Paisley's Pixels II

There has been a huge bottleneck at the end of this term with deadlines, and the amount of hours we've all put in to pull it off, culminating in me spending two days in my pyjamas finishing my negotiated brief and then staying up late for another two days finalising both my animation technology presentation and our pitch project. Thrilling stuff.

Body_Diffuse

Lets do this chronologically. The negotiated brief all seemed to come together at the last minute with me finally figuring out how to make my sculpt work in Maya and then I cranked out all the textures in one day, amazingly. I took photos of my own skin, my chair material, and the material on my laptop bag to use as a resource to create the textures for Noel's face, arm, leg and overall.

Its always disturbing seeing a skin texture in its stretched and unwrapped form but here is Noel's. My work-flow started in Mudbox where I painted the texture quite roughly using photos I'd taken as stencils, this looked ok in the viewport but when I exported it to Photoshop it was a blotchy mess of collaged skin, so I took the Mudbox texture as a guide for where everything was laid out across the mesh and then re-painted it using the clone stamp tool in Photoshop, using each of the skin photos as a palette. This was a problem at first because of varying white balances and exposures in the photos so I did my best to balance them first so my texture looked cohesive.

Here's how it looked in Mudbox. I tweaked it several times to try and avoid the burnt bacon look I seemed to be achieving I also used the displacement maps to add some of the wrinkle detail into the textures themselves which always help avoid that flat look you can get in a render with lots of ambient light.

I loved adding the details like the straggly hairs on Noel's otherwise bald scalp, its how I hide my woeful understanding of proportion- by layering little details that complete the character.

Note the detail picked up in the displacement by the specular highlight along the top of Noel's head

I absolutely love this next render, it makes him look like a milky eyed wise man with a wizened face that has more stories than wrinkles.

What's that gelatinous protrusion from underneath your beard Noel? Maya fur f*ck up again?

I actually managed to attach the separate displacement nodes to individual surface shaders that all fed back into an ambient occlusion shader and achieved the following- and as ever the the model's tiniest details are revealed in glorious monochrome. I'd like to do another turn around (that's right there's a turn around coming) with an ambient occlusion render and a mental ray contour pass for the actual wireframe mesh. It'll have to wait or now. I set a shader override for the fur so it was grey at the base and white at the tip, so I'm pretty sure it's not part of the AO but just fits due to the natural gradient of grey to white as it hangs farther from its point of origin on the skin.

Shiny bounce lighting.

The arm is actually a reeeeeeally overly simple base mesh with fingers (badly) sculpted on top, but the illusion of a clenched fist would've required rigging otherwise so this was the most viable compromise I could think of, and the final look is quite nice with textures. When it comes to making a fully functional rig this will have to re-done.





I spent a little while tweaking the shader for the 'glove' and 'sock' parts of his overall but never quite achieved the look I had originally designed so that's something I'll need to re-think going forward. This near to final render wasn't what I was going for at all but by changing the colour of the refraction, reflection and diffuse to different hues created this semi-iridescent effect making it shimmer like some kind of jewellery.

Noel & his overly shiny sock/glove

I've recounted this epic tale more times than is socially acceptable but it was rather stressful and frustrating. It took Nelson (my PC), my laptop, and 6 studio computers to render out half of Noel's turn around. When you've got light bouncing from object to object, and its being taken into consideration of the light scattering through the skin, rendering can get a little complex. Oh, and there are thousands of hairs hanging off his face all bouncing light around too. Shiny, I know. So after having it rendering at home overnight I worked out it wasn't nearly enough and made my way into uni for 10am to set the studio PC's going too. At 3:30pm I took what I had and caught the bus home after waiting at the bus stop for 30 minutes, I ran and everything! I then put it all together and handed it in with 2 minutes to spare, not a complete turn around but more or less, and I was pleased with it. So here is the final thing with missing frames added:




I'll save the other projects for another post. This one's too long already.

Pixel Propaganda

One thing I didn't get quite right was Noel's eyes, too much sparkly bump mapping and incorrect cornea shapes. Georg linked me this handy illustration of correct eye anatomy and how to go about recreating it, tear ducts and all.

When E3 was full of gratuitous amounts of everything I think it was fitting that most interesting thing I saw all show was this simple interview with Irrational Games' creative director Ken Levine. He talks about relationships, specifically within- but not limited to, Bioshock Infinite.

More BioShock Infinite Videos

Paisley's Pixels

Some advice: stock up on warm clothes and canned food, this post is looooooooooong...

