Brian Crick

Variations on a Theme

Well, that was a nearly perfect weekend. They’re so much better when I actually follow my own rules for managing them.

In addition to visiting the wonderful new Greater Cleveland Aquarium , visiting friends, exercising and going out with Marie, I managed to get through a full cycle and a half of pet-project work. There are six things on my plate at the moment; here are the weekend’s highlights.

* * *

Made a King of Swords for the Scopa deck. I was really happy with the medal salad going on there, though it got lost when I applied all my Photoshop filters. I’ll have to up the contrast on that a bit.

* * *

Am continuing work on my generic procedural NPC costume thing for Tinselfly. So what you’re seeing below is my test character, wearing a pair of boots whose thickness and length can be set to arbitrary values by the game at runtime.

It’s a bit sluggish, but you can watch this stuff animate in the game. It’s kinda spiffy. Need to work on adding procedural seams and details to things next.

* * *

My new font is starting to look like ya know, a font family. Whee! I’m really happy with how this is turning out.

Posted in Fonts, Illustration, Tinselfly | Leave a comment

Heart of Neutrality

I attended my second Cleveland Game Developers meetup last night, and (gasp!) I had a lot of fun. It’s a pretty diverse group, with as many artists as programmers, so my fears of being surrounded by other technical types were largely unfounded.

I even got to offer advice on music software to someone there. It’s a great feeling, to be in a position to be helpful to someone you don’t know personally.

I kinda like networking events. I know they’re the bane of many people’s existences, but there’s a time and place for the sort of neutral, casual conversation you get at things like this. Sure, being overly friendly at a networking event can be awkward, and if you’re having networking-type discussions with friends, that’s just depressing… but I feel a strange sort of calm talking to people I’ve never met before, who I may never meet again. It’s kind of liberating.

* * *

They’re pushing this Game Jam thing where you’re given a theme for a game, split into teams, and have 48 hours to come up with something interesting. I’m not really interested in doing a 48-hour programming challenge… I just don’t think I’ll find such a thing particularly fun or relevant to the specific programming skills I need to work on right now. However, if I attended as an illustrator or a fledgling musician, assigned to a random programmer, I think that would be an interesting experience. I could use the practice thinking quickly and doing those sorts of creative pursuits under absurdly tight deadlines.

As I understand it, they’re short on illustrators and musicians anyway… need to confirm that, though.

* * *

Watched Apocalypse Now for the first time last night. It may not sound like it, but that’s kind of a big deal. As someone with a dad who’s a Vietnam war veteran, Vietnam war movies simply didn’t exist in my chilldhood — or young-adulthood. The war itself was never spoken of, and I only know details of my dad’s involvement in the war secondhand.

Sure, I’ve seen Good Morning Vietnam and Heaven and Earth but those aren’t focused on combat so much.

So anyway, I watched it, and failed to find it particularly disturbing, or horrifying, though my impression is that it wanted to be those things, and succeeds for most people. I sorta wonder if there’s something wrong with me there. I’ve found maybe one or two movies in my life disturbing.

Then again, going back to the whole war-veteran thing… of course, I’ve never seen real warfare, but I’m pretty sure that no movie is ever, ever going to come close to capturing even the secondhand account of this event in my head, cobbled together from a couple decades of whispers and worried looks.

You want to flesh that out in a 2 or 3 hour ‘epic’? Please. I may just laugh at you.

Posted in Computer Games, Life, Movies | Leave a comment

Fun with Font Blending

Now that I’ve cleaned up my untitled square sportsy font a bit, I thought I’d mess it up again.

I had this critiqued by some experts in the industry a few years ago, and they suggested that it might work well as the widest variation of a whole family of fonts. I’ve never tried that before, but I’ve decided to give it a shot.

What I’m hoping to end up with is a 15 font family: you’d be able to pick any combination of one of five weights and 3 widths. Above, you can see what the 5 different weights might look like for the widest available width.

Luckily, I don’t have to make all 15 sets of letters from scratch; the way it seems to work is, you just define the extremes, and let your font-editing software blend between them. In the end, I’ll need to draw each character 4 times: narrow/light, narrow/extra-bold, wide/light and wide/extra-bold. What you see above is the two wide extremes blending together.

So it’s arguably 4 times as much work, but you get 15 times as much product, a more versatile product that hopefully will appeal to people with big, complex typesetting jobs.

But the ratio of work-to-product isn’t really what I find appealing about this. What I like about it right now is that working at these extremes is pretty unforgiving. The thinner the strokes, the easier it’s going to be to tell when they’re inconsistent. And with the extra bold characters, it’s been a bit of a challenge to cram everything in without having things look too crowded or muddy. And, I’m sure that the narrow versions of these will have their own unique problems to deal with.

