Ben (2)

Blush has come a long way from its humble beginnings at TIGJam to the game we drop on you later this week. It’s been pretty interesting wrapping something beautiful around an entirely monochromatic and overly simplistic prototype and I thought I’d share some snapshots of the process.

This was what it looked like at TIGJam when it was called Squiddy. It was very functional and the stark contrast put emphasis on the flowing motion of the tentacles, which was essentially the heart of the prototype.

When we began tossing the idea around of making an official Blurt game out of it my instinct was to push the black and white aspect of the look. This was my first mock.

After looking at for a while we all became concerned that if we were to continue in this direction it might overly resemble Flow. So when we inevitably decided to use color, I threw out a bunch of ideas to see what would resonate with everyone else.*

You can see in the lower right hand corner of the image what the general idea of each concept was. I personally expanded upon idea 2 as I saw bioluminscence as exciting territory. I wanted the team to be into the idea of a glowy, bloomy, see-through squid so I hit that first.

Once I placed it into an environment that was also glowy and bloomy I think everyone was feeling it.

The timing on these last few bits was perfect, as our initial part of the 8 week phase (pre-production) was wrapping up. I had developed a vision for the game by this part of the project that I wanted to communicate to the rest of the team. This image was created not only to showcase what I though would be a viable environment, but also to serve a production list. Hence the numbers and the corresponding key to the right of the image.

At some point during a game play mechanic discussion we were tossing around the idea of different abilities that affected your movement through space. In my eternal love of visual effects I made an image showing off different ways we could enhance the character.* One of these was actually implemented (but has changed since it’s initial incarnation), one is used heavily, and one was implemented but not actually used for anything. The rest were scrapped, but that’s okay! It was a useful source of visual inspiration.

At this point the game was called Blush and the aesthetic was falling into place. I created this image one day out of screenshots we were preparing for OffWorld not too long ago. This is NOT the logo or the menu for the actual game, it was just an image I made so I could personally experiment with text and colors.

This is about as much as I can show you before I’m basically showing off screenshots…WHICH I’LL DO LATER THIS WEEK! For your own information, this game has come quite a long way since even that image…

More information in the following days!

*For all you professional artists out there…one of the best things you can is formally sharing what you do best…CREATING! Spill your brain into a form others can perceive! Your ideas aren’t useful while they’re floating around inside your skull. When you put a bunch of ideas in front of the people you work with (even if you feel they aren’t neccessarily good) you are expanding the creative potential of whatever you’re working on by providing tangible options for your team members. Besides, when you let others pick and choose from elements you’ve created, you’re still the artist yet other feel as if they have had some say! So spill it, chumps. All of it. For better or for worse.

When I first started working at Flashbang over a year ago I took a yellow notepad from the office in the hopes that it would be a valuable organizational tool. It certainly has been, and tonight I flipped the last page! So I threw it all together in a huge image for you to take a look at. I like the image because it commemorates a year of working and learning. I had to ink out a couple phone and miscellaneous account numbers and some pages have been compromised, but for the most part it’s intact. Keep your eyes peeled, there are some gems in there…

Year In Notes

It’s a BIG image (3.3M), so give it a minute to load. Enjoy!

Whenever I encounter something(s) that is visually compelling in a game I’m going to quickly talk about it and how it applies to the development of games here at Flashbang. I’m going to kick it off with the new Prince Of Persia on Xbox 360/PC.

Anyone who has seen the game either in screenshots or in motion know that it is extremely stylized. While I think they achieved something really cool, what really struck me was their use of plain old pretty traditional art, specifically on the title screen, menu screen, and in this promotional movie. If you look closely at the elements involved in both the menus and that movie, you’ll notice that they didn’t actually use any 3d models. Instead they used flat conceptual paintings in 3d space to communicate vivid and complex scenes like one does in storyboards, or in constructing environments for stage and traditional theater.