Mudbox: Screwing up hard work on a computer near you.

I've finally finished exporting my sculpt from Mudbox, which has been a complete pain, because while I finished the sculpt a day or so ago the displacement maps have been playing up in Maya. So for myself and anyone else trying this I'm going to make some bullet points so I don't spend ages experimenting next time I have to do this.

Displacement maps do work, but only if you ask really nicely

• You can export using both subdivision and raycasting methods, subdivision is faster but limited to one object, raycasting uses more memory and is less stable and has more settings: so more room for error
• There are options to smooth target and source meshes and smooth UVs. These are all necessary for a correct displacement apparently, otherwise the maps exports with un-smoothed values.
• Stick with floating point EXR's, any 32bit format should work but this one ensures compatability and quality.
• Make sure you export the base level meshes from your sculpt back into Maya as they probably changed significantly from the meshes you started with.
• When you connect the displacement map to the displacement node of the shading group make sure you then go to that objects displacement attribute and click calculate bounding box so it can figure out how much displacement is going to take place.
• If you're doing this with a mental ray shader you make have some errors so do it with a lambert or something, and then when the bounding box is calculated you can apply the mental ray shader back to the object.
• Sometimes subdividing the base mesh with the displacement on top improves the appearance of the tessellation.

Yes, he even has hair. Yes its shiny as f*ck

I have literally been sat in my room in my pyjamas for two days finishing the sculpt and trying to figure this crap out and, while not healthy, I actually feel like it might all be finished in time for the deadline, and to a much higher standard than I hoped for halfway through this project. It's probably not going to be as perfect as I initially imagined, but its encouragingly close. All that's left to do is paint textures which, apart from the face, should be fairly quick.

Noel Paisley Ladies & Gentlemen

Gauntlet close up

Sock (couldn't think of an epic equivalent) close up

Ignore the tip of his beard geometry protruding from under the hair, I haven't yet figured out how to cover it in hair.

Did I get a bit render happy? Yes but I that it is both justified and well earned.

When sculpting was too much I sheltered within the familiar confines of Photoshop and tried to get something presentable in terms of concept art for the pitch project. Teaser:

Thomas Farriner Makes His Escape

Amazing what blending modes and a couple of textures can hide ;)

The Animated Analysis that tanked in terms of marks (though not as much as my dissertation proposal) but which I'm quite proud of (though not so much now I'm told its not worth an academic damn).

Analysis of an Animated Work:

Immersion & Emergent Storytelling in Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft, 2008)

Most people would classify Far Cry 2 as part of the open world, first person shooter genre (FPS). This is a rare hybridisation, so uncommon in fact that the sub-genre of the 'corridor shooter' has become ubiquitous when describing most FPS games, as many of these games take place in environments where the player is funnelled down a series of corridors in a restrictively linear fashion; both in terms of narrative structure and level design. This is perhaps where Far Cry 2 innovates the most but also where it stumbles, most likely due to the massive scope of the game world that is being represented in game for the player.

Immersion can often share a close relationship with the technology of a game. When the player needs to be sold on the illusion the game is offering in order for them to suspend their disbelief, their sensory connection to the game is one of the most important elements. Hence the emphasis on graphical fidelity, sound design, and the perpetual existence of the game world that Murray hints at in her writing on immersion (Murray , 1999: 105). There are a number of ways that Far Cry 2 strives to maintain perpetual existence of its world that work to enhance player immersion.

There are no loading screens, no pauses while the player is forced to wait, in an open world game this a difficult but necessary technological achievement. Jesper Juul talks about the way a game has fictional time and a play time where time in the game world is fictional time, whilst play time is time as the player experiences it. He gives the example of the loading screens in Half Life maintaining fictional time by pausing to stream data, but disrupting play time (Juul, 2005: 143). Far Cry 2's lack of load screens (except for when the player boots the game before playing) allows the fictional time and play time to remain in sync. In this way suspension of disbelief can be sustained, and the player is immersed for longer stretches of time.

Far Cry 2 uses a safe house system where the player can 'save' their game by sleeping on a camp bed. Save games in Far Cry 2 allow the player to rest his character for a chosen amount of time using a watch on the character's wrist, this is the only example of fictional time breaking away from play time and it is portrayed by a time lapse of the world outside the safe house. As the sun lowers in the sky the weather changes, non-player characters (NPC's) whiz around, and the player is shown how the game world is in perpetual existence. It continues to exist without him or her, which creates a believability in the procedural nature of the game world and it's various systems.

