Freemium

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/206497/European_and_Japanese_devs_proactively_capping_inapp_spending_by_minors.php

 I find it pretty interesting that this limit is going to be put onto Freemium games. Especially now that many newer games for console are starting to adopt Freemium idealologies, and many are starting to include in game purchases. It's good that they're trying to do this, to stop kids from buying tonnes. But of course, gamers will always find a way around these blockades, if they want to.

 I guess this was all coming together, especially due to recent reports that in some games now adopting in game purchases, where some purchases are up to $200 in size. A lot of people were in uproar about this. So it makes sense that they do this. Personally I think that alot more Freemium games will be coming, now that they can exist on consoles. 

March of the Ents

So making trees has been pretty awesome. I've really enjoyed it. Tree number one is a beautiful little birch tree. I'm very much proud of this old girl. Honestly, as long as it looks like a tree I think it's totally a success. There is one major thing that has been an issue and that's my model size being several hundred under but really it's looking good. I've had some problems running the line between going over a size limit and just under it. It's much like when you arrive 10 minutes early instead of just on time, which is another thing I do all of the time.

Mr Second Tree is in my opinion not as solid. Which I think is a fine opinion to have. I tried to make a willow tree, because I was really proud of my Birch and partly because I saw a totally awesome willow tree I wanted to make. Now this hasn't ended out as well, personally. But it does look like a tree and is pretty alright, really. I personally think that I just need more alpha layers, or do it a different way that I haven't thought of yet. But hey, it still works.

History 4 C - Indie History

 In the glorious old days of the Atari 2600 hundred many games were made by a handful of programmers. Anyone with the know-how to make a game filled with bleep-bloops and ham sized pixels could and could release it. That leads to why so many strange games were made for that and the similar consoles of the age. Through time in video games often games were made by these small groups of people passionate about gaming and their creations.

 Even some old games were made from passion. The 1980 arcade game Missile Command was made by progammer Dave Theurer suffering from nightmares about nuclear war. Similarly the 1988 game Wasteland and it's spiritual successor Fallout, both of which having sequels coming soon, come from the ideas of cold war fear.

 Nowadays many games are made by big publishing firms, huge groups of people making these triple A titles. But indie games are becoming more popular with each passing year, especially with Steam, Steam's Greenlight, and Kickstarter many small indie game makers can make money. The beautiful thing about indie games is that they tend to be built from passion, often with deep meanings behind it all. They bring an entirely different type of experience, and in a wide display of ranges.

 For example, Braid was designed by Jonathon Blow to be full of meanings and metaphors. Almost everything within the game is important, and this is of course an indie game.

 Cave Story was an indie game released in 2004, and it's something I want to talk about. Cave story Cave Story's original name was Doukutsu Monogatari and was made all by one man called Pixel in Japan over 5 years. Yes, all made by one guy. This is what I mean about games made from passion, he had this dream to design his game and it was awesome.

It was made to be a free game and once it was translated it became horrendously popular, and I definitely see why. It's seen by many as a masterpiece of game design. Part of a reason for it's success was that everything was solid. Solid game play, solid pixel art, solid music and a solid story that hooks you in.

 Now this sounds awesome right? This guy gained alot of digital fame via his game and people loved it. I bet he was over the moon. It gets better. Cave story has been updated and re-released, several times. Cave Story + was an updated version with new art and more levels released on all consoles and PC like a regular game, and recently a fully 3d version was released on the Nintendo 3DS.

 Oddly though all of these re-releases were done by different people and different companies, while Pixel had his fame he didn't exactly stay in the limelight.

 However a different story is the story of Minecraft and Notch, whose indie game made him so popular he now works as the CEO of his own company. Like Cave Story I remember playing this when it was in it's fairly unknown phase (which makes me sound like a massive Hipster I know). Like Cave Story it was originally all made by the Swedish fedora-wielding Notch. He made the game all in Java, inspired by other indie games such as Infi-miner.

 Like Pixel Notch built this game just because he wanted it to exsist, it's like his baby. But people loved Minecraft. People payed for access into its Beta, for each update. People started filming themselves on Youtube, making their own things.