I think this is clever because they achieved beauty with 3d depth without taking the oodles of time it takes to create character models and animation. Not that there is anything at all wrong or uneffective about creating these kind of assets for your title and/or menu scenes, it’s just that the time it takes to do so isn’t appropriate for our self-imposed 8 week development cycle. With 3d assets you are creating the model itself, a texture, and possibly a rig and animations for it as well. With this technique you are just essentially just making textures and then applying more fundamental animations to them in real time. Bending, swaying, deforming, rotating…these are things that the objects in Prince Of Persia’s title and menu scenes appear to do. They also employed a neat post processing effect which overlays a texture over everything, and they also created a particle system which generates those mystical blue ashes. This exact particle system is common throughout the game, which introduces some aesthetic unity and tightens up the game as an aesthetic package. A delicious art package. For your brain mouth. :)

Hi! I’m Ben, and like I mentioned in the Jetpack Brontosaurus post, I’m the Art Director here at Flashbang. It’s my job to make sure that anyone involved with art is on the same page when it’s time to crack down on a project. I try to use open communication to ensure that everyone feels like they’re contributing artistically while maintaining a cohesive aesthetic. It’s a tough job, but I love it. Especially since I’m an artist first and foremost, and due to the nature of the small studio environment I still spend a lot of time doing production work. This could mean anything from concept art, 3d modeling, texturing, animation, or level design, to any of the other specialized disciplines that go hand in hand with game art.

My relevant backstory! I became a part of the team at the end of 2007 when work on Off-Road Velociraptor Safari had just begun. At the time, there was no full-time artists so I took the reigns. Adam was working as a contractor at the time, and he had already made a jeep and some raptors, so I basically worked around what he had already done and that’s where it all begun. If you want some more technical details on the production of OVRS, check out the dev-log I made on my personal site. It’s technical! But the point is that this was the game I used to not only learn Unity, but to embed myself in the Flashbang family.

I’d like to use the Blurst.com blog space mainly to share insight into the dark, dank, and moist art harvesting that goes on here everyday at Flashbang. I’m of the open source mentality, so if there’s something I can share that I think will be useful to someone else, you’ll see it here from me. And if there’s anything I think Blurst users NEED to see that is related to games, art, or game art…I’ll throw that down, too.

The most important thing about what we do here is that our development process is flexible and organic. If you see something you like or don’t like, let me know! I’ve always been surprised with the amount of useful feedback I’ve gotten throughout my years of doing art, and even more surprised with what you can apply to future projects. In any case, It’s important to me that I have an open dialogue with the people that play our games, so share your thoughts! I might shuffle you over to a team member with a more appropriate response to your feedback, but I still want to hear it!

xoxo

Hello! This is Ben, the Art Director at Flashbang Studios. I’m extremely happy to be writing this right now, as it means Jetpack Brontosaurus is ready for you to play, exploit, make tightly edited music videos from, lie about beating, or whatever it is you do with games you play. Whatever, it’s not my business.

But I actually wanted to talk a little about the product on a personal and artistic level, because both its origins and its creation were remarkable. Earlier in the year I was doodling on one of our many whiteboards (whiteboards are a fantastic creative device, by the way). We were still working on Off-Road Velociraptor Safari at the time, so I had Dinosaurs on the brain a little bit more than usual. I ended up drawing an ambiguous long necked dinosaur with large conical boosters on it’s back. I’m not sure why, all I remember is that I was thinking of old muscle cars, specifically the Neutrino’s flying car from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But my co-workers loved it! It was not something I had intended to do, I was really just drawing for fun/exercise. But that’s how it started. It’s an iconic example of our philosophy at work; sometimes things are just accidentally awesome. And accidentally awesome is our style of opportunity.

We ended up attaching the idea of an Appatosaurus that yearns to fly, and does so in his dreams with the aid of strange future machines. With this in mind, our main directive was to pursue a non-photo realistic, dream like aesthetic, and this is where a lot of the imagery of the game derives from. Art and Tech collaborated to create the post-processing effects you see in the game that not only distort the view of the playfield, but transitions between nightmare and dream states. Luckily for us, our programmers supported our ridiculous ideas like warriors. Setting up every single object in every scene was such a mess that there would have been a blood bath had they been any less cool. Because of a few other time consuming factors such as this, it ended up taking a little longer to wrap up than we hoped, but we ended up with a really interesting art piece of a product that taught us a lot about our development environment.

But it’s here now, so give it a try. I realize some of you have already played the Alpha we released earlier in the year. Since then we have tweaked the controls, tightened up the camera behavior, and added 3 worlds in addition to the one that was was playable.

Go! Explore the dream world! Eat succulent floating fruit!