It’s like you’re exaggerating the problems already present in the design. If I can figure these issues on the edges of my family, I’m sure the middle will be much better for it.

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Autosave

For no particular reason, I worked a little on an old font today.

The changes are pretty minor. I’ve made the curves on letters like O and B more smooth (while still trying to retain the squarish look of everything), and slimmed down the strokes on the X, B and W so they match the other letters better.

You kind of have to squint a bit to see the changes. However, I think this is a bit more professional and clean looking now.

* * *

One of the nice things about working on fonts is, you can let something sit for a few years and pick it back up, and you don’t have to spend a whole lot of time re-familiarizing yourself with what’s going on. This font was last edited in 2009 I think.

Contrast that with my Dart board game project, which was a bit baffling to sort out today, after having gone unedited for a couple months.

* * *

It occurs to me that this whole saving-journal-post-drafts-in-Wordpress thing is backfiring.

See, I used to post everything directly to LiveJournal, which seemed incapable of reliably saving drafts. So if I wanted to write something, I had to do it all it one sitting, or at least have my post-editing page open all the time, beckoning me to come back to it. With WordPress, I can save a draft, leave the WordPress interface entirely, and completely forget that I was writing something.

There are any number of saved drafts on my site here, waiting to get edited. Chances are, I won’t get back to them. And that’s part of why there haven’t been many posts here lately.

As with most things, I think my posts are better when they’re just a little bit rushed. Everything’s more focused that way.

So I think I’ll go back to just trying to throw things together all at once here.

Posted in Fonts, Life | Leave a comment

Reflection

As Marie and prepare for a short New Years’ vacation that I’m looking at with equal amounts of excitement and worry, I find myself thinking a bit about identity. So have some random thoughts (which may be a little navel gazey, but hopefully not too much).

* * *

Part of tech support is calming people down. I did a little bit of this for a while, and from what I hear, I was fairly good at working with cranky customers.

Not that I had any training, mind you; I just made people calmer by virtue of being me. There’s nothing particularly amazing about that; we all, just by virtue of being who we are, make the people around us behave a little differently.

So I think of humanity in general as calm and reasonable. Because whenever I see people, I see my own calm reflected in them.

I kind of wonder about people who make people around them cranky. I’ve certainly met those people, and in all likelihood they don’t realize they make the people around then cranky; in all likelihood they don’t realize people, in general, are more noble than their own point of view would suggest.

* * *

I haven’t been in a few years, but part of why I like going to TypeCon is, I like the person I am when I’m at TypeCon. I’m a little more outgoing, a little more excitable.

I’d like Marie to meet this person, but getting that to happen would be problematic. When I’m around Marie I tend to let myself fade into the background, though I’m working on that.

* * *

Going to a meeting of the Cleveland Game Developers tonight for the first time, and I’m a bit nervous about that. Historically, I tend to become easily confused when I’m around other programmers — strangely enough, I see most I’ve met as somewhat alien and difficult to connect to.

But I like the idea of being accountable to a group of other game developers — apparently part of every meeting is project updates from the members.

I’m very curious what the group is like, and how I’m going to come across to them.

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Egoless Scheduling

It’s been a while since I babbled about managing myself, so have a random thought.

The concept of egolessness comes up a lot in martial arts. I never quite hit it during my brief dabbling in Judo, but I often lose my sense of self while programming or illustrating.

It can all sound a bit hand wavey I suppose, but to put it in more practical terms, I suppose losing a sense of self is simply a loss of desire (yeah, it’s very Buddhist). The desire to impress; to learn; to meet a promised due date or fulfill a specific expectation.

I do my best work when I stop caring about getting work done. If I’m too excited about the work, it’s easy to get overconfident or impatient to get more work done. (Which, sadly, happened at work-work today.) Which is not to say that I do my best work on projects I hate; hate is a form of caring, a form of emotional attachment, a burning desire not to do something.

So I’m wondering tonight if this concept of mastery and happiness through egolessness also applies to managing one’s responsibilities on a higher, more abstract level.

I’ve mentioned a few times before how I’m most productive when I rapidly cycle through pet projects. Part of the benefit of this is just to make sure I don’t lose track of any of my projects; I frequently waste depressing gobs of valuable time reacquainting myself with things I’ve backburnered. But also, I think this strategy is helpful in that it removes me — it removes desire — from the process of deciding what to work on. Since it’s a predetermined cycle, I always know what I will be working on next. I won’t procrastinate on things I’m afraid won’t go anywhere. I won’t implement quick, poorly conceived ideas because I’m excited about moving something forward.

Removing desire makes the work about the work — not about me.

So I should really start keeping an eye on how excited I am to be working — because if I’ve got too much motivation, it’s probably time to take a break.

