atomic monster

Right now I am in the throws of balancing.  Not game balance but life balancing.  At work we are currently trying to wrap up our game and so things are rather busy.  At home both my kids AND my wife's birthdays are coming up in the next couple of weeks.  So things feel rather difficult to balance properly.  I was on track to get a simple blog post every week day for almost two months but I was only able to get through last month. At first I was pretty bummed that I missed a few days and then the old habits started to kick in again so it seemed like a good time to post something to keep the juices flowing.  I doubt anyone really comes here on a regular basis, I assume most people that find their way here do so from one of my posts somewhere else.  But I'd like to spend some more time putting things here instead of scattered all over the place so I will try and keep posting things as often as I can but for the next month or so the posts might have a fe...

With work being as hectic as it has been and having spent a good chunk of time on my computer this year already, I decided it was time to dust off the old sketchbook and have some fun.  Nothing special or amazing just some fun doodles.  Sketching is a great time to play around with some brushes, markers and pens and just explore.  These were taking with the camera on my phone in a room with one lamp so the lighting is trash and the flash lit up the ink in spots. Watercolor over marker which made the colors muddy, not good. Watercolor over an inked sketch. 

This is by far my favorite youtube video ever.  Such good ideas to get some creativity going.  Love Love Love this video!

One of my favorite things to do on a game is to sketch out a map of the world.  Usually the game world comes to me before anything else.  Maybe its because I am an environment artist by trade but I think it has always been the worlds that have drawn me into games. Even when I think back to the pen and paper games I would play with my buddy Issac it was always the worlds that jumped out at me as the interesting part.  At the time I would spend so much time imagining the worlds but for some reason spent all of my time drawing the characters and creatures.  In fact when I first went to art school I thought I would be a character artist and not an environment artist.  Oh the folly of youth. The old Squaresoft Snes RPG games had some of my favorite gaming worlds as well as every single Lucas Arts adventure game.  A mighty nod to the Sierra games such as Roger Wilco and Kings Quest too.  I need to spend more time thinking about my game worlds then I c...

This game is being built using the BGE (Blender Game Engine).  I have a soft spot in my heart for the BGE.  I have and still do use the BGE even though I use Unity at work.  The BGE is just different to work with which is one of the reasons I really like it.  In the right hands it is more than capable to get a complete game finished.  Anyway the game looks great and interesting and I can't wait to find out more about it.  I love seeing people use Blender especially the BGE.  Awesome stuff!

Been playing this game with my kids recently and they really like it.  It brings back a lot of good memories for me.  Right when the Super Nintendo came out there was a really awesome console that here in the states was far lesser known the Turbo Grafx 16!  I was one of the lucky few that got one.  I stumbled upon it at Fred Myers when I was there to get a Super Nintendo.  It was an awesome little system but we only got a few games so it just never picked up in popularity.  Any time there was a sleep over my friends would have me bring the system and we would spend the night bouncing back and forth from Super Mario World and Bonk's Adventure.  I would also go through the game manuals and draw all of the pictures.  So it is really fun to play this again with my kids who are getting to enjoy it for the first time.

I added a few more tweaks to the random shape generator and you can now limit extrusions on each axis when picking a random face.  This little change really makes a big difference in controlling the generation.

I watched a youtube video the other night on a random shape generator that someone had made and got inspired.  After thinking about it as I watched the video I realized it would be pretty easy to do and so I quickly cobbled one together.  Right now it just has some very basic properties to adjust to get random shapes so the foundation is in.  It is already pretty fun to play around with and I have a few ideas to expand it a bit more. There is a common problem that any creative faces and that is the blank canvas or blank page.  The problem is that a blank piece of paper or computer screen can feel like this creative void.  The best solution is to get rid of the empty as quickly as possible.  Like looking at the clouds on a summer day you start to see shapes and patterns as you fill in the empty space.  Usually you will find something that sparks an idea.   The random shapes works in the same way only with a 3d mesh. ...