Personal Development Portfolio: Tree Tutorial

Hello All!

Well its after christmas and everything will be ramping up for the submissions on the 18th so yeserday i decided to get myself back into the swing of things by trying out some things from the tutorial on www.cgcookie.com.

Through the tutorial i was pleased but also disappointed that i knew and do most of the things he says already.

However, he did go more in depth on the hue,value and saturation side of pixel art one of which never really crossed my mind.

Anyways following his video i got to work creating my tree it all was going well, untill i seemed to start not enjoying what i was doing which made me give a rather lackluster, unfinished result. 

Thinking about it i have concluded:

1. his use of transfer on his brushes i didnt like, as it took away most of the control i enjoy about pixel art, going back on things i have said before if you find the importance of the placement of each pixel decrease in value then its digital art but not pixel art.

2. I felt it was going down a too overly processed realistic look using masks and overlay layers to do some of the work for him (however im having an internal debate about this)

So anyways due to my recent upgrade my computers more stable and can run vlc in the background so the return of timelapses!

so heres my tree "failings" for you to watch i feel it was going well until about step 6/7 on the picture above. Also for my christmas i was lucky in getting a new ipad mini on the hunt for looking for a good pixel art editor in the app store

Edit: heres the final 100x100 image i forgot to post up.

Looking back now on it, it doesnt look as bad as what i though, but it still isn'nt my style.

Update: Holidays!

Hello,

Sorry for the complete absence of updates so far this month, anyways this is where I am at now and what I have planned to do for the holidays.

Well firstly I managed to get my Project Proposal submitted in time at 6% originality, I feel relatively confident on the proposal but essays have never been my strong point so I am not expecting a fantastic grade.

Anyways other than that I bought new RAM for my pc and did a complete clean install (i do this every year to get my computers fresh for the new year.

However, my laptop does appear to have a  HDD problem so it makes work take longer than its supposed to due to it being rather slow when it works or constantly crashes.

My Pc for whatever hard was making it difficult for me to download the drivers required for my tablet and also photoshop, however with the presence of Alastair that seemed to had made them work.

So thats me finally able to get some work done (before i go to Ayr on the 23rd - 27th) was hoping to get more work done before i went down but it was rather unavoidable, its a shame pixel art is so digital because then my work progress can rely solely on the temper of my PCs.

Tim Von Rueden - Pixel Art Tutorial Sprite sheet

Anyways, Today I bought a tutorial from http://cgcookie.com/concept/cgc-series/pixel-course/ thanks to George for pointing it out to me it cost me about £6 but it gave the impression that it was rather good and i thought it would be worth it, to get myself back into the swing of things. I have some of the tutorial videos downloaded and ready so should get results of that up asap.

what else i have planned, well i still want to do a video of my project proposal. I want to get my skyscraper vs truck animation sorted. I also need to think of what it is exactly that i want to do for my final project.

so yeah in sumary

1. video proposal
2. Ethics Sheet
3. Skyscraper vs truck animation
4. Final Project, WHAT ARE YOUUUUU!?!? 

anyways thats all i have so far today, I have overdue books to deliver so better be off.

David M

Project Proposal: A quick update

Well I am so close to achieving the completion of my proposal that i thought that it warranted an update.

So yeah im at 2,873 words and just need to complete my abstract!

planning on making a video thingy of essentially my proposal so people can watch and understand my project so should do that at some point hopefully before the new year.

other than that its last week of teaching, so im hoping to meet ryan before we go for christmas to discuss plans and ideas for my practical stuff to be done for the next group of hand ins on the 11th of janurary.

So yeah expect alot more practical updates and media tests soon :)

but until then that is me for today.

David M

Meeting With: Ryan Locke #2

Hello,

Just a quick blog update of my first proper meeting with my supervisor,

So yesterday we had  a meeting, I had written down an agenda as to what to talk about, These being:

1. Project Proposal
2. Blog Grouping
3. Ethics Sheet

So my project proposal as quoted by Ryan, "Is like a cracked pavement, you can walk on it but you have to mind your step" 

As my 2nd or so draft of it I take it as a positive. He says im pretty much their just need to fill in the cracks with more references etc. 

also got to clear up what it is you reference, and that is pretty much everything that is related/helped you into writing your proposal which is a relief as I have alot of references just not many I could actually quote from.

as to my 2nd query:

I need to talk to lynn or brian about that as he isnt too sure.

