2012 – Page 2 – 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.

Sensor Sweep

Got a new Operetta build up.

I’ve also been working on a musical theme for the game.

music

I’m trying some weird chords and progressions here that I can’t even quite describe, and I like how that’s lending a sense of exoticism without just sounding like I don’t know what harmony is supposed to sound like.

However, the instrumentation is giving is this journey-though-the-desert feel, which isn’t quite what I want… I want something more adventure-on-the-high-seas.

Well, actually what I want is a similar sound to My Name is Lincoln from The Island, better known (to me) as part of the trailer music for Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I want something that sounds both like sci fi and a period drama, if that’s possible.

gameplay

I’ve added a bit where things are only visible to the player if they’re close to the player, or if this new spinny radar thing of yours has recently swept over it.

This was a little difficult to pull off — it involves some custom shaders and pixel-by-pixel bitmap drawing, but I like the effect.

Right now, anything could be invisible if you’re too far away; that’s just for testing. Eventually, only objects marked as cloaked or hard to see will ever be invisible, and everything else will be visible at all times.

There’s a little bit of weirdness in the planet labels; apparently, Unity doesn’t let you use custom shaders with those. Like, at all. I was worried about that at first, but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue, since planets should never be cloaked.

Also, I’m not sure how I feel about the communication to the player about where the sensor is sweeping. Right now, there’s just a slight bit of darkness in the places you can’t see, and I like how unintrusive that looks… but it might be a little too unintrusive. I dunno.

Anyway, next I’ll be working on your item list, which will mean putting lots more work into my home-grown GUI system.

Broken Illustration

I think I figured out a big part of my problem with my Scopa workflow, and working in Illustrator in general: I think of things too much in terms of overlapping shapes.

A lot of the time you can just draw a bunch of shapes, each one on top of the last, and be ok.

Everything’s nice and layered here. But say I wanted to make something with odd overlapping, like this:

I could start with the yellow stick

Add the red stick on top of that

Add the blue stick…

…and this is where things get a bit janky. The blue stick should go under the yellow stick, but over the red stick. There’s no order I can drop these things onto my drawing and get it to work.

The thing is, within Illustrator, I should stop thinking of these as sticks. I’m not working in three dimensions anymore; I’m working in two. I need to flatten everything out in my head, and see everything as flat shapes on a piece of paper.

If one three dimensional object overlaps another, that doesn’t always mean I get to make two 2-dimensional objects in Illustrator that overlap. Sometimes, it means that the top object breaks the bottom object.

What I could do here is draw the blue stick as a couple of separate pieces. When they’re aligned right, you won’t be able to tell that’s what I’ve done.

But there are still overlapping objects here. It’s not a big issue with this simple a drawing, but for more complicated drawings, having too many overlapping objects can be kind of a pain. Selecting things becomes a bit counter-intuitive; I could click on a spot well inside the red stick and get the yellow stick instead because it’s right there under my cursor… just hidden. I do this all the time, and it’s immensely frustrating.

If I’m comfortable with my outlines — and I’d better be, before I move from paper to Illustrator — it might be best to just draw my outlines first

and add in colored, broken shapes everywhere, with nothing overlapping at all.

When I think of ‘layers’ in Illustrator, I think of my object. Like the layers of someone’s costume, layers of fabric.

But a good drawing has a different concept of layers. The drawing itself has layers that are completely unrelated to the layers the viewer might see in the thing being drawn. There are color layers and outline layers and shading layers, things like that.

I think I actually used something like this approach in my Girl Wonder thing, and didn’t quite realize just how good an idea that was until now.

Much Ado About Purple

So I made this game a little while ago called Green & Purple, for a game-making contest. You’re a green ball, trying to make contact with a purple ball, and live happily ever after together.

I actually spent a lot of time going back and forth on the colors. I wanted pastels; I wanted two colors that were contrasting, of course; I didn’t want your usual red vs. blue selection.

But most importantly, I didn’t want pink & blue. I didn’t want players to immediately see this boy/girl dichotomy there. Even in an abstract, hastily constructed game, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t reinforcing any of those save-the-princess type sentiments out there. It’s a pet cause of mine. So I went with green and a sort of bluish purple, which I figured were reasonably neutral colors.

Despite that, hearing people talk about the game, many referred to the purple ball as ‘she’ and the green one as ‘he’.

Trouble is, you’ve only got so many options. With sufficiently contrasty colors, one color is probably going to be warm — fiery reds and yellows — and the other bluer, cooler. In the absence of any other context, I suspect people are going to see the warm color as more feminine.

Near the end of the project, I worried that I was possibly falling into some gender stereotypes despite my best efforts to keep things neutral; the cool colored ball was the one you were controlling, the one with some agency; the warmer ball was completely passive, waiting to be rescued. I considered switching the colors, but didn’t have time to do it before the contest deadline came up.

But you know what? It wouldn’t have mattered. Because this is not about color choices or thinking that people who read too much into color choices are sexist. It’s about the biases we all carry.

Had I switched the colors, and had people read the purple player as female and the green object of its affection as male, you could say it was a gender-role reinforcing game design, to play a female character whose only goal is to find a mate.

Had I started with those colors — a purple player and a green companion — there’s a good chance I would have worried about that… and wanted to switch the colors.

Because I’m biased.