 Now Minecraft is HUGE! It's on pocket devices and modded onto the Xbox 360 and soon the Xbox One. Notch made so much money with Minecraft he hired a team of people to help him work on it, and he now works on creating other games; which maybe he regrets after nearly getting sued by Bethesda for his game Scrolls.

 Minecraft is now one of those major fame stories, where and indie game rose to a level of video game godness, and is now pretty much known about by everyone as if it was Tetris or Mario. It's interesting how this happened. Not every Indie game explodes like this, many are lucky if they get a small fan base. It's theorised that because Minecraft's gameplay is all about building it applies to everyone. Everyone likes playing with LEGO (and if they say otherwise they're clearly in denial) and it's the same kind of satisfaction when you build a skull fortress in a mountain.

 Talking about Minecraft and its fame means I can't resist talking about mods. Modding has always happened since the days of Doom, when a pixelly flat demon was terrifying. But when it comes to Minecraft, mods have also exploded. Now many people who make big intensive mods for Minecraft such as Tekkit and Feed the Beast make money and have been able to build their own companies!

 Because Minecraft was just so simple to play and to code if someone wanted something new and awesome they could just work hard and make it; I actually know people who studied programming and did classes on Minecraft because of its ease of use. This means almost anything you can imagine has been modded.

Talking about all these video game creations made out of a person's passion all really takes a new meaning to 'Do what you love and the money will come.' But it is important to remember that when it comes to indie games, there's many stories that don't end in success. Everyone wants to tell their story, and make their game. Not everyone gets Notch level fame.

Refrences

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/narrative-mechanics

http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/dqz8eu/gt-retrospectives-the-fallout-retrospective

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/news/a284605/braid-ending-explained-by-jonathan-blow.html

http://www.cavestory.org/

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Markus_Persson

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Mods

History 3 - Facial Awesomification

               I want to talk about art styles in this modern generation of gaming. It’s always something I’m interested in. When a game dares to go away from a realistic art style and make something interesting and new, I always love it.

 The first thing that comes to mind is Legend of Zelda Wind Waker for the Nintendo Gamecube. When it was released in 2002 and 2003 at first the Nintendo community was outraged. They didn’t want the cartoony cell-shaded art style, although now it has a lot of love. The reason for this is that Nintendo gamers were promised far more when it came to the Gamecube’s Zelda title. At the Spaceworld event in 2000 gamers were shown this ; 

 A 3D Link with a similar design to the Link players knew and loved from the N64 era, looking marvelous in the new Gamecube graphics. But instead we got who is now lovingly called Toon Link. 

Using cell shading technology the Great Ocean in Wind Waker looked like a cartoon world, every character full of emotion. While gamers were outraged at the time, now Wind Waker is loved so much it got re released in HD on the Wii U (which doesn’t seem entire necessary but sure does it sell).

 Even though its not such a dirastic change, the art style in Bioshock Infinite is devine, and not just because it’s currently my favourite game of all time. The game was first designed with far more realistic faces and proportions on characters, but it was all changed for one reason. Emotion. Ken Levine, developer of Irrational Games and Bioshock Infinite decided to scrap using Motion Capture for the faces of the characters because he believed that animating the facial features of Elizabeth by hand would make her have far more character and emotion. You can see her more proportioned face before hand in early art and oddly enough in the televised trailer for Bioshock Infinite. 

 Personaly, I think this choice was amazing. Elizabeth, your companion throughout the whole game, is entirely important to the game, and her emotions doubly so. At any time in the game you can look at her and just see the look in her Disney like eyes and see her point of view. Brilliant choice.

 Similiarly, in Bethesda’s game Dishonoured every character has a far more caricature like appearance and the entire world has a more painted look. This graphical style makes the game far more interesting and stopped it from blending into obscurity.

 It’s interesting to me how now a practically photo-realistic human could be made in video games and yet sometimes going away from that look can make a far more interesting graphical style.

History 2 - RAW! JAGUAR!