Ethics sheet, I was considering in doing a questionaire to see what other people think when they see pixel art. I feel this would help me solidify that my project has some value to gamers experiance. 

Anyway its a good start my proposal is at about there:

abstratction: leaving that tiill the end

Introduction: 568/500 words, give or take and pretty much fully referenced and structured only the aim and objective need to be re worded and fixed

Contextual/literature review: 1193/1500

Methodology: 109/500 this is probably the section that needs more work to it.

Conclusion: leaving that untill i have completed my contextual review

Anyways thats me for today,

David M

Pre-Production Portfolio: Skyscraper and truck Part 2

Hello,

Well firstly you may (or not) have noticed that my skyscraper has changed and looks less blurry, I used a 'Sharpen' Filter in photoshop to recover the lost pixels in the Anti-aillising. however this has made some of there lines get coloured oddly which will needs further fixing, but its better than what i originally posted. So I shall re edit that post with what i was intending to talk about after its been completely finished.

I was intending on creating timelapse videos for these but I cant get VLC to work anymore and my computer is enjoying crashing on me.

So, today my next part in my little project is to create the truck, 

So, thats the finished model.

I am thinking of creating different models for the crashes as it gets deformed by the explosion.

Anyway, I enjoyed this part, pixel art is great for making sure things align properly, I am starting to realise why most 3D pixel art has basic geometry suits the style perfectly, however I am still adiment that I can find my own style so I dont just get told I am cloning minecraft or whatever.


Anyways next up will be making the street, might do alternate skyscraper textures to make the environment look more varied.

but yeah going to try get VLC working for the next parts as I really found it helpful to look back and examine my own technique.

Anyways hope you like,

Laters,
     David M

Pre-Production Portfolio: skyscraper test part 1

Hello,

I am not sure actually what this goes under (yet) but right now i think its close to a pre-production.

So what have I been upto? Well aside from slaving away at my proposal  (2000/3000 words) I have decided to do a little more practical.

The idea

Well, I want to do a pixel art animation that looks 2D but is actually 3D, the sequence I have chosen is a truck crashing into a skyscraper which came from a midnight think before bed and a chat with my flatmate.

The animation is not going to be too long, 30 seconds at max. 

The camera is going to have to rotate to show that the animation is 3D.

Progress?

Well I havnt gotten far, thanks to my computer crashing, but I have finished off the skyscraper (near enough) heres the 3D model for you to have a look.

How'd you do that?

Simple really, but I shall go more in depth for you.

As you may have read before (if not go look, i'll be waiting) I have textured 2 cubes, 1 looked like Fez and the other looked like Minecraft. I also decided to get really ambitious and try and texture a team fortress 2 model but failed miserably.

So This is why I chose a skyscraper and a truck they are both fairly rectangular.

I then used the same technique as my minecraft cube, but blew it up from 512x512 to 1024x1024.. However I seem to have made a catastrophic Pixel Art error that I have only just realised.

I appear to have made the rookie mistake of accidently forgetting to tick maintain hard edges on the scaling up.

Not to sure how to fix that!

Well i was going to take close ups of each part so you could see what was going on, on a pixel level but that would be kinda pointless now since everything been AA'd and blurred out...

Well thats something im going to have to make sure i dont do for the truck...

Hopefull i find a way to fix this and upload a new one tomorrow.

Typical, well that was a real downer to thee old moral, ahwells

till tomorrow,
     David M

Something: notes project proposal progress

Hello, not sure what to head this blog entry as...

Well unfortunately it is another annoying wall of text entry for you to read.

Finally think I  have made significant headway into this whole Proposal nonsense decided to rewatch the pixel art documentary i posted up before but make notes from it take interesting quotes etc. its good to know other people out there have the same opinion as me on pixel art, and the video says most of the things in my head that I couldnt get quite coherent enough for anyone else to understand.

other things its made me realise and need to look into

• mosaics
• tapestry

The parallels pixel art has with its music cousin chiptune and the similarities between the two how that chiptune is considered as a backlash to the ultra clean ultra processed glossy electronic music and that pixel art could be considered a backlash to the super realistic focused game industry however chiptune seems to be more widely accepted and mainstream in its respective industry whilst pixel art still considered as crude.

also, got a good quote from a book "understanding comics by Scott McCloud" talking about the benfits of abstraction over realism.

anyways thats me for now should hopefully have my first full draft done by the end of this which al send to one of my lecturers..

thanks, 

David M

Concept Development: Pixel Art Documentary, project proprosal

So yeah I found this a while ago but never got round to posting it, this documentary by Simon Cottee pretty much mimics my views on pixel art which is good. I don't know how credible he is for referencing but I feel the video is too important not to reference.

