Bikini Girl Model Progress

For a fun side project I am doing with the current Torque3D beta I decided to take the Left 4 Dead concept and vary it a bit so that it involves Bikini clad girls on a tropical island who are being captured and taken away by sea monsters. Ya its real '50s goofiness, but its also something I figured would be a hell of a lot of fun :)

Here is an in-progress shot of one of the girls:



Click for Larger Version

More to come later...

My Top 5 iPhone / iTouch Games

I had a few moments so I thought that I would throw together a list of what my current 5 favorite iPhone / iTouch games are:

1. Oregon Trail

At the core of this game is the classic old educational Apple 2 game that we all had to play in school but Gameloft has done a serious facelift to the graphics and gameplay to make it more enjoyable. There are new resources mini-games (berry picking, fishing, telegram puzzle, hunting and panning for gold) that allow you to earn food, money and/or supplies the ability to choose a branching path to follow on the trail to Oregon and more. Its definately fun and a great bit of nostolgia, though I found at the end of my games I just skip all the mini-game options because I realize I do not need to do them all.

2. Kachinko

At the heart of this game is your typical match-3 puzzle game, but its been combined with a challenging Packhinko (or Plinko) like game aspect. Balls are randomly released fromt he top of the screen and will go through a varity of pegs and physics obstacles on its way to the bottom. Your job is to move the slots at the bottom of the screen to collect the balls in match-3 style gameplay. The game is only over if there are no more balls to be dropped or if one of your slots overflows, making Kachinko one of those perfect iPhone/iTouch games for a timekill while on the road or waiting for something, short, sweet and to the point!

3. Shift

Physics is combined with the accelerometer of the device to allow you to tilt the device in a direction to have various blocks or obstacles move in that linear direction. The goal of the game is to navigate your pieces through the puzzles that have been setup and there is a personal challenge to try to achieve this in a set number of moves. I like this game but there are some challenging levels that makes me have to put it down and come back later to it, but once again another one of those perfect iPhone games that last the right amount of time.

4. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Oddly enough this is one of those few ports of a PC or Console game that is actually very much like the main game. The game is more of a static platformer that requires the user to draw various patterns or symbols on the screen to utilize their lightsaber or powers. Beautifully done in 3D with a lot of prebaked bitmaps to sell the environment the only thing that prevents this game from being my #1 is that I find the iPhone and iTouch are devices you play games on for only a few minutes at a time, as such I have found it very easy to forget the patterns or symbols that I need to draw in order to succeed.

5. Vay

Vay is a port of an old Sega CD RPG game that is very reminiscent of a NES or DS Final Fantasy title. Vay can be a lot of fun, its probably one of the few RPGs I have found for the iPhone that doesn't resort come off as a lame Diablo clone and instead resorts to a clearn and classic look and feel towards its gameplay and presentation which I really appreciate (and wish they made more RPGs like this). If there is one complaint that I have, and it keeps the game at the bottom of my top 5, its that I found it pretty easy to forget which quests I was on adn where I was to go since like I said the device is more suited to 5 to 15 minutes of gameplay at a time than long spurts that a involved game like Vay requires. But still I have liked it.

Art Concept Books

Lately I have been trying to draw more in my spare time, as such I have been trying to recoup my collection of drawing tools from Faber brush-pens, to PrimsmaColor markers, various pencils, Staples Optipoint Pens (an awesome gel pen that I have found great for random doodles and sketches since the ink flows really well and best of all the pens are dirt cheap) and lastly oil painting supplies. While visiting these stores I have manged to stumble upon some really cool book that cover some really need art-theory (as well have really cool pictures).

Mechanika: Creating the Art of Science Fiction with Doug Chiang
Doug Chaing is a really amazing concept artist who has done incredible work for various films and computer games and this book shows various concepts he independently designed and the workflow and techniques that he used to create them.




Drawing And Painting Fantasy Landscapes And Cityscapes
A cool concept book I found that has various samples and techniques for landscape and architecture.







