Brian Crick

Adequately Gorgeous

I’ve been obsessing over one particular spaceship model for Tinselfly lately. Mostly, I’m trying to prove to myself that I can make this product look as good as I want it to be.

You can view this in 3d here. (It’s updated from yesterday’s model, if you happened to see that.)

This is rather uneven, sort of by design. That main body is pretty funky looking, because I’ve been ignoring it.

I slip into a bit of a weird workflow, when I really don’t have any faith in my skills. Sure, a decade ago I made this design, ostensibly for this project, and it still looks pretty nice… but since I made that, I decided to make the switch from pre-rendered scenes to realtime 3d, and  I have a long way to go before I can say I’m good at making models for realtime 3d projects.

So I’m shooting for adequate here.

Trouble is, my standards for ‘adequate’ are pretty high. And what I’ll do, when I’m not sure I can make something that meets my standards, is just focus on one small piece of my model or illustration or whatever, and see if I can get it looking ok. Here, I’ve been concentrating on the big disc in front and those shiny lattice-like sails curving around everything. And I hereby declare those things adequate. I’m pretty sure now that I can give everything else — the main body of the ship, the rings in back — a similar level of detail and visual interest.

I sort of wonder, if I’d gone into this confident that I’d eventually get something I liked, if I might have picked a more efficient workflow. I wouldn’t say I’ve done a lot of second-guessing my decisions, but jumping into a challenge expecting to fail probably isn’t a great mindset to have.  That’s how I went into another recent illustration project, and I’m pretty sure that killed my efficiency.

Generally I tend to be pretty optimistic, and that’s been waning a bit, much to my surprise. I think it’s time to reclaim some of that. Being stupidly optimistic can be helpful sometimes.

Larger Than Life

I’ve been working on my Hortensia model (a spaceship for Tinselfly), just roughing out the basic shapes for it. Here’s what it looks like from the front right now:

And from the back:

My main goals were to have it look absurdly fragile and have a sort of nautical feel, what with these sail-like structures and all, and I think this is finally getting there.

It’s a bit Tron-ish, but I’m ok with that; whatever I make, it’s going to be something-ish, and Tron-ish feels like a better fit for this story than Star Trek-ish, Star Wars-ish, or a realistic NASA-ish.

Besides nailing down the silhouette, I’ve also been trying to decide how big this thing is, and I’ve finally settled on that, too.

To give you a sense of the scale I picked, here’s an overlay of random things in comparison:

(The ‘me’ bit seems to have been completely obliterated by compression artifacts… you can click on the image to see a larger version.)

By any absolute measure, this is not a big ship. The distance from the front disc to the back of the rings is less than 100 meters. The main body isn’t so much bigger than the Mayflower.

I like that smallness. I like the idea that you could have the whole thing in frame, and see a character on deck or behind a window, and maybe even know which character you were looking at.

* * *

My lead character Robin is supposed to be in awe of the beauty and power of this thing. I could just scale it up; I could make it look big and massive and have it dwarf everything around it; I could make it comparable in size to popular fictional spaceships… but that sort of feels like a cheat. No matter what this ship looks like, Robin has to react to it in a way that expresses her feelings about it. And if I’m not communicating that in some sort of memorable, gameplay-driven way it’s sort of a lost cause anyway.

Here are some random ideas for doing that:

  • Robin occasionally glances back at the ship if it’s in view. (On its own, this isn’t really based on game mechanics, but imagine a scene where you’re talking to someone and keep glancing back at the ship and you fail to hear important information they’re trying to convey; the solution would be to talk to the character in a different location where the ship isn’t in view and distracting Robin.)
  • Robin can run a little faster towards the ship and a little slower when running away from it. (This could also be used to solve a puzzle of some sort.)
  • While near the ship, the camera rises really high, showing Robin dwarfed by the ship. Robin looks up constantly. From this point of view, Robin cannot interact with anything near her, that she needs to interact with; you need to literally get Robin back down to earth to continue.

That’s just a few ideas I thought of while writing this post. Hopefully you can have all sorts of little things that the player experiences, without words, without cutscenes, that tell you about this and other playable characters that don’t have anything to do with giving the player loads of verbal exposition.

Why I Liked Battleship More Than Star Trek

(Spoilers on both movies ahead.)

The other night, I saw the new Battleship movie. And, surprisingly enough, I kept comparing it to the latest Star Trek movie.

Star Trek was critically acclaimed. Battleship was universally panned. But they have lots of similarities:

  • We start with a protagonist who’s a bit of a screwball.
  • Said protagonist demonstrates his screwballness in a scene involving him in a bar trying to impress a girl he just met, and instead getting into trouble.
  • Protagonist gets a chewing out by someone in the military, is told that they have lots of wasted potential, and is urged to join the military.
  • Protagonist joins the military.
  • Protagonist develops a rival within the military, a person somewhat more by-the-book than himself.
  • Bad aliens attack. Good guys don’t fare so well.
  • Protagonist demonstrates his ability to command a ship in a pivotal scene involving his rival.
  • Good guys defeat aliens.