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Low Hanging Starfruit

Now that work has settled down a bit, I’ve been tinkering with a very old pet project called The Itty Bitty Galaxy.

If you have Unity, you can play with it here (not that there’s much you can do; you just move around).

In sort of the same way I always break new modeling programs in by making the starship Enterprise, for the last decade I’ve broken in new programming languages with this project. I’ve done it in C++, Flash, Flex, Torque, Android, and now Unity.

Been concentrating on the starfield. Another thing I’ve done a zillion times before. I’m very particular about my starfields. Most of them — especially real ones — just look flat and boring to me. There’s no color, no sense of depth, no volumes to look at, and if I’m going to show of how big and vast my universe is, I want to try to do it in a volumetric sort of way, in a way where you have identifiable, three-dimensional volumes of space to look at, so you can say, hey, this here thing is big. It’s tough to wow people with how big and empty space is, though I’ve certainly seen it done (Homeworld comes to mind there).

And actually, this posts has been languishing as a draft for so long that I’m looking at this version of the starfield and thinking to myself, wow, this is not very deep. But I’ll have another update on this later I guess.

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Little White Book, now with 10% more littleness

Spent much of today working on my Celestial Stick People book, trying to get it from a 30 page 5.5 x 8.5 doc into a 6 page 8.5 x 11 doc that The Game Crafter can support.

That was not pleasant. But it think it’s looking passable. Not great; not, perhaps, good, even; just passable.

(If you don’t see it above, you can go here to download it.)

I’ve actually had to cut very little; just a sentence here and there, and my one-page introduction. Mostly, it’s just a much more compressed layout than my other design. I miss my wide margins and copious amounts of whitespace, but I’m actually fairly happy that I could do this at all without too many cuts.

I guess if it’s stapled together and stuck in to a card box, people will be more forgiving of really compressed text.

Gonna do more cleanup, bug Marie for the Diamonds card text when she’s back from Indiana, and get it off to The Game Crafter as soon as I can.

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About a Sharp Dressed Man

Finished my King of Cups.

I tried a white tux, but the large swatch of white just didn’t work… it felt empty. So I just made it black like the businessman.

I feel a little weird about how not-detailed the sides of the tux are, but in some ways I like it.

Don’t have too much else to say about this, except that copy/paste is definitely not the way to go here. While there’s a similar end result here to the businessman, the underlying shapes used to create that result ended up being very different. Would have been faster to simply start from scratch.

Posted in Board Games, Illustration | Leave a comment

Abstraction

Have the beginning of a King of Cups.

As you can surely tell, I started with the King of Coins and made modifications from there. I still need to change the suit, to make it a white tuxedo instead of a black business suit.

I’m not sure if this copying-and-pasting approach is actually faster than starting from scratch. I’ve spent 45 minutes on this so far, which is already quite a bit longer than the 15-30 minutes per face card I was hoping for. Of course, I really have no idea what sorts of expectations to set here, so I’m not going to beat myself up too much about the time spent… this is, after all, a learning process.

I didn’t really sit down and design the cup icon; I just drew something straight in Illustrator really quickly. But I rather like what I ended up with. I think I’ll keep it, with only slight modifications probably.

* * *

While I’m waiting on answers to some questions I had for the client, I thought I’d post some ruminations on what I want to get out of this. And what I want is to do work for precisely the sort of games I don’t like playing.

I like games that are about building stories. Games with memorable characters and places, where after the game, you find yourself joking about the funny or surprising or hero-clobbering plot twists that came up during the game.

These sorts of games tend to have lush, naturalistic illustrations where every picture could be a still from a movie.

I have neither the skills nor the desire to produce this kind of stuff. I like making illustrations that are a little abstract. The sort of illustrations that would be well suited for more abstract games, where your characters aren’t characters so much as ideas represented by people.

My stuff tends to lean towards Art Deco, so this is no real surprise. If you’ve got, say, an Art Deco mural with a bunch of construction workers… those workers aren’t people. They’re the visual manifestation of the idea of hard labor, and the nobility thereof. They’re archetypes. If you’ve got an abstract strategy game where you can summon any number of identical snipers each turn, those snipers aren’t individuals. They’re sort of platonically ideal snipers, and I like it best, from a visual standpoint, when the character portraits for these more abstract games have more abstract art for these kinds of things.

I’d love to have done art for games like Pandemic… there are people, but not really interesting characters you can connect to. I would have loved to have seen some stylized, glorified doctors and engineers in that. That would have been pretty awesome.

Of course, when my board game project gets further along, I’ll want to do more naturalistic illustrations for that since it’s supposed to be story based. Should be an interesting challenge.

Posted in Board Games, Illustration | 2 Comments