Perfectly Peculiar Pixels [#12]

The semester may be over, but given that you’re a couple of centuries too late to lead relatively unchanging lives, we might as well touch upon certain learning concepts that will inevitably follow you out the door. Amusingly, Epic decided to grace us with a game with a pretty steep learning curve, though reportedly not as cliff-wall-ish as I’m assuming I would find the actual Dark Souls. Namely, delving deeper into what you know, augmenting it with what seemed like contradictory (entirely for click-bait’s sake) information , and expanding into at least the periferee of your specific interests.

You have no doubt run into this concept in your previous education. When it’s done right, it’s teaching children in elementary schools that spherically curved mirrors reflect parallel rays of light (with the maths associated with it naturally), and then pulling a Shymalan by revealing it was actually a parabolic curve all along! When done wrong, you do MS Word in elementary school. And high school. And university... Presumably that particular fault has gone the way of the dodo lately, but given the state of education today, I’m sure something took its place.

While solving for spherical chickens in a vacuum may seem like a reasonable way of simplifying things for physicists, game designers don’t have this luxury. We (and fine, mostly I) repeated “play, don’t show” ad nauseaum, and I stand by its task. However, it is by no means the entire, pun always intended, picture. Film Riot covers the one aspect of film (but also game) making, that can and often does make or break shots, scenes, and whole movies…or games!

Following the classroom conversation on perks and failings of open source software, Film Stop does a quick breakdown on why Blender isn’t industry standard. Personally I don’t share the view that it will never be. Yes, current leading artists have all been trained in all the other software packages, which individually provide better tools for certain things. However, the gap with the mainstream applications has been closing for a while now, and while Zeno’s paradox might be fulfilled over time, I think a critical mass of users can cause the fission of Autodesk’s dominance. Until then, though, much like full-stack developers, if you’re aim is to be a full-stack artist, learn it, but don’t stop at Blender.

I make no secret of my blindspot of ‘Souls like’ games. I am familiar with From Software games in all ways which are irrelevant to game designers, that is, in name, reputation, visuals, and second hand reports only. Specifically not gameplay. More than the gameplay itself, Mortal Shell got me thinking about the evolution of medevial Christian and gothic iconography in video games. While its basence might come as a surprise to fans of Bloodborne, or Lies of P, I think it’s only now (or 5 years ago when Mortal Shell came out) making its way into indie games. At the very least, it has become more approachable, in shear polygon count, to emulate e.g. Gaudi, opposed to brutalist architecture.

One for today