The animation system in Far Cry 2 plays a big part in the player's immersion, the game shuns the use of the cut scene, a technique ripped straight from the frames of its moving image sibling, film. Instead the player is fixed to the first person perspective of their character continuously . This means that every action the player performs is done using their own digital hands, without the use of an obtrusive user interface or heads-up-display. For example Far Cry 2 allows the player to navigate its 50km open world (an unnamed African country in the middle of civil war) using a map, which the player carries in the hand and can examine at any time. When the player finds a vehicle, they enter it without leaving the first person perspective, with animations provided for every action. The same goes for firing, reloading, and unjamming weapons, repairing vehicles or swimming.

Far Cry 2 also has a unique approach to first aid. While it borrows the rather tired convention of the health pack to heal a players wounds, when the player is critically wounded, they must retreat from battle and tend to their ailment. This cues a brief animation of the player reaching down and say, pulling some shrapnel from a leg, or fixing a dislocated knee joint. This insistence on a first person perspective, perpetual world existence, and 1:1 fictional and play time all follow an uncompromising design ethos that match the brutal nature of the games themes of idealism and greed. In this way Far Cry 2 forms a communication between designer and player though its mechanics of play, a design methodology that is described in Extra Lives and advocated by independent developer Jonathan Blow (Bissell, 2010: 93)

This unrelenting immersion can occasionally hurt the player's experience, while games have evolved beyond placing 'fun' as their only purpose, this does not mean a player is going to relish the frustration of having a game's systems punish him/her time and again. Whilst getting to a mission objective on the map, the player can begin to resent the systems that embedded them so firmly in the game world when they have to run for miles in real time, only to be gunned down in the chaos of the enemy AI and fire propagation system.

While these systems can work against the player's enjoyment of the game at times, they are what create the potential for the player-centric emergent narrative that Henry Jenkins discusses in his Narrative Architecture essay (Jenkins, 2004) and truly explore the medium's narrative potential. This approach to meaningful story relies on the 'buddy system', the characters that the player meets can rescue the player when they are failing in combat, in this way the immersion of the player is saved from being broken by a fail state or load screen after death. While the missions remain fixed, the certain elements are interchangeable, and players can make choices that allow the narrative to branch. In this way Murray's “procedural authorship” (Murray, 1999) is at last put to use as elements of the story are directed by the author's hand (the buddies) and the player takes those elements and assembles them through choices and gameplay, forging a personal and unique emergent narrative. This was taken even further by one critic who documented a 'perma-death' (a self enforced rule where once the player dies, the game is over) play through of the game and annotated the screen shots he took with anecdotes of his own emergent experiences (Abraham, 2009). This is one example of the best that Far Cry 2 can be, and a logical extension of its uncompromising nature.

Bibliography

Murray, Janet (1999) Hamlet On The Holodeck The MIT Press

Juul, Jesper (2005) Half Real The MIT Press

Jenkins, Henry (2004) 'Game Design as Narrative Architecture' in: First Person: New Media Story, Performance and Game The MIT Press

Bissell, Tom (2010) Extra Lives Pantheon Books

Websites

Abraham, Ben (2009) Permanent Death - The Complete Saga http://drgamelove.blogspot.com/search/label/Permanent%20Death 27^th April, 2011

Games

Far Cry 2 (2008) Developed by Ubisoft Montreal [Sony Playstation 3], Ubisoft

 Pixel Propaganda

Not the must cutting edge article on story in games, but its still intriguing to ascertain the state of narrative among developers. There are two other parts also so worth reading if this piques you interest.

A wonderfully written review of LA Noire that interprets the games world and characters in a wholly original manner.

Why sometimes I should learn to shut up about my passions and obsessions, and why not shutting is up is so important.

Pixel Prose IV

Look at the beautiful sparkle in his eye...

Applying the displacement map of the sculpt to the shader.

Noel is now into phase two of the negotiated brief and I've begun sculpting him in Mudbox. The transition wasn't as smooth as planned with re-scaling, normal reversing, UV unwrapping, and OBJ exporting all necessary steps to undertake before any sculpting can begin. Note to anyone attempting a similar thing: don't bother with Autodesk's cross software format of choice FBX, its a pile of crap that doesn't work properly with Mudbox's brushes, stick with OBJs.

