So as you may have noticed if you've visited this site more than once, it's changed a lot lately, from the navigation to the color scheme to the art that's on it. Well, that all goes into my feelings of inadequacy with my page, mostly due to my feeling inadequate in art. While ECGC was a fantastic experience, it has also left me feeling like I should be doing more. While I would love to put all of my energy into making brand new awesome work, I just don't have the time right now. Overall, this post will focus on my plans to fix that, and where those feelings come from.
The design of this webpage has changed a lot. My first attempt at changing the color scheme was a terrible failure as the color palate was okay for somethings, but this webpage was not one of those things. I've tried to remedy that with this color palate, and aside from the blog banner right now, I'm pretty happy with it. I also rearranged my portfolio. I felt that the page was getting crowded and I wanted to further categorize it so that I could show a slightly larger range in my work without all of the very best stuff being hidden. I'm happy with it so far, but it may be a bit tedious as I add more art, so we'll see. Just a few weeks ago I was making a lot of art, art that I was happy with and proud of. However, very little of that has made it to my portfolio, and that's because a lot of it was fan art. There's nothing inherently wrong with fan art, but I feel as though a lot of it would undermine the more professional (or trying to be) nature of this page. I think with the new page format though I will be able to publish more of that, but I think I would like to get some input from my teacher before I do so. Overall though lately I have been very tired and busy with exams coming up. I have a lot of ideas in my head, but neither the time or energy to currently bring them to life. I do have one big project in the works that I'm excited for, but that is going to take me a while and I likely won't finish it until summer. I don't mean to bash on my technology again as I've done in another blog post, but when drawing with a mouse, or using a computer that takes forever to render your animation, it can add to the frustration of not feeling good enough. When I can barely draw smooth lines no matter what I do, it is a little frustrating, and I can't tell you how many times I've had to wait for an awful amount of time before I can even tell if my camera is in a good position to render a shot. Overall, I want (after exams at least) to make more time for making artwork based on original concepts. I think having a schedule over the summer and working on a large project or two would be really good for me. I can probably overcome some of my technical hindrances with more practice and time, so putting in the time will probably pay off, though I may look into buying a tablet. I really just want to have some good quality work to show here, because I know I am capable of doing good work, and I do have some good work, but I want a higher quantity of quality work.
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Last week I was lucky enough to attend the East Coast Gaming Conference. It was an interesting experience and it was nice to meet people who had actually made it in the industry and weren't starving artists. It felt smaller than I expected, but I still wasn't confident enough to really talk to any of the people at booths. Most booths were either colleges, indie game companies, or VR games. I wish that I had done more things at booths and talked to more people. Most of the talks that I went to were really informative and interesting, especially the one about poses by Gregory Marlow. However, since I was unable to interview him, I'll be focusing on another awesome talk that I attended. As you could guess from the title, the talk was about developing virtual reality games using Epic's Unreal Engine 4. The talk was given by Andrew Hurley who works at Epic games and is a phenomenal environmental designer. I was also able to interview him afterwards (which I'm very grateful for, he was very nice and gave good answers). A lot of his talk focused on new innovations in UE4 that would make VR game development a lot easier. While a lot of it did go over my head, it was still very cool and made me more interested in getting into VR. One of the coolest things he mentioned was the VR Editor though. There's a video on what it looks like here: Basically, it allows you to build a game inside of VR in real time with all of the lighting and to scale so that you know exactly what the game will look like. Mr.Hurley seemed very excited about what this will allow us to do. When I interviewed him later, I asked if a designer would need to understand code to use the program, and he said no. I thought that was pretty interesting, and I know most designers still would want to know code to communicate better with their team, but it's very cool that there is such a user friendly way to design levels inside of VR without having to touch the code at all. He also talked at length about some of the recent advances in VR technology as well as things to keep in mind when designing VR. High frame rate was something he stressed both in the talk and in the interview since a low frame rate can cause nausea. He talked about Instance Stereo Rending, technology that allowed them to render the right and left screens at the same time by rendering one and adjusting it a bit, which saves a lot of time. He also talked about something called Monoscopic Far Field Rendering for mobile games only, which basically flattens things that are very far away so as not to waste time rendering things in the distance too well since you don't need to be able to perceive depth that far away. Other design mistakes were also ones that would make the players feel sick such as moving their camera without having them move, and random acceleration. There were also things that designers have to do differently when working with a VR headset instead of a normal screen like avoiding screen space effects, as well as applying a Visible Area Mess which accounts for the strange shapes of the screens and allows things out of sight to be rendered in less detail. He also stressed how watching performance during development is incredibly important, again to keep up the frame rate. Personally in the past I had thought that VR would end up as just a trend like Wii Motion controls - not something that would fade completely, but something that everyone was very excited about for a while, but soon took for granted - but it seems based on the interview that I was very wrong. Hurley said he thinks that VR and AR (augmented reality) are the next step in designing video games, going as far as saying that we've "mastered 2D games" and that we already have awesome looking 2D games, so the next level is in VR. So it seems that if I want to get into the game industry, I'll want to watch VR closely. Luckily Mr.Hurley talked about that as well. He recommended this talk by Tim Sweeny: I thought his talk was very interesting too. He talked about many of the challenges of VR currently, such as having tech that can't handle the frame rates that are needed, lack of realism especially for humans, and user interaction. However, he also showed many of the triumphs, like shots compared to a photograph that are nearly indistinguishable. He called VR the opposite of mobile games, where instead of designing simple cartoony games, it will take a lot of resources and be very complex. He also talked about the possible future of VR with motion capture that will be able to translate even small movements and facial expressions into the game, likely leading to more games that are slightly less fast paced so that people can focus on smaller details. He also discussed the fact that users will probably contribute a lot to VR once we get good enough at making user friendly interfaces, but some of that will be internet trolls. Lastly, he talked about the upgrade data sharing would need if VR and AR becomes a part of daily life. All of this makes me excited to see if the future really does follow the way that he thinks it will.
As for general industry advice, Hurley recommending finding one area that you're passionate about and branching out from there. For him it was level design which ultimately led him to get into coding and environment design. He also threw in a good word for the college he went to, Wake Tech, saying that the teachers were also very good at encouraging people's passions and helping them succeed at them. Overall, his excitement about the future of and knowledge on the game industry helped me really feel much more excited for it too. |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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