The Master Sword
For the past few weeks, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword had me doing things that no other video game has. It had me standing for 90% of a 45+ hour adventure because it was more compelling than sitting down. It taught me how to read my enemies’ behaviors, and to reconsider the meaningfulness of my sword (which, in terms of combat and puzzle-solving effectiveness, doesn’t change in a significant way throughout the majority of the game) more often than occasionally reminding me about all the other classic Zelda tools also at my disposal. By the end, it had me convinced that I was a significantly better swordsman than when I first gripped the blade referenced in its subtitle.
Every new idea requires a good explanation, but many of Skyward Sword’s best got away without needing any. Without hand-holding exposition nor repetitive tutorials, the newest execution of the series draws attention to how its design sensibilities were subtle enough to have more than one user in mind. Though by contrast, they also draw attention to every moment that thought otherwise, leaning on a tradition of variety when it least needed to. As I watch the first Zelda in half a decade struggling to soar to the top of most critics’ 2011 Game of the Year lists, deep down inside I think I know why.
Free Fall
”They dive brashly off the decks of their aerial island, only to be swooped up by their soulbound, gigantic bird mounts mid-plummet. Every time I did this (and boy, did I do it a lot), I fell a little more in love with the conceit. It’s one part Evil Knievel and one part office retreat trust falls, a combination which is equally delightful the first and hundredth times you execute it.” -Griffin McElroy
World of Vintage Postercraft
If you want broccoli on your pizza, I don’t care. If you’re looking for the person who made those vintage World of Warcraft posters PC Gamer published, you’ve come to the right place.
After spending an afternoon searching for instances of them being shared since PC Gamer’s online-reissuing (originally found in their August 2011 magazine), I was surprised to discover that a fair amount of people are actually interested in the posters, across a number of networks around the internet (Twitter, Tumblr, general blogs, etc.). And while I have no idea who Eric Hawkins is, stuff like this–and especially stuff like this–helps me believe that there’s some truth to what observations I’ve made. It also made me happy to gleam that they hit home with the sort of folks I was hoping: old-school WoW players.
I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly sure how I hope to achieve what I’d like to with this post: making a place for anyone who’s looking to learn more about the posters. Whatever that may be is more or less up to you, the reader–this is just one place to start, for me. So, if you’re out there and curious, please feel welcome to ask anything and everything about them–I’ll edit/append this post accordingly.
In the meantime, I’ll answer the most frequently asked question I’ve gotten about the posters, that being, “Where can I buy them?” A selection of print options are now available, right here.
Lastly, while PC Gamer was generous enough to include an interview with me on top of the posters in their outlet (many thanks to Josh Augustine for that), there were a few more questions that didn’t run with the final article. So, here’s the rest of what they asked, and what I had to say:
How long have you been playing WoW?
All the way back to when it was just Vanilla, but I haven’t been back to Azeroth in quite some time actually. It’s always been on and off as close friends leave or return to the game. To be honest, it sort of became one of our primary means of keeping in touch when we were geographically split up during college.
Being new to WoW when it was still new to the larger gaming community made it very easy for the old world to leave a strong impression on my perception of it. Not having to rush to catch up with an expansion meant you got to spend a lot of time in plain-old Azeroth, and that experience played a significant role in this project.
Do you do graphics/artwork for a living?
I’ve been designing mobile applications on both tablets and smart phones every day for over a year now. So, while I do art and design for a living, it’s much more about interactive design as opposed to being purely illustrative like the posters are.
My major is actually in game design, and my previous job was the result of an internship where several of us developed a mobile game for one summer. Before that, I was creating levels and prototyping game modes for TF2 and L4D in Valve’s Source SDK to educate myself and alongside my peers.
Even though designing games and making art for them is much different from the demands of most mobile apps, a surprising amount of best-practices are shared between them. The same goes for what I do now: lessons in contemporary graphic design provided me with useful tools, both stylistic and technical, that brought me to what you see now in the posters.
What inspired you to make this series of posters?