 In the early 90s the video game market was owned by Nintendo and Sega. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis were the two major consoles on the market, both consoles being 16 bit systems. The early 90s was a period of time called the Bit Wars by some. Many people didn't even know what Bits were aside from better graphics, but they knew they wanted more bits. In basic terms, having the amount of bits a system had meant how many bits one element could handle at a time, more bits meant a faster system with better capabilities. This meant that advertising was filled by talk of bits.

Now Atari in the past used to be king of the video game industry, but were falling behind in the Console wars right now. But just like in life, in the console wars when you play the game of thrones you win or you die. But Atari had experience and age on their side. Their attempt to get back the crown of console gaming, which currently was being shared by mostly Nintendo and Sega, is something that really interests me. That's mostly why I'm doing one of these big blog posts about it, obviously.

 The Atari Jaguar!

 First of all, what a brilliant name for a console. It sounded aggressive and badass, the perfect name for a console trying to regain the crown! It was released over a year between 1993 and 1994 with a mass of advertising campaigns, all boasting one key thing about the Jaguar. It was a 64 bit console. This first came out in America far before the Sony Playstation which was still only a 32 bit system, and the N64 another 64 bit system wouldn't come out for a couple more years. So obviously they wanted to advertise the 64 bit system! And they did. Hilariously.

They even insulted the other systems:

 Now why wasn't the Jaguar a super success? Because it wasn't actually 64 bit. Well, it was and it wasn't . Technically, the Jaguar did have 64 bits of processing power, but it actually used a mix of processors, 32 and 16 bit, to add up to 64 bit. This ended up making the console actually weaker than the 32 bit Playstation, which Atari's CEO even admitted. So, people didn't like it. In 1995 after the release, Atari lost over half of their revenue. The stockholders were so frustrated Atari released this message to them :

From the introduction of Jaguar in late 1993 through the end of 1995, Atari sold approximately 125,000 units of Jaguar. As of December 31, 1995, Atari had approximately 100,000 units of Jaguar in inventory.

You would think after being so central to the Video Game Crash of the 80s that Atari would know better and would be able to avoid such a universal failure. That being said however, supposedly the Jaguar still has a very active fan-base, and home made games are still made for the system. So it's got that going for it, which is nice.

Now I need more practice in 3Ds Max. That much is obvious. But if you consider I've only been using the program for about 6 weeks, I think I'm doing rather okay. I just finished my old building project; I had chosen the stupidest building to build though. 

 (the photoshop overlays I used for the textures wont remove from the render though, so thats a slight worry.)

 I think its okay. It's not industry standard but it's okay, considering I'm still a student and all. I made alot of mistakes but really, if you don't make the mistakes how will you know how to avoid them? That's how I'm looking at it anyway. Next on my list is to watch a bunch of Mike Pickton videos on unwrapping and texturing, as for now that seems to be how I keep messing up. 

I need to get better at not losing things. This is like the 4th time I've left or lost a USB stick with work on it. Really what this SHOULD teach me is to back up my work more often so when this does happen, it wont waste about 4 hours of work. Ah well, at least I can learn some new things by re-doing it. Look on the bright side of life and all that jazz.

The end of Gamings honeymoon phase

 The British public information series Protect and Survive, made in the late 1970s during the nuclear threat of the cold war, was voted number 89 in a Channel 4 poll of 100 scariest moments. This was above even Dracula. During the 1980s the cold war was terrifying, and at any time the entire world could of been obliterated in nuclear hellfire. I for one, am not interested in living in the Fallout Universe as a Ghoul.

 And that's what we're here to talk about isn't it? Video games. I already talked about the Magnavox Odyssey and how it shaped the gaming industry (sort of). Truth is the Odyssey started the idea of a cartridge based gaming system, which was then elevated to the level of godhood by the Atari 2600. In the early 80s the Arcades were the homeland of gaming.  Companies all over the world were trying to get in on the Arcade money by making home consoles. Everyone wanted to take the Arcade experience home, and with home consoles like the Atari 2600 that was possible!

