’s least popular classes. It’s a little ironic, since Warcraft’s humans are, to me, that game’s least attractive option, but what can I say? It’s probably the historically authentic armor that gets me; I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.

I’m sure I’ll try everything at least once though, being the altaholic I am.

I’ve taken some time out of the project I was working on —an earnest attempt at a custom Team Fortress 2 map— to work on what you see to the right.

It may look familiar to anyone who enjoyed Morrowind; these are the masks worn by the Ordinators of the city of Vivec, though obviously reimagined for the higher-res game art of today. This is actually something I started way back with my original Oblivion mod-work, but I never went beyond a basic high-poly model. I decided to revisit it to help remedy two weaknesses in my portfolio: a lack of human faces (important for a character artist) and a lack of Zbrush work. Because I already had the base established, I figured I could take this to completion fairly quickly. I wasn’t intending to take it to in-game implementation, but once I had done the full texture job, it was a matter of hey, why not?

Here are some further in-game shots: 1 2 3 4. The plume needs some work — it looks fine in 3dsMax, but there are some transparency issues in Oblivion itself. Also, you may notice in the profile shots, he is lacking ears! I’ve yet to fully explore how best to address this.

That said… here’s some stuff!

● I noticed shortly ago that Gamers With Jobs finally got their new site design up. I mention it, because the design was done by none other than my friend Eric Carl, web designer extraordinnaire! It’s a huge upgrade for them, much more professional than their old design, which I felt didn’t do justice to the thoughtfulness of their content. I mean, let’s face it, people absolutely do judge websites by their cover —er, design. I admit that I do.

● I finally got around to checking out Black Isle’s leaked VanBuren alpha, ONCE KNOWN AS FALLOUT THREE. There’s not, unfortunately, a lot to comment on. It’s very true to the first two Fallouts, and I will admit feeling a pang of bittersweet nostalgia that Fallout will not be revisiting the isometric turn-based style any time soon. However, one can’t help but wonder what might have happened, had this game seen release? I suspect it would have been another obscure and underappreciated gem, a fine game —possibly a great game— but only a modest market success, and likely not enough to, at the time, save Interplay, or ensure the Fallout franchise a bright future.

In any case, I note with some irony that Black Isle’s Fallout 3 was to start the player off as a prisoner… which happens to be the same way that every main entry in Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series has begun.

LINKS FROM AROUND THE WEB

Tom Chick interviews Brian Reynolds of Big Huge Games. It’s mostly a look back at Rise of Legends, but also strays into more general questions. I’m really looking forward to what these guys do for their next games.

Over at 1Up, the question of just how personal game-playing can be is mulled over. Games as wish fulfillment, games as a mirror. I wish they’d try to distill it a little more, and deliver a firmer judgement on what exactly inspires personal involvement though.

RPS interviews Rod Humble, of EA Maxis. Humble is an interesting figure, both a part of EA, crusher of foes, vanquisher of dreams (I kid, I kid), and a producer of small art games. The interview mainly centers around Humble giggling at the various cruelties one can enact upon Sims.

Richard Bartle, co-author of the first MUD, has some harsh words for the anti-videogame figures of today.

● I’ll end with something I’ve dabbled in the past couple weeks: two MMOs — the free trials for Lord of the Rings Online and Everquest 2. Apropos of nothing in particular, I asked a friend who had never played an MMO before if she’d like to try LotRO out with me. She agreed, fortunately, because these games are always more fun with friends. We set aside a night to jump in together and check it out, but when the time came, Turbine’s account services were down, and she was unable to start the trial (I had accidentally started it the night before). That put a bit of a damper on our appetite for the game. We played the next night though and had a pretty good time, though not good enough to entice either of us back in. Though we had seven days, it was the only night either of us spent much time playing.