50 Fantasy Vehicles To Draw & Paint: Create Awe-inspiring Crafts For Comics, Computer Games, And Graphic Novels
Another book of techniques and great samples that show some great design logic for creating various vehicles from pure mechanical sci-fi, to organic and of course a mixed bio-tech design too.

Kachiko for the iPhone & iTouch

Late last week we officially released Kachinko: our Pachink inspired, match-3, puzzle game onto the Apple AppStore for the iPhone and iTouch devices. Here is a short video that I did of the game being played:


iKachinko - Kachinko for the iPhone, Live Demonstration from mgtgames on Vimeo.

Do you part and buy Kachinko today. Trust me it's an awesome game (and I am not just saying that because its a game I helped make).

50s Monster Movie Creature

A while back on the GarageGames site I had posted a link to a small artist challenge to create a 50s inspired Monster or Scifi movie creature. The idea of the challenge was just to have some fun and see what people could come up with with a set of guidelines.



Click Here for Larger Version

My goal was to create a Creature from the Black Lagoon type monster combined with a few aspect of 'Ymir' from the movie 20 Millin Miles to Earth.




I spent a couple of evenings just doing research with Google Images, a copy of the incredibly awesome Dark Horse Comics version of the film (art by Art Adams), a pen and a pad of paper. Getting an idea for the shape and form and how the original Creature suit looked and pulling in elements of Ymir that I liked.



Next up I went into 3DS Max to create my 3D model for this creature. I kind of cheated here and repurposed one of my generic male models I created and did some quick modifications to get a generic form I could take into Mudbox 2009.



I probably dont need to display the work I did in Mudbox again (since its the first image that you see for this blog. But once I was done with Mudbox I exported the base data back out to 3DS Max (so I can make the character into something I can load into a game engine) and here is how it looks in Max with some viewport shaders.



You will have to forgive the blue normal map look of the model, I dont have a diffuse map ready for it yet (and there is no displacement map loaded to do the extra little modifications for the model).

More to come later...

It's Not Dollars But Your Personal Investment

Isn't it interesting in indie game development when you see someone complain about the prices of the tools that they need to purchase (such as the game engine, programming or art tools) you just know that these same people will spend more than that in a year on upgrading/purchasing a new computer, buying books and training, accessing the internet on a fast high speed connection, paying for web hosting to promote their game or to run a SVN server for their team and many other things.

No one said making a game is supposed to be cheap or easy, it's a challenge that requires an huge investment. An investment financially and an investment from yourself to spend countless hours working on a dream you have and put in more blood, sweat and tears than you think you could possibly ever have. As such the real question people should be asking is not "How much does it cost to make a game?" but "How much of myself can I put into this so that I suceed?", and the true answer to that is far more than you can possibly expect. But then that is why making games isn't easy or cheap, that's why you don't see every joe bloe with a computer making a game for their best friends to play. If it was easy the magic that went into making it to deliver an entertaining experiance would be lost to its players.

Working with Mudbox 2009

So I finally bit the bullet and purchased a high resolution DCC (Digital Content Creation) application. As you can tell by the title of this post I ended up going with Mudbox (instead of Zbrush) and the main reason for this is that I ended up liking the UI and controls as well as the painting tools of Mudbox more than Zbrush. Not that it really matters much though as both applications are capable of producing the same incredible level of work.

My first week with the application was mostly spent experimenting more with the different tools, goofing around and getting more familar with some sort of workflow that I could employ. I didn't produce anything worthy of showing off though until I stumbled upon this Vimeo demonstration of Mudbox:


Concept Sculpting in Mudbox 2009 Tutorial from Wayne Robson on Vimeo.

After watching Wayne Robson use the application and seeing his techniques he employed I felt pretty inspired to start fresh and try something new. So for the past few evenings when I had some free time (which isn't a lot with a toddler) I would load up Wayne's tutorial on one Monitor and Mudbox on the other and get to work. After a lot of pausing, playing and rewinding to review segments of the video over and over again I ended up with my own creation:

What I ended up with was a bit of an amphibious lizard guy. While I know its far from perfect I am pretty pleased with the fact that I was able to begin producing something worthy of showing off. So a big thanks goes out to Wayne Robson for creating such a cool and inspirational video.