For those not in the know, a displacement map is a texture that physically deforms the original model according to the light and dark values of the texture, this texture is generated by a sculpt you make in a piece of software like Mudbox of Zbrush. This means you can view the low poly model in the viewport but at render time a giant texture's worth of detail is tessellated at render time.

Ok that's slightly misleading. What actually happened when I applied the displacement map to the model was this:

Nice one Mudbox, how would you like it if I did that to your face?

Maya can actually handle a pretty epic amount of polygons in the viewport if you're lucky to have a half way decent graphics card. So this series of renders above this one are 2,830,320 polygons, rendered straight out of Maya. 

Unfortunately with my Wacom out of action I've been switching between dodgy tablets from the media desk, a faulty bamboo or a malfunctioning Intuos 4 when I'm in the studio. But I'm getting used to it, this is what the sculpt looks like in mudbox, I'm really trying to push the crumpled paper style wrinkles of age, so they show up nicely in the render, because some detail is bound to get lost as light is scattered through the head by the SSS shader.

Soulful Noel

I've tried to strike a balance between mirroring my brush strokes to save time, and sculpting asymmetrically to create a more organic looking character.

Pitted and Creased

Meanwhile we have a pitch rehearsal coming up, not as soon as I first thought thankfully. Hopefully I can get the concept pieces done in time and we can get a solid run through so that on the day we can break out the charm and enthusiasm. Seems like we're ditching out more ambitious gimmick which I loved as it involved the audience and therefore the pitch was unique in the same way our product was: it would be interactive. But five minutes isn't adequate time for this so we'll have to revise our strategy and either come up with something new or hope we can put together a very slick presentation.

Baker's Escape

The fourth and final literature review, from Tom Bissell excellent book Extra Lives.

Literature Review IV

Chapter 6: Braided

From Extra Lives

(2010, Pantheon Books)

This chapter features extracts of an interview within prominent independent game designer Jonathan Blow. Using Blow's words, Bissell works to construct an argument for games as an art form on its own terms.

Bissell explores the possibility of a fundamental conflict between narrative and game structure, “Games are about challenge, which frustrates the passing of time and impedes narrative progression.” (Bissell, 2010: 93) While this is a good observation about generic game design, it doesn't include the wider definitions of narrative that both Jesper Jull and Henry Jenkins have acknowledged, it very much refers to the fixed narrative as seen in the film or novel that different genres appear to draw from so much with limited success.

Then Blow raises the question of whether the art or expression in games should really be coming from the storytelling at all when other mediums may incorporate narrative but “the real art is happening else where” (2010: 94). Here the author gives the excellent example of opera, where story takes a back seat to musical performance. Later in the chapter Bissell gives us a hint as to one of the ways games serve as an expression between designer and player “Like a poem, a great platformer does not disguise the fact that it is designed” (2010: 97) but it is through a game's difficulty that Blow chooses to use as one of his methods of communication with the player: “It's difficulty is interesting because it is not arbitrarily difficult. It is meaningfully difficult, because, again, it forces you to think about what subverting time really means and does” (2010: 101). Through this back and forth between designer and author, the successes and failures of, Jonathan Blow's game Braid (2008), can be very directly evaluated, though in a mostly subjective manner.

Bissell acknowledges that Blow relates “the videogame's umbilical attachment to story to the influence of film” (2010: 94). When a medium draws so heavily from its predecessor of moving image, perhaps developers find it hard to escape this heritage, when dealing with subjects that are more representations of reality than abstractions of it. Perhaps Bissell could explore this rift between the failures of representational games and the successes of abstract games, and relating it to Juul's writing on abstraction in games.

Games often have very defined gameplay conventions, and the author does well to recognise these whilst identifying the fact that there is a difference between what some critics might refer to as a genre when it is in fact a movement, the movement in question being the 'art game' movement, whose ethos- Bissell infers, primarily follows ludologist design ideals- “They work off a few basic assumptions: games have rules, rules have meaning, and gameplay is the process by which those rules are tested and explored.” (2010: 96) Drawing parallels between artistic movements is something that few authors have done when discussing games. Relating them to established movements in other media, I feel, is a good decision that creates context for the evolution of games and fosters a better understanding of their current state of progression. “Naturalism is not the pinnacle but rather a stage of representation. With Braid, a considered impressionistic subversion of 'reality' has at last arrived” (2010: 99-100).

