Art blog

Been awhile since I've done a blog post on here, so figured I'd throw up a quick art blog.

First though,in case you missed it, GGE has gone live for the general public, be sure to check it out at www.greatgamesexperiment.com. Congrats to the team on going live, it's an awesome site.

So some people picked up on the shots of a character I was working on in my spare time around here (not a lot of time for art in the last six months). About two months ago we had a power-surge here at GG due to old wiring kicking out the power (too many computers on this side of the building). When the power came back on, all the machines came on at once and poof, fried my two external hard-drives which were stupidly not on a power-surge strip. Lots of stuff lost on those, but one of the things was the character demo from GameFest. I think Mark McCoy actually has a copy somewhere, but it was a rush job anyway so I figured I'd spend a little time hooking up the dude I was working on in the same situation. So anyway, hooked him up, still have to tweak the animation a bit to not be a little wonky, but it runs.

So since it was rather painless to get it up and running for GDC, I figured it'd be fun to just run with it and make a quick little environment to show it off in, to show off the new lighting stuff as well. One of those rare moments where things just gel quick (did it pretty much all yesterday) so I ended up coming up with this "Gold Forge" setting yesterday (mostly because I wanted to play with dramatic lighting and glowing meshes). I think what I dig most is that it's a pretty dynamic environment, everything has some sort of movement, etc. Was a ton of fun, and still have some stuff to do, but for the most part it's going to wind down. Still on my list is to actually put some texture on the dude's back, he used to have a backpack, but due to time constraints for GDC I just took it off because I didn't think I'd have time to properly texture it all, even thought the normal map stuff was done awhile ago (I'm slow with character stuff, not my primary area of
expertise). Gotta touch up some of the textures, thinking of throwing some decal light projectors in there of some veiny looking stuff as light/shadows, maybe throw some floating stuff in the water, etc. Got a really nasty bug in there that freezes the scene, probably because I'm built this in a hacked up orbit camera directory and there angry going on. Got some script problems with particles too, again just seems to be in this hacked up demo script version I'm using. Nothing that can't get fixed today though with any luck, will bug someone to figure out why it randomly freezes up on me.

Other than that, we got some cool stuff to show off at GDC this year, everything from Torque X, TGEA, TGE, Games, GGE, TGB, and the list goes on. I don't think we have enough booth space to show off all the cool stuff properly actually. I'll be down at GDC, busy worker bee again, so if anyone will be at the IGDA, Minna Mingle, or XNA evening events, please feel free to say "hi"! Sickhead Games will have some cool TGEA stuff to show off very soon too, but want to save that little juicy
tidbit for them to show. ;)

Obligatory pictures and movie following:


www.garagegames2.com/web/images/tima/plan/forge.wmv