So yeah unfortunately I havn't been doing much practical as after the presentation I feel that I need my theory up to scratch which hopefully along with writing out my proposal and this documentary is helping.

anyways, thats me for now will probably do some practical stuff tomorrow though for a break between all this writing.

David M

Meeting With: Ryan Locke

Hello,

So yesterday I finally managed to get a meeting with Ryan who turns out is also my supervisor for my project.

The meeting went well I managed to clear up a few of the questions he had for me after my presentation which I feel helped alot in him catching upto where I am at.

Essentially what we did was throw ideas and such at each other to get the ball bouncing and just told each other what we knew about pixel art and why we like it.

Because of this I didnt manage to take down as much notes as I was hoping but I did try to get down the more important points, which are:

Abstraction - What is it? Is pixel art abstract art, if so how can we prove it? Why are we attracted to it?

Nostalgia - What is it? why do people feel its important and have to replicate it?

Why are humans attracted to the building blocks of things we played with lego to create houses, scientists discovered the cells, DNA etc. there has always been an interest in discovering the building blocks to things, can that be related to the attraction to using pixel art?

symbolism, semiotics

there was also an article that ryan unfortunately forgotten the name of but it was "connecting: Abstraction and applied meaning" or something along those lines, If i find that and be able to fit pixel art in somewhere It should help me a great deal :)

Presentation: Reflection

Hello,

Well this is us onto our 9th week, which means last week was our crit presentation week (slides to follow) So here is what i think went well and what didn't quite gel...

First off, I got very nervous at the beginning of my presentation I don't know why it got me so bad but I did manage to get over it by the end but it did have a negative effect on my presentation.

My feedback from lecturers were still rather positive however Lynn and Ryan both mentioned how they were worried that I didn't seem to have gotten much further in the theory side of things than where I was 4 weeks ago. This has alot to do with the misunderstanding of what we were to show, my nerves and not being able to convey my thoughts well enough. Both Brian and Ryan both said afterwards that I didnt seem that enthusiastic, which is right in the sense that my nerves and such dont make me ethusiastic when it comes to talking but I am ethusiastic about the project.

Anyways, I just need to make sure that in 3 months I have a solid understanding of where I am at.

Concept Development: 3D failings

today/tonight was another day of rhings not going to plan,

Despite what supervisors have told me I decided to do a texture on a properly modeled character, however i do have reasons for doing this. Mainly I wanted to see if a pixel art texture would work on a character as it looked interesting when I smoothed off the minecraft block I did before,

This interested me mainly because the 3d pixel/voxol games like minecraft or 3D Dot Game Heroes are still angular and basic but this cube gave me the idea that maybe the model doesnt have to be angular for the pixel texture to work...

However,

Since my falling out with maya the other day, i didnt want to model my own character and UV it as that would take me time so I borrowed Valves Heavy model from the game team fortress 2 of which they allow all steam users to borrow and play about with.

I chose the heavy mainly because hes bigger and the most sqaure out of all the characters and hes my favourite, in design anyways. 

I got as far as having a basic texture on the vest only,

My problem with it (other than it being messy right now) is I dont think pixel art suits the style of the character, which isnt too surprising since Valve had no intention of pixelating them (sorry valve) I might come back to it later depending on how things go.

I did find these videos though,

Minecraft parody of the popular gangnam style song by PSY

and,




Minecraft parody of paradise by Coldplay

I liked these because although they are using the original models of the ones in the game, they are rigged and geometry to give them more complicated animations.

which has given me the idea of doing something similar but with slight more complicated models. However this will lead to me having to model them myself.