Overall Bissell's writing is little light on videogame terminology and theory, he makes up for this with his knowledge of literature, fine art, and film theory when discussing the topics raised throughout the chapter. While the subjects are wide ranging, they revolve around the central critique of Braid in order to cohesively hang together, and appear to fit the style of experiential game criticism well.

Pixel Propaganda 

Not much to share this week, I still want to write about LA Noire but with these literature reviews I'm aware the blog posts are verbose enough as it is.

Luckily there are a number of good pieces of LA Noire based criticism to fill that gap for me, the first of which is a hypothetical look at the gameplay enhancements a sequel could make. The second takes a critical look at the breakdown between Cole Phelps, the player, and intentionality.

Pixel Prose III

I am absolutely loving this pitch project at the moment, I know the moment we have to set foot in front of an audience I won't be so thrilled but right now the limitless possibilities of creating an idea without technological, financial or temporal constraints is so massively liberating that I'm enjoying the pure creativity of it all.

So the brief is to pitch an idea for an animated/film/TV series/game to our peers and some industry practitioners, the focus being to hone our pitching skills and communicate our ideas in a concise and engaging manner, whilst allowing our enthusiasm to shine through. Me, Hugh and Dan have teamed up again for, I think, the first time since the WHAT! project at the end of the first year, seems to be an annual thing.



A quick overview of our idea:
Its a videogame, released episodically, telling the intertwining tales of 6 characters during the great fire of London in 1666. As the player takes on the role of each character playing through adventure and action moments set in the open world of 17th century London- their actions and choices effect the other characters in subsequent episodes. In this way the player crafts a unique path through the story that will adapt and shift in profound ways. That's the basic gist of it I'll go into much, much more detail when I have more to show because this idea has me really excited and some of the stuff we've come up with would take a bit of explaining.

Essentially I have got very caught up in the idea itself whilst perhaps neglecting the actual pitching side of things. I would give a summary of our pitch plan but I don't want to spoil any surprises because with my fantastic public speaking skills we're going to need the element of surprise on our side, along with some luck and a completely epic concept to pitch. We've made a habit of getting our inspiration out and about, jotting things down in our notebooks over a meal in Falmouth town, one such pitch meeting was held over a full English breakfast followed by pancakes, nothing empowers unbridled creativity like bananas and caramel!

Initial beard, no eyes.

Meanwhile the negotiated brief continues to frustrate me. I had made progress, and then that progress was unsatisfactory, so I regressed and made a second attempt at Noel's body which now looks passable in it's primitive state. I had some problems with the skin shader when I added mental ray's physical sun & sky, when the highlights blew out instead of going white they hit a kind of grey peak. After a quick Google search I found this is easily resolved by un-checking the screen composite option in the shader settings. Must be something to do with the way it compiles the different layers of scattering at render time.

Correct shader for Sun & Sky

This next render was a fantastic glitch that I think occurred due to final gather funnelling unholy amounts of light through the out glassy part of Noel's newly modelled eyeballs. Fantastic effect as the excess light scatters outwards from the eyes, looks like a wizard. 

Final Gather render glitch of the gods

I looked at some anatomy reference, a couple of online tutorials, and talked to Dan about the eyes briefly and they now comprise of an inner sub surface scattering sphere with an iris indentation and then a further indentation for the pupil. This is encased in a second, highly reflective sphere that simulates the tight specular of the eyes white sclera.

New eyes, no textures for iris or pupils yet

 Now I've moved on to the body with little success, on the right is the discarded model (just in case the new ones even worse) and the new mesh which is more accurate to the original design, but as the design was drawn from a 3/4 angle that's probably not a good thing. Still, hopefully it'll look less like a wetsuit with some textures and a sculpt full of creases and folds.

Looks like a wetsuit, sigh...

More writing? why the hell not. I actually got good marks for this one, unlike my animation analysis piece which bombed...I'm not bitter...

 

Literature Review III

Henry Jenkins'

Game Design as Narrative Architecture From First Person

(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.)

Henry Jenkins' essay alludes to some of the comparisons he draws between game narrative and spacial design even in the title, using the phrase narrative architecture. In this way he lays the foundations for his exploration of the ways storytelling in videogames differs, as well as borrows from, other narrative based media with a particular focus on, but not limited to, film.