I played Everquest 2 alone, and was actually very pleasantly surprised. I suppose in the 3+ years since release, they’ve had time to fully adapt to the post-WoW MMO landscape. The trial allowed me to play in three different starting areas, depending on the race I chose: a Newbie Island (coming in either good or evil flavors, but essentially the same), a goodly Fairy Forest, and an evil Dark Elf Forest. The latter two are recent additions to the game, part of the second-to-last expansion, and they’re of a very impressive quality. Quests are plentiful, levelling is quick, and there are enough neat things to find that exploration feels like a worthwhile use of your time. I’ve come across a number of unique, named enemies for instance, which tend to offer nice rewards. There are nice little collection quests, which generally involve you picking up randomly spawning items off the ground — collect five types of feathers and you can trade them in for an item and experience.

You’re disallowed from going past level 10 in the EQ2 trial or exploring the larger world, so once I had seen what there was to be seen, I went ahead and uninstalled. I’ll probably check the game out again some time, and at the very least, solo a character to the end game. As for LotRO, I don’t know. It’s undeniably a solid, highly-polished game, but perhaps the understated, low-fantasy world of Middle-Earth is ill-suited to the game style of World of Warcraft and Everquest, which exalt in their goofy, anything-goes fantasy settings. Because these games are made for running around, gobbling up quests, and then moving on, the game world needs to be something of a giant carnival or amusement park, and from what I saw, Turbine wasn’t willing to turn Middle-Earth into such. If you’re one whose love of Middle-Earth extends so deep that you’ll be able to appreciate the subtle differences between one agrarian Breeland hamlet and another, you just might find LotRO to be the finest MMO available today. Otherwise, for an ignorant savage such as I, I suppose the game failed to communicate to me how it was superior or even notably different from WoW.

Fortunately though, what reportedly shipped as a soupy morass of bugs and instability has been transformed into a darn solid game, thanks in large part to the game’s loyal fanbase. This is something I’ll always love about PC gaming. There are two strains of player-made patches, the “TRUE” patch (warning, link is NSFW, as the patch author likes to create nude skins), which only fixes bugs and implements a few pieces of content that were clearly meant to be implemented, and a second one that fixes bugs as well as sort of refining and remixing the content. I’ve opted for the fixes-only patch for now. If I play through a second time, I’ll likely check out the other.

Here is a helpful post on the Something Awful forums, for anyone who might read this and feel inclined to check the game out.

• NPC characterization is surprisingly great. Character designs are strong, and though this was one of the first games to use Source’s facial animation system, they typically manage to pull it off pretty damn admirably. The game features a colorful and memorable cast of characters, generally avoiding silly two-dimensional cliches. Voice acting is also of a near uniform high caliber — an impressive feat, given the sheer quantity of dialogue.
• The character development system, like most classless character-building systems (Fallout, most Elder Scrolls games, and indeed, Deus Ex) allows you to gimp your character if you’re not careful. The usual advice is to choose one combat style and keep it leveled up, and that applies to Bloodlines as well.

• Remember the Hell’s Kitchen map in Deus Ex? It was something of a hub area that you kept returning to between missions for the first third of the game or so. You even had an apartment to call home, and I think a lot of players developed a sort of fondness for the locale. I can only speculate that the guys at Troika specifically used it as inspiration, but Bloodlines’ four urban hub areas are evocative of Hell’s Kitchen, especially since you can gain apartments (“havens”) in the first two.
• Unfortunately, in some pretty key ways, Bloodlines doesn’t hold up to the Deus Ex tradition. The game often seems ill-suited to dealing with stealth, for example. In combat areas especially, you get a lot of scripted triggers where enemies kick down doors or bust down walls — literally monster closets. If you’re stealthed when you cross these triggers, they’ll still bust through the door, but being unable to see you, they proceed to simply stand there. It’s very silly. There were also plenty of situations in which I was hiding literally right in front of somebody, out in the open, yet remaining unseen. Defeated enemies simply fade away too, so you never have to worry about hiding bodies. Splinter Cell this ain’t.