Meeting With: Lynn Parker #4 & Concept Development: 3D me

Hello,

Well on Wednesday I had another meeting with Lynn and it went pretty well,

I have managed to make somewhat of a start on my proposal and she went over with me what I could possibly talk about and how to structure it. We also talked about my practical stuff worryingly we realised most of the things I have done is for my personal development rather than what i thought was my concept devlopment which has me worried also that next week is crit week so should have alot of new stuff to show =/ time has sure flown past *gulp*

Anyway,

Think I am slowly climbing out of the rut i was in and feel more on track just gotta have stuff to show for my presentation.

_________________________________________________________________________________

So after that i made a start on my 3D pixel test, its not finished I dont think I want to do something 3D anymore but thats yet to be decided.

So here I am in my untextured form, the bit i am not happy with is when I went to mirror the geometry I had to delete intersecting ploys this then created a hole, I have no idea how this happened as i was being careful when i was modelling. this irritated me quite a bit.

Meeting With: Robin Sloan #3

Hello,

Well today I arranged to meet up with Robin to discuss where I was at.

We discussed more about my aim and stuff and he thinks I have one I just havnt really wrote it out academically but he said that something like "Contemporary pixel art" and doing case studies on games like fez (which I was pretty much doing already) and discussing things like whether there pastiche or a parody how most games that choose pixel art over nostalgic reason over any stylistic reasons.

this is the path I may choose as it interests me quite a bit. but have another meeting with lynn to see if she agrees i like having more than one opinion on these things. hopefully it will get me out of this low point i seem to be in right now.

thanks for reading,

David M

Concept Development: Fez notes, 3D Dot Game Heroes Editor

Hello,

Well today I got my new 360 ( which i got because i a. really wanted one and b. i can justify it because it has alot of pixel art based games in the indie market and also always wanted to have a shot with fez)

So I decided to play fez and take notes on its looks and trying to see how the environment is made. first off, my initial response was the somewhat limited response of "wow!" I think its the cleanliness and crisp colours the characters are rather simple in their design but suit the pixel style.

10 minutes in the game gives you a fez this fez has the power to unlock the third dimensions, You would never have thought this game was 3D until this point, it looks like a well polished 2D game beforehand.

Now on the technicality side of things, you may have remembered the fez block i did a couple of posts back and how I wasn't sure in how the geometry was done, if it was modelled or just using a bump/normal map to give the illusion. In close inspection it would appear that most if not all the geometry is modeled.

Thats how far I got before having to go make dinner but I will keep updating this posts when I make more notes.

After, coming back from dinner I had a look into 3D dot game heroes as Alastair reminded me that it had a Voxol editor to create characters in game.

here it is on show:

This was a rather poor attempt at trying to do a voxol version as my profile pic.

what have I learned?

Well most importantly that doing voxol art is a whole new kettle of fish than pixel art and if I want to do any more on that then i would need to look into tutorials. Unfortunately I do not think I have the time with us now on our 7th week. 

Other than that Its been rather quiet been trying to do more personal proposal stuff but I feel like im stuck in a rutt with that. Need to find my motivation that has seemed to have dwindled off recently hoping that either lynn, robin or Ryan will get back to my email about a meeting this week so I can hopefully settle my nerves about my position.

Thats me for now,

David M

Concept Development: 3D dot game heroes, voxol editors first impressions

Hello,

Well another day another blog upldoad, so what  have I been upto?

well firstly and mainly I have been worrying alot about my aim or more accurately my lack of one, I think my lack of an aim is making me worried that my practical work (the thing I felt positive about is beginning to suffer)

but moving away from that right now,

well from the wee mini pitch on thursday i got the impression that people wanted to see some 3D stuff so in preperation I have been looking into games with a pixel art style but are 3D.

Ignoring Minecraft and the millions of clones it has out there, and fez mainly because I feel like I have talked about in depth already.

Theres this,

3D Dot Game Heroes

3D Dot Game heroes, Developed by Silicon studio and released on PS3 in 2010. Game heroes uses Voxols (the 3d interpretation of pixel art) this is where the characters and environment are built up of small cubes rather than pixels. Interested in the style I went looking for Voxol editors online and came across; 

• Sproxol
• Qubick Constructor
• Voxol 3D

Sproxol

First impressions are rather negative, the program felt rather clunky and unintuitive completely getting rid of the feeling of control it was hard to create anything that looked recognizable so have given up, I know if I read some tutorials then things might be better but I think it would still be rather infuriating.