The author begins by creating context for his argument, listing a series of quotes from his contemporaries in videogame theory, criticism, and design. He specifically draws from the opinions of a group who believe that games should be studied solely by their mechanics and systems, the procedural and interactive attributes that separate them from other media. They are labelled ludologists, a term coined by Ernest Adams. He stresses the importance of his neutrality between this group and the narratologists and takes the time to establish common ground with “some points where we might all agree” (Jenkins, 2002: 119). Here Jenkins makes the first of his many references to different media theories, though I feel he doesn't make these connections as explicit to the reader as he could have. “I understand what these writers are arguing against- various attempts to map traditional narrative structures […] onto games at the expense of an attention to their specificity as an emerging form of entertainment.” (2002: 118) This passage seems to make reference to the concept of medium specificity, and how it appears many critics and theorists under the ludologist label feel that this aspect of videogame study is being neglected in favour of outdated or irrelevant media or hypertext theory.

In order to encompass Jenkins' proposed methods of “spacial stories and environmental storytelling” (2002: 121) he attempts to expand the definition of narrative beyond a series of plot based events and into a broader understanding of story that uses theorist Kristen Thompson's work as a basis for this expansion: “Russian formalist critics make a useful distinction between plot (or Syuzhet) […] and story (or Fabula) which refers to the viewer's mental construction of the chronology of those events.” (2002: 126) This leads him smoothly into his explanations of techniques for storytelling in videogames that range from weaving the storytelling into the environment, to placing items that players can extract story from in a detective like manner. These two techniques are missed opportunities where Jenkins could be analysing the use of mis-en-scene to enhance atmosphere.

One point of contention that resurfaces a number of times throughout the essay is the conflict between player intent and authorial intent. “Game critics often note that the player's participation poses a potential threat to the narrative construction” (2002: 125). One interesting style of narrative Jenkins' appraises is emergent narrative, the story that the player crafts as they play. For example in The Sims (Maxis, 2000), Jenkins cites Murray's prognostications of “procedural authorship” (2002: 129) as allowing this most malleable form of narrative to be somewhat controlled, but ultimately providing no more than the foundations for the player's narrative architecture. Not only does this immerse the player in the story, it provides them with a great feeling of agency as they execute the story just as they imagine it. Jenkins could afford to better stress how neatly this side steps the conflicting needs of authorial intent and player freedom and agency, but otherwise he explores this avenue of narrative well, throughout the essay he finds a middle ground on which make his stand for narrative gaming which is, while broad, convincing and well reasoned.

Pixel Propaganda

This film came out of Siggraph 2010 I think, but it was only last week they finally released the full film online after its festival tour. Apparently they have been receiving job offers left right and centre after this film was released but declined all in favour of starting their own company of the back of this new found interest from the industry. Another example of the importance of our third year films I suppose. Its so gorgeous, uses some node based dynamics called ICE in Softimage I believe but I have no idea, I just read some stuff about it.



Loom from Polynoid on Vimeo.

Whilst getting Noel's skin shader just right I kept coming across this fantastic tutorial on mental ray's 'simple skin shader' in Maya, its a great in-depth look at setting up the shader's many parameters but written in very comprehensible language. Also L.A Noire came out this week, but I'll save that for another post.

Pixel Prose II

Depth of Field, rendered in camera...just because I can

After what felt like a slow first week, followed by FMX, it feels like the term is only just getting started, but in fact we're swiftly approaching June and its accompanying deadlines. The Last Trophy has now been handed in by the third years in its most advanced state of completion yet, I'm hoping work will continue on it as their team are so far in and what is finished is very pretty.

Cinematic

Spot the odd texture, actually the whole gun is missing a texture...

Some of the jungle scenes were getting so heavy towards the end that Nelson was struggling to render them out at all making lighting somewhat problematic, the RAM would fill half way and then Maya would crash. There was only so much I could light, though there seamed to be lots of animation reaching a polished stage, every shot had a missing texture, a floating prop, eyes that gazed into the back of the character's head. A quick once-over these shots and they'd be ready to go. Here's a clip I lit and composited, I also worked on the shaders on the blimp:







The negotiated brief seems to have caught up with me to the extent that even my new scaled down brief feels overly ambitious, so I aimed to have the head done by last Thursday, it wasn't. The tutorial was very helpful though, I went over the character design and what I'd done so far with Georg and we figured out what was accurate and what I needed to do to more faithfully re-create my design in three dimensions.

Mmmmm, waxy sub surface scattering.