  Beyond just stealth though, there just isn’t as much opportunity for emergent scenarios as one would hope for. Outside of conversations, NPCs aren’t very responsive to your actions and environments are typically very static (though there are plenty of locked doors, vents, and computer systems).

• Conventional wisdom on this game says that, in the latter third of the game or so, the game loses its roleplaying luster, relying more and more on uninspired action gameplay. It’s not quite as bad as I’ve seen it made out to be, but it’s hard not to notice. This lapse is only magnified by the fact that, at this point in the game, the storyline takes a detour, and suddenly you’re dealing with a lot of new characters who may not be quite as interesting as the characters you’re introduced to in the early game. An argument could be made that the entire Chinatown portion of the game could have been cut without the game as a whole suffering greatly (though you’d admittedly miss out on some cool gameplay sequences).

  It’s worth sticking it out though, as the game does eventually return to LaCroix and the Anarchs for a pretty satisfying conclusion.

• Finally, a couple posts ago, I mentioned that Bloodlines seemed to be a game with a lot of perhaps superfluous art. Now that I’ve fully played through the game, I can confirm that this is the case. I used a small example in which the player ventures into a creepy prosthetics workshop for a very brief battle, but the worst offender of superfluous art assets has to be the Natural History Museum level. In it, there are about ten to twenty displays that show fake animals, from dinosaurs to elephants, each one fully modelled out and textured. Yet, there’s really nothing interesting in there aside from security guards, and it was very possible that the player could bypass the room entirely, not seeing any of that art at all.

  Simply put, Bloodlines is a big game with a lot of art. It’s something of a surprise, given that Troika’s previous two titles had been 2d isometric games. They must have had to really hire a lot of artists to create so much art output, and I can only imagine that the budget for Bloodlines swelled correspondingly. It makes the game’s apparent commercial failure all the more bittersweet; with HDR, more extensive normal mapping, and higher-resolution models where appropriate, this game would be very competetive, appearance-wise, with most modern AAA titles.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun did a retrospective last year for Bloodlines as well. It’s worth a read if you found this post interesting (though it does contain spoilers). It’s significantly more negative than my take, but their criticisms are fair. They’ve also just recently put up a nice interview with CCP’s Reynir Harðarson. This is relevant because CCP Games are the guys who built EVE Online, and who are now starting work on a World of Darkness MMO. The interview doesn’t contain much directly relating to the WoD MMO, though there is reassurance that they will apply their virtual world approach to the project.

I’m not big on the gothic industrial thing, but playing through Bloodlines has certainly given me an appreciation for the World of Darkness setting and license. Everybody ‘gets’ vampires, after all, and there are a lot of inventive things you could do with an urban, modern-day setting. Incorporate the game world with real fake websites (in a slightly ARG-like twist), allow for user-generated content (custom clothing, who knows?), or even explore in-game advertising as an alternative revenue stream from standard subscriptions. It’ll be a fascinating project to follow, I’m sure.

Some links to share:

Feet of Clay
Once upon a time, I very much enjoyed the blog of game designer Dave Rickey, until I went to visit one day and found it mysteriously VANISHED. Now he’s back though, and I would not hesitate for a second to recommend his blog to anybody interested in MMO theory. He is a VERY SMART MAN.

Not Addicted.com
Also returned from the nether, after a long period of having no front page. It’s sort of a comedic digest for the MMO space, from a Flowers of Happiness pedigree. Glad to see them back up and around.

Lots of Valve stuff on the latest episode of Game Trailers TV
I don’t know if any of it is new and exclusive, but I suspect a great many of us are interested in hearing all we can from these developers who can currently do no wrong. There’s good footage of Left 4 Dead, as well as a very brief fly-through of Gold Rush, the next official Team Fortress 2 map.

Warning though: there are some Portal spoilers in Part 2.

Speaking of TF2, I’ve barely played it at all for the past couple weeks, and I really ought to rectify that.