Qubick Constructor

Was the most popular in my search but when it came to downloading my anti-virus refused to install due to threats so had to look elsewhere.

Voxol3D

Voxol3d gives the impression of being more robust than sproxol, but also looks rather daunting to me but shall be looking up some tutorials. and hopefully be able to show something pretty to look at tomorrow.

Thats all folks,

David M

Concept Development: chammy texture test, mini-pitch and thoughts.

Hello folks,

Well today has been rather interesting, for our class today we were to show our practical stuff show people what we have done since our presentation.

So, people seemed to like my stuff which is good generally got given ideas of what I already had bubbling away in my head but its good hearing it from other people.

Lynn also pointed out Abstraction through pixel art, which is interested because I was thinking my project could be based on abstractism. anyways the tests and thoughts had led to more of a breakthrough...

Why choose pixel art, why do i like it?

my usual response to these FAQs was "because its awesome and cool" which isnt exactly something i should put in my dissertation/project proposal, thing was that i never really thought about it in any great depth but it randomly jumped into my head when i was doing my texture test for chammy.

what i came up with are, 

"how you can make things look more detailed and more complex just with adding a few pixels" which leads onto...

 "you are in complete control there isn't any computer trickery and since you have been adding things pixel by pixel and controlling the image in this way you have complete ownership, people can ask how you did that and you can answer exactly? without being told "oh i used a filter or copied a tutorial"

so now onto the chammy texture so here he is, 

i think the armor (the purply stuff) looks pretty good, chammy is like a mash-up of animal his skin(green) an tongue came from a chameleon, his lower jaw a whale, his vail from a bat wing and his armoured skin from a crocodile.

I used these as they all had different textures, he looks detailed but lets take a closer look, 

as the pixels become more clear the detail begins to go away however certain textures such as the armour/eye retain the texture however the skin doesn't this is because i used a pixel art technique called "dithering" this technique is effective further away because the human eye cant pick out the individual pixels so they colours begin to blur, when I zoom in the pixels are clearer so the blurring technique no longer works.

I shall do the full animation of him at a later date but i feel I have more important media tests and project related things to do right now but i shall keep coming back to him every now and then.

anyways until next time,

David M

concept development: 4th year mini project COMPLETE!

Hello!

Well you may have noticed but my bloggers background has changed so yeah thats everyone that wanted to take part + others

so this was the last line up;

from left : kayleigh, wally,indy, mario, daft, punk and generic dude

so heres the finished tile,

The reason why I did this method and how it benefited me is that the more limited the pixels you use the cleverer you have to be in the placement of each to get the necessary detail. however i did take a few shortcuts to make things quicker as i didnt want to spend too much time in doing this.

• everyones outline is based off of 3 characters : Me, Rory or Angie
• each character has atleast 6 copies apart from wally indy mario daft and punk who only have 1 per tile

So overall I did 22 unique low pixel characters so I think I am sorted in that side of pixel art for a while anyways going to finish off the chammy and woman and the moon images next and experiment in 3D stuff.

I have started my personal proposal but havnt gotten far since i appear to need to know what my Aim is to do any decent amount for it, despite what the lecturers keep saying =/

ahwells, until next time!

David M

Concept Development: 4th year mini project Part.2, trip to the library

Hello, so last post for today.

Well after the cube test me and angie decided to take a trip to the library to get some books, I found some that I wanted and couldn't find others.

• Art in theory 1900-1990, big book I am hoping it might have a few useful quotes a book this big should do surely!
• Designing Arcade computer games and graphics just found this in the library looks like it might be useful has a few tutorials that talk about pixel art techniques.
• Aesthetic theory, with a name like that its bound to say something useful about aesthetics.
• Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction. I am hoping that since pixel art has links to traditional art that cubism may give me a couble of ideas behind both the art style.
• Cubism and its histories same reason as above  

books i didnt manage to get were:

• Key themes in media theory
• An introduction to game studies
• Aesthetic theory and the video game

So yeah, will probably be reading these for most of tomorrow, and hopefully get down some stuff for my personal proposal.

but moving onto my project...

So I have done more fellow uni compadres,

Top from left: Ritatsu, Lynn, Neil, Adam, Eilis

Bottom from left: Dan, Nikita, Ceren, Stuart

The same rules apply to you guys as the group before.