I know, its hideous. My hands aren't the most obedient of tools

Since then I've made tweaks to the jaw, cheeks, nose (I will never stop changing his nostrils) and I've added ears. Its still in a symmetrical stage but it shouldn't take long to add some of the asymmetrical quirks to give the face some personality, and match Noel to his 2D counterpart. I made this basic clay sculpture to get a feel for the proportions of the skull and prominent facial features, it was a useful exercise for sure, but nothing I can use for reference.

Its time to move on whether I want to or not for the sake of reaching the production milestones I wrote down hastily a week ago. I think it will be very hard to get a convincing likeness without the beard and eyebrows, these details (the beard especially) make an important part of the character's silhouette so it should come together when I add these things. This is Noel's current visage:

Click for sweet, sweet HD largeness.

Looking at this now I've just realised his eyes aren't nearly close enough together...

Now I know you're thinking the ratio of images to words in this blog post is way off, so here is my second literature review.

A Literature Review of Chapter 4: Fiction

From Jesper Juul's Half Real. (2005, The MIT Press)

The entire premise of Juul's book is on the liminal state of the videogame and the way in which it straddles the border between perceived and imagined realities. In the fourth chapter he goes into greater depth about the fictions that games create, how they work (or don't work) with the game's mechanics, and whether games can even be narratives at all. He derives his definition of fiction from analytical philosophy lending his words greater context.

He starts by stating that the player is largely responsible for imagining the fictional world themselves. I feel this has become less true as videogame technology has developed in recent years leaving less space for interpretation of the visual representations on screen, though just as much for concepts and systems within the world, because as Juul points out: “All fictional worlds are incomplete” (Juul, 2005: 122). Videogames are unique in the way they they demand player skill in order to progress, and Juul hypothesises that this is what leads to rumour and speculation as to unseen fictional elements among players, which expands the fiction in itself in ways the designer can't possible control or predict.

One thing Juul does really well is identify different ways in which fiction is represented in videogames, he makes good use of bullet pointed lists in between lengthy explanations in order to clarify and emphasize the key aspects of his argument. His terminology for the different variants of fiction in videogames are logical and work well to summarise their unique properties. The most prevalent appears to be the “incoherent world” (2005: 132) which appears in videogames that use popular conventions like extra lives and levels, but then also attempt to wrap the gameplay in a fictional premise. This premise can be explained to another, but not without explaining the game rules too.

According to Juul videogames can be further distinguished at a lower level, “from abstract and representational” (2005: 130), though he does not state that the same videogame could potentially be either, depending on its fictional sophistication. Tetris, he says, is an abstract game, bearing no relation to any fiction to explain the mechanics. But Brenda Brathwaite's Train is a re-working of Tetris in non digital form and with a coherent fictional world that puts the gameplay in the context of a Nazi general, attempting pack train carriages as efficiently as possible. This fiction gives the game a dark theme that often alters the way players approach the game once they understand the context in which they are playing.

Brenda Brathwaite's Train

There are many ways of expanding the fiction for the player and Juul makes good use of his listing again giving a comprehensive look at different methods to do this. He makes a point about the non-interactive nature of cut-scenes that borrow conventions almost entirely from film, and makes no attempt to hide his less-than-glowing opinion of them. This leads Juul into a section on the correlation between fictional time and play time, where some videogames break the link in order to serve gameplay (speeding up time in The Sims (Maxis, 2000)) while others try very hard to preserve it (pauses while loading in Half Life (Valve, 1998) or the lack of any pause button at all in Demon Souls (From Software, 2009).

While Juul poses an argument against the value of narrative in games, stating that tragedy is perhaps the hardest to portray, he does say that the “emphasis on fictional worlds worlds may be the strongest innovation of the videogame.” (2005: 162)

 Pixel Propaganda

Here Frictional Game's (Penumbra, Amnesia: The Dark Descent) designer Thomas Grip talks about the space between author and audience where imagination and interpretation takes place. It's a speculative look at where game's should make that space and how they can use it to create more personal experiences.

I found this guy through a game that I found on a website that was linked to a publication that was discussed on a blog that I found on a weekly round up of the weeks best videogame blogging. Its like a nerdy paper trail. This talk as a brilliant insight into the potential of games as research, pushing the boundaries of what a player will tolerate, derive meaning from, or enjoy. One of their experiments in particular is an interesting experiment into how little gameplay a player needs to still enjoy a game, I recommend anyone with a copy of half life 2 tries it out for free (you need that version of the source SDK as its a mod).

GLS #5: Doing Development-Led Research in Games from itucph on Vimeo.