WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA

Graduation project's going good. But here's what's also been happening.

A week ago we had a series of lectures related to XNA, in a big Microsoft-sponsored event. Most of it wasn't interesting. There was a guy named Rob Miles though, from the university of Hull. He was interesting.

He ended his lecture with a pop quiz with four questions we were already told the answers too, just for the heck of it. The winners of each question got an XNA-programming related book. Here's mine. I don't even program :I

Last thursday was the Festival of Games in Utrecht, so I visited the career expo, did some networking. Coolest of all, I ran into Tõru Iwatani, creater of Pac-Man, who was there to do a keynote at the conferences. This is his face.

I shook his hand, I got my picture taken with him, and he signed my pass.

I feel like a whore.

Concept art, backgrounds

Here's a mood drawing I did a while ago, it's meant to visualise a section of our game that we're finalising at the moment.

More importantly, here's some (nearly) finished backgrounds for our game. We're just now implementing them into the game.

Figure Drawing

Last tuesday I went figure drawing with a friend of mine. Haven't done that in about three years. Here's the result:

First, these were 3 minute poses done with pencils:

15 minute pose with pencils:

15 minute pose with quill:

15 minute pose with Pilot parallel pen:

And two 15 minute poses with ink wash:

Even MORE concept art and the first background

Here's some more concept art I made over the last two weeks.

And here's something special: our first in-game background! Not quite finished yet though.

Even more concept art

Here's two more works this week. Next week we're starting production on in-game assets!

More concept art

More concept art! Can't go into much details on these though, don't wanna spoil our story:


Impression of a factory:

Metaphorical rebirth scene:

Oh god my eyes:

In Memoriam, mood sketches

The last few weeks I've been making some mood sketches to try and visualise how our game might look. I'm gonna show you some of them this week:

This was quite an early one, done with a lot of images from google (hence the notes). It's mostly inspired by the works of Dave McKean, and it isn't that far off from my vision for the final game in terms of style actually. It is however far too dark for an ingame screen, and the abuse of advanced blending modes on the right is pretty obvious too.

Changing the lighting and coloring on our player character in real-time (like this environment would require) seems possible in our game, since we've recruited an XNA programmer to handle our coding. He's already been working on getting blending modes to work in XNA, and the results look promising.

This is a much lighter and desaturated work, inspired by the visuals of Machinarium and Silent Hill 2. The shapes and objects you see in this one are a combination of minimalistic brushwork and custom ink wash textures I prepared especially for this project. I like how this one worked out, but I may try and remove some of the more obvious dark speckles from the textures from now on.

Back to the way-too-dark environments, this mood sketch revolves around a scene which in itself revolves around a hospital bed. This one took a lot of messing around with layers and blending modes to get the right lighting effect. Our game probably won't use bloom-y lighting to this extent, I just found it fitting in this scene. The light is also a useful device for creating transitions from our game to live-action footage that will accompany our game. What live-action footage? Not telling you yet.

Sadly, this one has nothing to do with our game.

This post is dedicated to our project's first casualty:

IN MEMORIAM

OUR PLANT

Turns out it had been dead for weeks already, so we chucked it out last week.

Finally.