With 15 people I have started to make a start on the actual final thing ( the tileable background for my blogger)

so heres the tile on its own,

each person has atleast 2 duplicates

and thats me done for today....

David M

Concept Development: 3D cubes pixelated

Hello quick short post for you,

So today I have decided to have another shot at pixel art in 3D after my previous failings.

So what I decided to do was start off with something simple, in this case a cube, and create pixel art textures for them I decided to choose Fez and minecraft just because they are recognizable.

I the produced tiny 16x16 pixel textures,

totty wee texture(this was created by me entirely only using minecraft as a reference)

then scaled up the file in photoshop so that it would fit the cube and my finishing result are these:




left mouse to rotate, middle to zoom in/out and right to move

for these turn arounds i used www.p3d.in .

What I am thinking next in my practicing is to create, texture for cylinders then sepheres before maybe using pre made characters and texturing them but we shall see. Also thinking about making more cubes of older games that were around in the 80s-90s would do 70s but that would just be a plain white cube.

David M

Concept Development: 4th year mini-project part.1

Hello,

So as a wee side project next to the other ones I have mentioned in previous posts, I have decided to do low pixel characters like the one of me in my profile pic for some/most/all of the people in my fourth year class i did this because I felt it would help me in my time of artist block then I dont have to think about some crazy character to draw and pixelate and just get on with pixelating some of the crazy characters I bump into at university.

Might be able to spice up my blog a little bit more in the end...

From left: me, Alastair Low, Angie Mulligan, Rory Jobson, George Johnston, Robin Griffiths

If you are wondering "why in the devil am I waring that?" then its because I either A. Drew what I usually see you in either at uni (George) or at the flat (Al & Angie ) or B. used your profile pic (Rory & Robin).

so thats six of my fellow uni peers done rest to follow when I have the time/bored/taking a break from a more "important" project.

so thats the end of my spree of blog updates, until tomorrow, thats me done for today.

David M

Concept Development: Yuriy Gusev

Hello,

This and the previous post were supposed to be together but it was getting rather long so thought it should be split into two.

Realism In Pixel Art

So through my research into Minecraft and the thought of it losing some of its pixel art character through trying to be realistic I decided to search into realistic Pixel art. 

I stumbled onto this guys website Yuriy Gusev website and was blown away by his work:

I have to say when I seen these my jaw dropped in amazement "surely that cant be pixel art" i muttered to myself..

Each of his work is super detailed but also full of the cartoony character that pixel art has look closely and you can see the trademark pixel art lines and the dithering used to created effective gradiant effects by hand. I really have to look into this guy more.

Concept Development: Games/review analysis

Hello,

Earlier on today i posted up my meeting with Lynn, where I had a few tasks I wanted to do for today so here is what I have done. (its going to be a rather big post today so sit down and grab a brew)

Games Analysis

1970s

pong(1972), Asteroids(1979),space invaders(1978)

Games in the 70s were very basic due to the computers limitations most of them only consisted of very basic sprites (16 pixels give or take ) and only white as a colour. "0" counted as an inactive pixel so shoed up black and "1" indicated that the pixel active showing up in white. This remained the norm until space invaders came out with a brand new colour "green" due to the developers working on a new engine from the ground up. Sprites remained limited to the same pixel size and the computer struggled to keep up but it was an early sign of what was to come.

1980s

Donkey kong (1981) ,Alex Kidd (1986) ,PacMan (1980), MegaMan 2 (1988)

In the 80s with the introduction of 8-bit consoles games could have more colour and more pixels giving sprtes more detail and depth, now and up to the early 1990s is what inspires the nostalgic games of today.

1990s

Doom(1993), Prince of persia (1990), super mario bros.3 (1991)

Early 90s and the introduction of 16 - bit consoles brought more shades/colours and also more pixel adding more detail than before but the real movement was on PC where games could be more detailed pseudo 3D games such as doom appeared paving the way too 3D. pixel based games decreased from then on.

Reviews Analysis

So I have decided to read into reviews of games that use pixel art as the visual style and see what is said of the game purely on its aesthetics.