While I’d love the gender roles in the world to up and disappear, I certainly can’t say I believe they’ve already done so. I expect everything I see to express gender stereotypes; I expect to be annoyed by said stereotypes. Because I am biased, I will desperately try to pull my experiences in line with my expectations, spinning said experiences as needed. I will spin my perceptions of any game I play to fit in this world view, seeing sexism where there may be none — because thoughtless, sexist characterization is what I expect to see in most games.

And that applies to my perception of my own work. I will fight to keep my work egalitarian, but my biases will have me seeing depressingly overt sexism in everything I make. In a less abstract game, in a game with recognizable human characters, I will be wont to complain that I have failed to make such-and-such a female character sufficiently stereotype-breaking. I will graft a perception bias onto a character who may very well be, in an objective sense, portrayed in a perfectly respectful way. I will likely post a journal entry about it, wondering how I can do better. In my post, I will describe said character in terms of a stereotype that is an oversimplification of who the character actually is; and in doing so I will reinforce the very stereotypes I seek to avoid.

Fighting bias is a skill. Wanting to be less biased does not immediately grant you this skill. Wanting to produce works with an egalitarian world view does not immediately grant you this skill. I know I say that a lot, such-and-such-a-thing is a learnable skill, not a part of your core being. But having bias, being prejudiced or bigoted or whatever… it’s very, very tempting to think of acting upon bias as a failure of conscience, rather than a failure of skill.

I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Friction

The thing about my whole ‘throw things at the wall and see what sticks’ approach to improving my productivity is, you have to take time to see what’s sticking and what’s not. And I think I’ve just realized something here isn’t as sticky as I thought.

* * *

My pet project management thingie has, just within the last week or so, gotten into a mostly usable state. It still needs a lot of work, but I can reliably use it to manage my projects.

It’s basically just a tree. You can add things to the tree, change the order of things, move things up or down in the tree, and select whether individual nodes will open in a new pane or just expand like, you know, a regular tree control.

I was keeping all this information in a simple text file, but a couple months ago I decided it would be a good idea to ditch the text file and start using my still-buggy homemade software. I figured if I forced myself to use it, I would then be more motivated to fix the bugs.

I was wrong.

Instead of using my software and trying to fix it, I just abandoned project management entirely. And there was a massive hit to my productivity because of that.

It’s a little too easy to abandon my pet projects, even though I know that doing so is bad for my mental health. You can have all the motivation in the world, but sometimes it’s not about motivation. For something like this, sometimes you have to look at the other end of things and reduce the friction that’s stopping you from moving.

So I dropped everything and got this app usable, and that’s a big part of why I’m now getting everything back on track.

* * *

My Adobe Creative Suite software — Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash; that sort of stuff — is a couple versions and a few years out of date.

Adobe has moved to a subscription based service for their software, and I’m finding it hard to justify the cost, given that I don’t do any freelancing anymore. In fact, it’s entirely possible that I will never get a new version of Photoshop the same way I will never buy a new desktop computer. It just doesn’t seem to make sense anymore.

* * *

I’d like to get moving on that comic with Marie, and haven’t decided yet if I’m going to do it in Illustrator or my own custom paint program that I write a while ago, just for this sort of thing.

Illustrator is a known quantity, but it has trouble with files with lots of filters, which I use extensively. Getting a new computer won’t help; the problem is that, because it’s old software, it can’t take advantage of all the memory present in new machines.

On the other hand, my custom paint thing has some potential, but is also very buggy and needs to be updated quite a bit before I’d really say it’s usable.

I’d say I should just go ahead and declare that I’m going to use my own program and that will motivate me to clean it up… but I’m coming to the conclusion that that strategy is never going to work. Which is not to say I’ll never get the paint program usable. I think I just have to do it for its own sake.

I can’t think of it as a quick fix for the hole left by an outdated Creative Suite; it will never get done that way… I have to think of it as worth the investment instead.

Play Ball

Got some good work done over the three day weekend. Not as much as I’d like to have gotten done of course, but still, I feel like I’ve gotten things back on track. Even did an elliptical workout.

Have a pretty picture:

So here’s a nearly complete version of that baseball player I mentioned the other day. It’s feeling a little flat to me; I might need a number on the player’s jersey to add interest and provide a background for the ball, which is getting kinda lost now.

I think it sorta looks like he’s passing the ball to himself, rather than preparing to pitch it, but I’m mostly ok with that. Some weirdness is to be expected here, and I’d even go so far as to say that’s going to be part of the appeal of this style. As my first character with limbs, this is the first time I’m actually seeing that weirdness that comes with your typical playing card characters.

Mail Order Epiphany

Barely two days after it started, my service as a juror for Cuyahoga County has ended. And by ‘service’ I mean working from the juror waiting room and watching juror selection, having not actually been on a case.

I’m relieved that this will make it that much easier to get back to my usual routine — I could use any help I can get — but I’m also bummed I didn’t get to participate in the system for real. I’m dying to know what it’s like. What real attorneys are like, how an expert witness engages with their audiences, how the one particularly casual judge I met would have handled the proceedings.

For me, just being who I am, with my general shyness and poor verbal comprehension skills, it would have been monumentally difficult to listen to days of testimony and process it and then feel comfortable discussing it with a bunch of people I’d never met.

I was looking forward to that challenge. I felt like that was a challenge I needed to overcome.

But if this needs to happen, it needs to happen, and there are, of course, many ways of getting challenges to come my way that don’t involve waiting two years for another summons to appear in my mailbox.