 Unfortunately as everyone was trying to get in on taking the home console money, that lead to everyone making their own consoles. So many consoles being made is one of the key reasons for the 1983 Video Game crash, although there were other key factors of course.  One of the most hilarious reasons to me is the E.T. Game. Not only was this game so bad that most copies of the game were dumped in the desert, but it also cost Atari somewhere between 20-25 million dollars in trying to get the rights for the game.

 Out of the ashes came the Nintendo Entertainment System, the all holy NES. This started a key change in the market, where the main video game consoles were American in origin to Japanese, which didn't change back for some time. Now part of the problem with Atari is that almost anyone could make an Atari game and sell it en masse. Many games were literal advertisements, such as the Kool-Aid Man game, made purely to sell a product. Nintendo solved this problem by checking all third party developers and keeping them on a leash. Of course unlicensed games were still made, but Nintendo's efforts are thought to have stopped a second Market crash.

 Another great survivor of the Market Crash was the PC. Gaming as we know today formed from the 80s with the steps made by Nintendo and the new PC gaming industry. Such historic games as Zork and The Legend of Zelda started to form genres that we know and love today! PC's got more and more powerful, media PC's with more powerful screens and speakers made gaming on PC more and more able, eventually leading to games such as ID Softwares Wolfenstein 3D (which may of been made in 1992 but its pretty important), which were revolutionary and brilliant at the time. This generation of games with its monumental lows and highs set the stage for gaming for THE REST OF TIME!

So I just had my first big 3D Max crash. Luckily not too much work was lost, only like 1 hour as opposed to an entire lost project.

History!

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/203244/Classic_games_now_preserved_accessible_on_Archiveorg.php

So this is a pretty cool thing, simply saying a whole load of old games are available online now in an easy and free way. Sweet huh? Pretty cool to look at how far games have come.

Behold the Bradgate

So, pretty much everyone on our course has been to Bradgate Park over the last week. It's a pretty cool place really. The whole area has this big feel of Tolkien, and even when it was raining and miserable it was still an amazing place to be.

This was perhaps my favourite photograph from exploring Bradgate. I love the look of the tree, the way it looks all battered and twisted lent to the side, accompanied by the view past the wall. I told you that the place had a very Tolkien feel. This land reminds me of home, of the nice large Therfield Heath that I lived next too for a good 18 years. 

 This place was awesome. So awesome I returned there with a party of companions when the sun actually decided to shine. This time we managed to focus on sketching, because there wasn't a torrent of rain on my sketchbook constantly. My main focus was looking at the trees. Because I know that trees will be very important to learn about for this course, and especially the older more fantasy looking ones. 

Take for example these fine trees. Especially the one on the right. It looks like it might of grown in Silent Hill, screaming forever. I couldn't resist drawing that one.

Sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something.

By removing N-gons I merely make more N-gons... It's a downhill battle! I had no idea that these N-gons were even a thing, that if you make a shape with more than 4 sides in 3D it's apparently the worst thing in the world. Now I'm trying fruitlessly to fix model where about... 60% are these devilish N-gons. Oh dear.

3DMax why do you hate me?

History 1 - The Odyssey

 When researching the history of video games we usually assume that the first video game console was the Atari 2600. In many ways it is, as with its cartridge system you could buy games to use on the system, much like consoles today. But it was not the first. The Atari 2600 was released in September 1977, where as the Magnavox Odyssey) was released late 1972.

Daddy Magnavox here came out a good 5 years before the Atari we all know and love. Unlike cartridges used by the Atari and the NES the Magnavox used removable circuit boards that change the way the game works. Along with that the Odyssey had a very strange controller, with spinnable analog sticks on each side of the box. This controlled a glowing dot on the screen, where one stick moves the dot on the X axis, the other on the Y. Unlike the Atari every single game played the same, and all were rather simple and made to be played with two people.

 The system was unable to keep score in it's various games, so the players had to do this themselves. The console even came with chips and scoreboards. The games were... less than exciting. Like many before it, the Odyssey starts off with a pong like game, as video game consoles dedicated to Pong were extremely popular at the time. The console came with plastic overlays to place over the television which was like an early form of graphics adding some basic colour, such as a green tennis court and various other skins of Pong such as hockey and football.