Now, admittedly, there’s a lot more to Star Trek than this possibly pedestrian screwball-does-good character arc, which has been done many times before. And the constraints that movie had to deal with, what with rebooting the franchise and all must have been crushing for anyone involved, But to the extent that I rather like pedestrian character arcs, and am going to focus on that aspect of any movie that has one, I kinda liked Battleship better than Star Trek.

exposition

Let’s start with the screwball. Star Trek’s Kirk gets in a bar fight while hitting on a girl who’d just as soon be left alone. There are nice moments, but it’s not that memorable a scene.

In contrast, Battleship’s Hopper is introduced in one of the funniest scenes in a movie I’ve seen in a while. Here, he girl wants something: a chicken burrito. The bar’s not serving food anymore, so our protagonist, in a desperate attempt to be helpful, runs to the nearest quickie mart to get a burrito. The mart is closed, so he breaks in, warms up a burrito, leaves some money on the counter, makes a huge mess of the place, gets chased by cops and gets tased just after delivering said burrito, falling unconscious at the feet of the girl he’s trying to impress.

It’s absurd, it’s funny, it’s memorable, and it’s strangely endearing. I’d go so far as to say it’s the best introduction of a screwball character I’ve seen.

the set-up

The next few scenes have one of those things where an unfortunate chain of events forces our unprepared, screwball hero into a situation where he suddenly has to prove his worth as a leader.

The captain of Kirk’s ship has to go do some super-dangerous stuff, leaves Kirk’s rival in command, and much to everybody’s surprise, makes Kirk the new second in command.

In contrast, in Battleship, the entire command staff of Hopper’s ship is killed, leaving Hopper as the senior ranking officer. Structurally, I like this set-up a little better. Hopper is completely blindsided by this. He goes from zero to captain in a single scene. We’re shown Hopper’s lack of fitness as a leader because he’s a really bad captain at first. He doesn’t have the trust of his crew at all, but he’s still captain and has to figure out what to do.

Kirk, as second in command, has to prove he’s better than his rival before he can take command and actually make command decisions. We don’t necessarily get a great sense of how exactly Kirk’s loose-cannon-ness might make him a bad captain and why nobody trusts him.

baggage

Both Hopper and Kirk have relatives in the military who die in combat early in the film, and Hopper and Kirk want to live up to these shining examples of military officers.

Kirk’s baggage is his father, who died saving a just-being-born Kirk. It’s noble and all, but you can’t really say Kirk and his father had an interesting relationship.

Hopper’s baggage is his brother, who he lived with well into adulthood, and who he works with in the Navy. We see them talking; we see Hopper’s brother trying to take care of him; we see the brother’s disappointment when things go badly. That relationship is the core of the first few scenes of the movie.

pay off

So finally we have our scene where our hero rises to the occasion and becomes the leader he needs to be, for the world to be saved.

Kirk does it by tearing down his rival. By proving that his rival, the current captain, is emotionally unfit for command.

A rival whose entire home planet just got swallowed by a black hole.

I find that pay off more than a little anticlimactic. If your home planet just got erased form existence, you might be a bad captain for a while, too.

In Battleship, Hopper proves his fitness by temporarily letting his rival run the ship, because his rival has come up with a brilliant plan for defeating the aliens. Hopper proves his fitness by acknowledging that command isn’t about doing everything yourself; it’s about  understanding the strengths of your crew and managing them well.

On an emotional level, I actually found this surprisingly satisfying. That arc really worked for me.

set piece

On a completely non-character-driven level, I liked the action scenes in Battleship more than Star Trek too. Being based on a board game, everything’s a bit more, shall we say, rules heavy. And I think any good set piece should have rules. Some people might groan at Hopper’s rival’s plan to chart the course of the aliens on a giant grid with letters on one axis and numbers on the other, but I rather liked that. It was better than watching starships flying at each other with guns blazing. There’s no structure to that.

And I rather like silly, overly abstract structures overlaid on my movies, whether you’re talking about set pieces or character development.

Extra! Extra!

Been working on a randomly-generated-extras system for Tinselfly.

It doesn’t look like much yet, but I’m pretty excited. The idea is that if I have background characters in any given scene, they’re all going to be dressed in a similar fashion or they’ll be easily divisible into two or three classes of extras who are all dressed similarly. So for example, one ‘class’ might be people in navy uniforms. The uniforms will all look mostly the same, but there might be a little variation in the details: most people will have their shirts tucked in, but some will have their shirts untucked. Some people might be in short sleeves, and some in long. And of course, there would be variation in the people themselves: skin color, weight, height, hair style.

So here I’ve got a simple sample class that defines a character with some variation in weight and skin tone, and a plain garment with variable thickness, color, collar size and leg length.

Eventually, I want more detail and more variation or course; in one particular scene, I even need people in nice white dress uniforms with randomly placed blood stains that vary from shiny and red to matte and brown.

It’s going to take a while to get there. Besides procedurally generating character meshes, I need procedural textures with patterns, trims, lapels, and details like pockets or randomly generated fruit salad on people’s chests, if I want to get really detailed about it. All of which I’m pretty sure I can do, and it’s tempting to dive into all that, but my first priority is to make sure my procedurally generated characters can be animated.

In addition to extras, I’m going to be using the same system to define the look of my leads. And I’d like an animated, working, playable character as soon as I can get one so I can start on gameplay and level design stuff while keeping all this character generation stuff at a trickle.

Because I’m probably going to be making improvements to the character generation throughout the entire project.

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.