So, only a few days after my second post in this blog, in which I proudly declared my portfolio site to be complete, I decided that this was not, in fact, the case. Specifically, I’ve decided to go back and complete the Thri-kreen mantis guy, which previously only existed as a high-poly model. That portfolio page was, I felt, amongst my weakest entries, and this should give me the opportunity to turn it into what may be among my stronger pieces.

I will take it as far as the rigging stage, but will not animate or implement it. Other 3d game artists often do the same — producing work simply as an exercise, with no specific game engine in mind. The reason is that, well, animation and implementation are difficult, time-consuming, and not always as rewarding as the initial creative process can be.

In my case though, it’s a time issue. As I complete this piece, I have put my job hunt on hiatus, and this is very personally frustrating. I’ve been waiting years to go professional — to finally gain the legitimacy of earning real compensation for what I’ve poured so many hours of my life into (my family will be happy to learn that, no, this game development thing is not just one big scam that never pays out). At the same time, there’s a voice saying, “hey, you’ve waited this long, what’s another couple weeks?” You only get that one first impression after all, and perhaps having another completed character model in place of a page of unfinished assets will tip the odds in my favor just that necessary amount.

I’m trying something a little different with the diffuse map. First, I am specifically avoiding photo overlays, and shooting for a more hand-crafted look. Blending in photographs are a quick and easy way to achieve that high-contrast grungy look, perhaps best displayed in my Gatehouse textures, but I don’t necessarily want to make games that look grungy. In fact, games may even be tending away from that classic gritty photorealism, towards a more gameplay-driven visual design. Rather than simply making each art asset as detailed and true-to-life as possible, artists would be required to ask, “what must it communicate to the player? what is the visual goal of this asset?” For characters models, it’s to be distinctive, memorable, and emotive. For background clutter objects, it’s to enrich the environments without distracting the player’s eye from what’s important, gameplay-wise. Etcetera etcetera.

Getting back to the thri-kreen texture, the second thing I’m trying differently is to seperate the light/darkness shading layers from the coloration. As you can see from the render above, he’s got mottled brown stripes, significantly darker than the rest of his flesh. To achieve this without interfering with the diffuse map’s implication of form, they’ve been seperated into different layers, and this is actually working better than I expected. Here is a look at the grayscale light/darkness layer (ignore the palette and bright orange eye).

The diffuse map, as a whole, is still a bit plain and boring, and I hope to introduce some implied texture without going overboard (he also has a normal map, mind you), as well as greater richness in the coloration. The goal is for the texture to remain smooth and creamy; visually interesting without being visually busy.

I have been:

Researching.
Preliminary budgeting. Car research. Keeping an eye on the job boards.

Tying up some loose ends in my NWN2 work.
There is a large handful of character clothing and items that are unreleased or need to be updated, so I’ve gone back and done some of that. Unfortunately, it’s total drudgery. Small, manual tweaks, and then export. Ho-hum.

Not unrelated, here is a dwarf in a top hat and a gnome with eyeglasses. Incidentally —and a total aside— the gnome is the best proportioned character model in NWN2. Click for a higher res shot, and compare him to the dwarf, who has strangely small hands and feet. His limbs appear tapered-off, making him look awkward and kind of wimpy. Several other base models, including the human, have this problem too.

Anyway, I’m about ready to move on from NWN2, as far as personal projects are concerned. Not because the dwarves have small hands, but because I can’t muster much excitement for it, as a game or a modding platform at this point in time. I’m hungering for something a little more creatively indulgent.

Installed and played through Portal. Finally.
Pretty incredible little game. I’m sure I have nothing new to say about it, but I’ll say a few words regardless. Its greatest attribute is probably its austerity. There are countless points at which a lesser developer might have wanted to add more —perhaps a health meter, or more guns/tools, or mobile enemies— but would have only served to dilute the overall experience.

Oh, and this blog…
I made some minor tweaks to the layout, and added some favored links on the side, because that’s an easy thing to do. There remains much to do though, like add a link back to my portfolio page, since most people will probably come through that way. Php is tricky to figure out though — what can I say?