 Some other gens are Simon says, where you draw cards and move your cursor over to the body parts on the overlay, and Skiing where you follow a track and see who can go fastest. Of course for our American friends there was even a game where you named the States of the USA. It also came with various different board game overlays, where you literally played the board game and used the TV as a board. It's a very basic system, but what do you expect from the first family console?

Interestingly the Odyssey came with an early light-gun peripheral similar to the NES's, based on military light gun technology planned to help shoot down rockets but adapting it for entertainment. For a console so far ahead of it's time it didn't sell well at all. There was rumors that the system would only work on specially designed Magnavox televisions and partnered with pour marketing campaigns the Odyssey remained obscure.

But for Magnavox it was not a financial failure. Overtime Magnavox sued Atari, Coleco, Mattel, Seeburg and Activision over their designs of games being extremely similar to Magnavox, and won or settled every time. Magnavox even won a court case against Nintendo for Magnavox claiming to be the first video game console (saying that Tennis for Two came first) and failed. So Magnavox sure did make alot of money. 

The American company Magnavox may have been pushed into obscurity as a subsidiary for Philips but it atleast has a place in video gaming history.

Professor Layton and the Autodesk

 There is something I'm very much enjoying about this course. When working on 3D modelling in Autodesk 3D Max there's an element of problem solving. It's like working on a puzzle.

 My Guru's (third years who are helping us hapless first years) gave me and the rest of my group a project to make a weapon, and I've been working on this fun little project.  This is the weapon I've been trying to make, from an old story of mine. At every turn I've been stumped by little problems. 'How do I do this?', 'Is there a way around this problem?' and of course 'Oh god what have I done?!' And I'm loving it. These puzzles are awesome, and by solving these questions I'm growing as a 3D artist... Or atleast, I'd like to think that.

 So far, modelling in 3D has been fantastic. I think I'm really starting to understand it, even if I'm at a low level. Texturing this thing may be alittle bit harder but I'll learn. It will all work out in the end.

 Nothing is broken,
Everything is fine.
I textured a phonebooth,
Along all it's lines.

 We dealt with strife,
And came close to snapping,
But thus is the terror,
Of UV mapping!

We are stuck.

 Mayday.

We've been in the labs trying to do a lesson about texturing. As you can see, I haven't mastered texturing yet, nor have I (or anyone around me) managed to fully texture our phonebooth. Our teacher has gone AWOL and no tutorials online make a lick of sense! No one can figure out what to do... It is a sad day...

 I used to live in the countryside. Moving here to Leicester for university has been awesome but something's very different. Sirens. There are so many sirens all the time, not even mentioning all the ambulances, police cars and fire engines I've been seeing. Its very strange. But it got me thinking...

 When I was a child, and I know alot of other people who were the same, I loved police cars, fire engines and ambulances. They were so cool. I remember getting super happy seeing the sirens blaring past. It's odd, how that was so exciting to me as a child, and to other children, considering that if one of these emergency vehicles has its sirens on then it means something seriously bad has happened. But I didn't think about that as a child. I was just excited at the flashing and fun. It's a very surreal thought that the now foreboding symbol of despair and horror used to be a symbol of excitement.

 So I've got something on my mind. (I mean, this is a blog, I may as well use it.)

 The exceedingly likely chance is in my growing career in Game Art Design is that if I get a job, I will probably be spending my life modelling radiators and chairs. Think about it, every in-game environment is filled with small objects and assets littering the place all adding to the feel of the place. Someone's gotta model the toilets, texture the chairs and mesh the bins.

Now I know this sounds negative but I'm actually looking forward to it. I've only used 3D max for about a week and I really am excited to make all these things, even if they seem insignificant. The small things that may seem boring will piece together the environment and make whatever we make seem real!

 Of course in a few years time I probably will hate myself for thinking this.

Prologue

This is my blog! I'm Oli and I will be your blogger for this evening. This blog was all constructed for my Game Art Design course in university, and so will probably be mostly made up of me talking about my course and various related things. Of course, I might talk about completely unrelated things aswell. Expect an insight into Oli's mind and my various thoughts.