I was out of town visiting a friend of mine, with whom I played WoW since day one, right before Cataclysm hit–which no doubt lead to a long discussion about it. At some point in the conversation, I wondered what all this vintage content would look like if it had a deliberate vintage/retro aesthetic to it.
When I returned home I started playing with two-tone illustrations of tableau’s from the old world just to see what it might look like, and got pretty carried away after a couple hours. Integrating the quotes was a result of improvisation, but they really helped compose each subsequent scene. From there, I sort of saw them becoming advertisements to taunt and lure players into revisiting these now-abandoned “hot-spots” one more time.
The article that ran in PC Gamer's August 2011 issue. Hit the image for the full page.
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If you’d like to see what art & design work I’ve been up to most recently, my Dribbble page is probably the best place to go for that for the time being (it’s more iterations than final drafts, but it’s the most immediate way for me to share new work while renovating my website).
If you’d like to download the posters themselves (at print-ready scale, too) you can find them back at PC Gamer’s original write-up. Just hit the images embedded in the page to bring up the full-resolution file/s. Right-click and save to your heart’s content (you know the drill).
Hope to hear from you, whoever, wherever you are.
Crashing In
Crash Bandicoot is like taking a hike in the forest. You’re on a dirt path for the most part, running across animals while leaves and flowers brush past you, with just enough light bleeding through the canopy up above. You feel like you’ve been funneled into something by the outdoors, a natural interior that envelopes your imagination, and with that comes a natural tension as well. The trees, the change in elevation, the twists and turns obscure your vision–the most important tool to playing a 3D platformer–leading every several steps towards discovery, and surprise.
You could only ever see a few meters ahead of you, and a few feet behind you (or the opposite, if a boulder/bear was chasing you). Occlusion is something that the thrill of most video games, especially platformers, thrive on. Our television sets become viewfinders, our hands moving them back and forth.
Whether or not the context of a larger world begins to make sense to us is only a side-effect to this layer of interactivity. Crash never asks you to envision that entire space–just what’s up ahead, or around the corner. You couldn’t plan too much ahead even if you wanted to, and the temptation of crashing into/onto a crate, than onto a skunk, then onto a platform and back onto the ground is a rhythm so satisfying in motion you’d rather just keep pressing buttons and moving forward.
The pacing of Crash games (at least those developed by Naughty Dog–I’ve never played the current generation Crash’s) were incremental and moment-to-moment, without completely ignoring the scope of its larger surroundings. Between levels you would leave the more claustrophobic forests and return to larger islands, indicating where you were in Crash’s world. From there the environment also became your interface as you’d pan between which level to play next. As unconcerned as this mode of presentation was with detail or hand-holding tutorials, it still seemed to get the job done.
Crash was pretty satisfying with so little to be said. It was focused, undistracted by duct-taped features creeping in, or a desperate excuse to leverage internet access. It was an ancient tiki island filled with secrets, and that’s how I found them.
Learning to Play, 2 & 3
Since my Learning to Play column at GameCareerGuide got going, two more installments have been published under it.
#2: Dinner Tables, “considers the design of a game project…and uses Valve’s Team Fortress 2 and more as inspiration.”, can be found here.
Most recently, #3: The Mixing Board goes between two large scale game projects from my time at CIA, comparing the team-dynamics between them to illustrate the up’s and down’s of collaboration. Read all about it!
I’m still mulling over what the fourth issue will discuss. Going back through the archives of my experiences in art school, which only ended a year ago, gets tougher with time. Your mind gets foggier, and aggressively dusting off the hardest lessons learned isn’t the most enjoyable thing to do for an entire article. I’ll get around to it as the spring moves on, unless Cleveland keeps the rain away for longer than a day.
Souvenir
Three of us, alone, made some noise in our dining room for nine months.
Here’s what the result sounds like.
Souvenir
The Commonwealth’s (that’s us) debut album.