Fez(2012)

Scored highly in reviews and sold well come release reviews from eurogamer said;

"The games unique artwork its perspective shift mechanic its nostalgia for the 16-bit years and its bewitchingly strange setting all exist in harmony and make a single deliberate statement. Maybe its about perception, reality and subjectivity like the old man said. But i think its about something else: what games were to us in there charged infancy, what they have expanded into in the 30 years since and how to fold these things together into a signle beautiful whole." - Oli Welsh (2012)

Edge said;

"Fez blends 2D and 3D spaces at will, strings a series of otherworldly puzzles acorss dainty hovering islands and and delivers a pastels and pixels visual style that manages to feel voguish as well as sweetly nostalgic" - Edge staff, (2012)

What I think,

Both reviewers make excellent points and to praise the game for its visual style. Both of them mention nostalgia in their reviews but if you look back to the 16-bit consoles of yesteryear you will see alot of significant changes mainly the colour is super clear rather than the bold colours back then the environment also seems more detailed. I would say Fez is the image you get in your head when you think back to a game you loved when you were younger but when you see it again you realise you have tricked yourself. but what i would also say is that I would think even a non gamer would appreciate Fez for its own simplistic merit.

Scott Pilgrim Vs The World: The Game (2009)

IGN - Review

" an awesome design style gives an old school vibe without at all seeming outdated" Hilary Goldstein (2010)

Joystiq - Review

"Scot pilgrim is almost "hyper 8-bit" somehow managing to be insanely detailed and all within a pixelated reviews"

What I think...

Oddly the reviewers pretty much summed up my thoughts on Fez, which is strange because I would have said that scott pilgrim was more of a nostalgic trip as its more 8-bit than fez and it was built and made for the very reason of remembering the games of old. 

minecraft (2010)

Minecrafts a weird one mainly because none of the reviewing sites have mentioned the graphics atall focusing entirely on the gameplay which is odd ( however i do realise there are many review websites out there and i have just scratched the surface so there might be mention of it yet ) but I will update when I hear anymore on it.

What I think...

Minecraft is 3D made up of blocks each block has a pixel art texture however, I feel they are trying to be realistic in the sense that they have realistic colouring/shading which looses the character that the previous games have in droves.

This Gave me an idea of another 3D project I choose games through the decades from pong all the way up to games today making a 3D cube textured the same way blocks were made then.

Meeting with: Lynn Parker #3

Hello again,

Well it turns out my worries I had in the previous post were all in my head and im back to feeling like I am on track which is good.

So here is what we talked about,

• For 3D pixel art my UV textures have to be spot on so practice that. might start this next week as I feel I still have things 2D to do
• look into the indie game movie take note of things I find important to pixel art so mainly Phill fish and his motivations
• research into cubism and pointilism and try and recognize any similarities they have when compared to pixel art
• look into the area of aesthetics
• look into the area of nostalgia read reviews on games that use pixel art and discover where the game gets its merit from. 

What do i have planned for today then?

1. I want to do more low pixel stuff, so was planning on doing people from my course so shall do 3 or 4 today ( then I dont have to constantly draw sketches of characters that I make up dont want to use up all my ideas on media tests.
2. watch the indie game movie and take notes!
3. loook for books on cubism, pointilism and art theory
4. read reviews and take quotes of what the reviewer makes on the games graphic style.

David M

Personal Development Portfolio: Ctrl + W and some more work

Hello,

well I am panicking a bit, not really sure what I am doing seems like I have too much going about my head right now and being ill isnt helping.

however I have another meeting with lynn tomorrow so hoepfully can settle some nerves then.

anyways, the passed couple of days I have been working on some more pixel art stuff,

Started off with this picture, 

My plan was to have a short animated Gif wind blowing the hair etc but I somehow managed to press Ctrl W instead of E unknowingly to me that is a shortcut to close the window losing my hours worth of work and putting me back to the beginning so I decided to leave it for now and get back to it when I feel less drugged up in medicine.

however I did decide to start something fresh and came up with this guy,

the idol frame looks a bit odd right now but i shall get round to it tomorrow.

presentation: slides

Hello, sorry for the delay internet has been a bit funny thanks to the builders coming in to fix our kitchen roof.
anyways should be back to regular posts now so heres the presentation slides as promised.

Slide 1

Slide 2

Slide 3

Slide 4

Slide 5

Slide 6

Slide 7

Slide 8

Slide 9

Slide 10

Slide 11

Slide 12

Slide 13

Slide 14

So thats my presentation slides minus the accompanying notes that i have appeared to have misplaced somewhere.

David M