Games are experiences - who’s making them?

A recent blog entry by Leigh Alexander (who’s blog is great - though you may wish to be careful, as skimpily-dressed game characters show up frequently) brought to mind something that’s been turning around in the back of my thoughts for a while - about the last 15 minutes.

Reading vs. Playing…

In another attempt to make this look like a deep-thinking game-designy blog, I post another ramble on game structure…

Can you get an education in art for free?

Like most artists around here, I’ve got a bunch of links stored up from my travels around the Internet. Art tutorials of every shape and size, telling me everything from how to compose color to how to wrap brushes so they stay nice. This is truly a wonderful time to be an artist.

A while ago, I posed a question to myself: Just how much art education could person get strictly from online resources? Looking at the links I have collected, and knowing that there is a vast number of them that I have yet to find, I’m beginning to wonder if a person could get a “complete” art education just by learning online.

How to make an “Innovative” game

Now then, I’m the least-qualified person on the planet to write this post, but everyone’s entitled to an opinion, right?

Create wrapped vines and wires in Blender

Long twisted shapes are necessary for a lot of scenes. Vines in a jungle, computer wires on your desk, pipes in a spacestation complex - all will add a lot to your scene. Unfortunately, these things are difficult to model using poly-by-poly or box modeling methods. In this tutorial, I will show you how to easily create these things, and how to wrap them around objects realistically.

Part of the inspiration for this tutorial comes from Meats Meier’s Animation Mother.

A solution to “I saved over that?!?”

Blender’s save feature is so convenient that I’ve gotten into the habit of saving every couple of minutes (or seconds, as the case may be). This is an okay habit, since Blender won’t complain at all if you quit without saving changes, but I’ve had more than one instance where I was experimenting with a file and saved over it when I didn’t want to.

For the longest time, this simply meant going back and doing hard work to undo whatever experiment I was trying. I recently got fed up with this and changed one simple option in Blender to fix it.

Finding the way out of Swamp DRM

My last blog post on “hostage gaming” was very sketchy and rough. Talking to several people about this plan and thinking about it more only rubbed in the fact that my initial proposal of a plan I hope (dream) could change how media is marketed is off to a bad start. Anyway, forget that last post. In this post I’m going to try and re-present my idea in a comprehensive manner and in a way that actually makes some sense.

Artists: Oppose the Orphan Works bill - don’t lose the rights to your work!

As you may have guessed from my previous post, I have some concerns about the way videogame manufacturers are currently marketing their products, however, the wrong sort of change could be severely detrimental to both artists and consumers. In case you haven’t heard, this is exactly the sort of change happening right now in the US.

The recently introduced Orphan Works Bill has been making leaps and strides at getting approved and made into law, damaging copyright holders’ ability to hold their copyright, and potentially losing them their ability to protect their work.

More information can be found on CGTalk.

Please, if you’re a visual artist, you need to click that link. Now.

Is it time to hold games “hostage”?

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about game piracy lately, and how a system could be created that would minimize or eliminate the need for DRM or other systems that restrict a user’s ability to play and share a game. Here’s one of my ideas…

Compile from source - and don’t worry about the dependancies.

One of the irritating things I’ve experienced about compiling programs and libraries from source has been the lack of a package-manager like method to resolve dependencies. If something isn’t there, I have to go and find it manually - a job that can take a long time if there are many dependencies.

I was able to “cheat” recently when trying to compile Ogre3d - a library I’d had much difficulty with in the past.