Take something home with you at
http://thecommonwealth-music.bandcamp.com/
Or listen right now
Organized Crime
Blizzard Entertainment has taken a page out of Dr. Gregory House’s book with Cataclysm, their latest addition to the golden-goose that is World of Warcraft. They had to cause one disaster in order to solve another: half-a-decade-old designs were frozen in place, but still making up a majority of the persistent game-world. They found an icebreaker no greater than the return of Deathwing, a key antagonist from Warcraft-past who happens to be an ancient dragon consisting of shattered rock, molten lava, and rage.
In an age of gaming that’s made a powerful ally out of the internet and fiber optics, you’d think that broken design could be avoided altogether, in theory. When endless tweaks and revisions are part of the business model (free, expanded, and improved content), game developers don’t necessarily have to rely on a sequel to deem any change worthy. Apparently, this one did. Read more…
Photoshop: Import multiple images into one layered document.
I was forced into a corner at work this week. I needed to layer dozens of images into the same Photoshop document.
If I was a fool, which I am, I would open Photoshop, then proceed to File > Open all of these images at once. Afterwards, I’d choose one as my Photoshop document, slowly drag-and-dropping the rest on top of it, automatically creating their own layers one at a time.
Not to mention this means watching Photoshop suck the life-force out of your computer as it opens a new tab for each image. But no longer. I have learned, and now that my work week is over, I will share. Read more…
Why I Put Up With S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
If you know me personally, you’re probably somewhat aware of the latest hurdle I’ve had to overcome in gaming. To my own surprise, it didn’t fall under the creative end of the medium. Instead, it was S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (S:CS), the single most demanding game experience I’ve ever had. The one I came closest to giving up on over a dozen times.
At a point, the game peaked to an emotional train-wreck for me. Half-way across the Zone (what the affected area of the Chernobyl disaster, the theatre of S:CS, is referred to as in-game) and I was stripped of my arsenal. Notorious game-breaking bugs began to surface, enemy AI grew too accurate, and friendly AI fell too inaccurate. With few means for controlling my own fate, I learned to travel one save at a time for every step taken, tip-toeing around eggshells I couldn’t even see.
Seemingly out of nowhere, I was victorious: I beat Clear Sky. I was slightly baffled at coming upon such certainty in a game underscored by ambiguity. All that certainty was then swiftly washed away by the most concentrated dose of ambiguity S:CS had to offer with its ending. “Am I actually done?”, I thought. Was that it for me and Clear Sky? Are my adventures (nightmares) in the Zone stories worth telling, as opposed to crafting them?
Yes, to all of the above. So what was there to put up with, and why did I put up with it for so long?
Excerpt: Einstein’s Violin (On Listening)
From Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses – p. 98
“At one point in his career, Albert Einstein was asked by a small local organization to be the guest of honor at a luncheon and to give a lecture about his research. He agreed to do so. The luncheon was quite pleasant, and when the time came, the host anxiously announced that Albert Einstein, the famous scientist, was here to talk about his theories of special and general relativity. Einstein took the stage, and looking out a largely non-academic audience consisting of mostly old ladies, he explained to them that he certainly could talk about his work, but it was a bit dull, and he was thinking perhaps instead the audience would prefer to hear him play the violin. The host and audience both agreed that it sounded like a fine idea. Einstein proceeded to play several pieces he knew well, creating a delightful experience the entire audience was able to enjoy, and surely one they remembered for the rest of their lives.
Einstein was able to create such a memorable experience because he knew his audience. As much as he loved thinking and talking about physics, he knew that it wasn’t something that his audience would be really interested in. Sure they asked him to talk about physics, because they thought it would be the best way to get what they really wanted – an intimate encounter with the famous Albert Einstein.
To create a great experience, you must do the same as Einstein. You must know what your audience will and will not like, and you must know it even better than the do. You would think that finding out what people want would be easy, but it isn’t, because in many cases, they don’t really know. They might think they know but often there is a big difference between what they think they want, and what it is they will actually enjoy.
As with everything else in game design, the key here is a kind of listening. You must learn to listen to your players, thoroughly and deeply. You must become intimate with their thoughts, their emotions, their fears, and their desires. Some of these will be so secret that your players themselves are not even consciously aware of them…it is often these that are the most important.”
