Blitz games

Blitz game studios is an independent game company, at Leamington spa, UK. The work they carry out for games can be divided into 5 divisions:

• family
• mature
• serious
• game technology
• education

They also hold open days for students, who are interested in games and animation. This link is to the next one, to be held 2013:

http://www.blitzgamesstudios.com/open-days/sample-briefs/

To attend the open day, students must hand in work relating to a brief, distributed by Blitz games. They say, in the games industry everyone will work to a brief (description of a task for any given project). The brief you receive will be based on what you choose as your proffesional practice  I had a look at the sample briefs, to find out what work would be required for a game Artist:

Game Designers

Provide an analysis of a piece of level or games design work you have completed.

For a design of an entirely new game or new level for a pre-existing game that you have made (individually or as part of a team) simply provide:

• Full video walkthrough with voice over (or subtitled commentary) focusing on game flow, pacing and player experience. Tell us about the process you went through when making your demo, what decisions you made, problems you faced and where you diverged from your original plan and why.

Optionally:(game artists)

• Planning documentation you produced to show the intent when designing your game or level (e.g. maps, game-flow storyboards – tell us what you were aiming to achieve when you set out).
• if you are submitting a game you have made, please provide us with a copy of it and the means to run it.

GAMES - pre production

I'l be investigating the pre production processes for designing games. I have researched the methods associated with film design and animation, for the purposes of the live brief (PICTURING TIME animation). I can make comparisons between these processes, the aim being to explore how the final animation would be converted into a game.

The 'Pre production' phase

The link below:

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2006/03/16/the-game-production-pipeline-concept-to-completion

goes through the production pipeline for making a game. The pre-production team usually consists of producers, designers, programmers, artists and writers. All the games design documents are created in this phase of the process.

High concept

 which will start with the 'high concept', often just one single line describing the game. Such as a futuristic racing game or ninja tournament game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_development#Pre-production

Pitch

After the 'high concept' has been established, the next step in the pre production phase is the 'pitch' a.k.a. 'concept document', 'game proposal'. This step is where the idea for the game and its profitability is pitched to a publisher. Often it will be pitched within a company to managers. This may be verbal, but publishers usually like to see a written documents. If the pitch is successful, then the game can do into development.

Concept 

Once the game reaches this stage of development the 'concept document' or 'game plan' is created, and is much more detailed than the 'pitch'. 

Game design document

Pre production artists role

the link below:
shows a job description for a pre production artist. Though its outdated, I found the job description to be quite useful in understanding the skills I would need to demonstrate, to progress as a pre production artist.
http://www.cgarena.com/job/3357

Key skills listed here include:

• the ability to storyboard
• Draftsmanship/ drawing skills
• knowledge of Photoshop, illustrator and flash
• knowledge of 2D animation
• Staging and composting skills

Another example here is a job descriptoon for a concept artist for a games company (Konami):

http://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=2c128e9e2c9154bb&qd=DgxYZa-nqPVrOtYWnIqDF9gkM9Udsrexu7YsWHdddbJoqzlmMZFZuANI_UXpbeUPi9ySgRR091YwtrWwLrVP9Jh2Af4EP_fuveFn4icmDTxb9Ho5RRIV4qLYqP_LX5FE&rjs=1&atk=17aejatj718a14tg&jsa=7527&inchal=apiresults&utm_source=publisher&utm_medium=organic_listings&utm_campaign=affiliate

Key skills here include:

• Drawing skills traditional/ digital
• Eye for light, value, weight, colour and composition
• Ability to understand and translate gameplay elements in visuals that enhance these elements
• strong visual story telling skills
• 3D skills here (maya,3ds max) are a plus

(I have not listed qualities such as experience, as I am focusing, at this point, on the skills I will need to develop as a pre production artist.)

It seems it is important to understand animation processes. Understanding 2D and 3D will be more of an advantage. 

Composition, colour and value can be all be developed by looking at paintings and other art (in particular art with a narrative) as well as work by pre production artists. Hans. Bacher claims (dreamworlds) a film that seems great is not usually so by accident. Most great films are composed and designed in a way that each scene will be able to communicate the mood, atmosphere and narrative through composition, colour, value etc. to the audience.


As an example I've chose a few well known paintings for there use of light and composition.

Bal du Moulin de la Galette by Pierre-Auguste Renoires

The painter here uses light to show the people outdoors. You can tell its a sunny day as light seems to shine down in patchs, as though through the leaves of trees. Shadows are not dark in this painting as light would still shine through the leaves, so light/pale blues are used. Cool colours are used to represent shadows. The characters in the painting stand out more this way as they are contrasted against the background. The weight of the Painting flows from the right forefront, and appears to taper round to the horizon.

This quick sketch shows how I might be able to show this in a story board

 

Cafe terrace at night by Vincent van Gogh

This painting is done in portrait view, which works beautifully with the composition of the painting. Below I've tried converting the composition and lighting effect into a storyboard image. Storyboard images need to show images that wil be suitable for a screen format (landscape)
  I love this painting as it shows an effective method of using light to stage the action in a scene. Also the use of depth points the eye towards this part of the 'screen'

Sunday afternoon on the island of Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

This painting divides the screen almost into three parts. 

The colour at the front is very cool, showing characters at the forefront in shadow, detail with block, contrasting shadows. The warmer colour make up the middle of the image.

I experimented with this composition of colour, so that the image moves from cool to warm in opposite order to how they are usually used. For example, when we see an image like this:


  We can tell by the tones and colours (as well as the depth and composition) that the car is sat on the grass in front of us. As the fields and trees extend into the distance, the colour we percieve these at become duller and 'cooler'. Cool colours are blues, greends, pale colours etc. Warm colours are reds, yellows, oranges etc. and bold

Animation about Time

Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world


Whilst looking up other animations about time I came across this animation. Very simple technique, but relays information to the audience very clearly and effectively - as the story is drawn it forms a mind map.

Ludology vs. Narratology debate

"This disagreement has been called the ludology vs. narratology debates. The narratological view is that games should be understood as novel forms of narrative and can thus be studied using theories of narrative (Murray, 1997; Atkins, 2003). The ludological position is that games should be understood on their own terms. Ludologists have proposed that the study of games should concern the analysis of the abstract and formal systems they describe. In other words, the focus of game studies should be on the rules of a game, not on the representational elements which are only incidental (Aarseth, 2001; Eskelinen, 2001; Eskelinen, 2004). The idea that a videogame is “radically different to narratives as a cognitive and communicative structure”^[8] has led the development of new approaches to criticism that are focused on videogames as well adapting, repurposing and proposing new ways of studying and theorizing about videogames.^[9][10] A recent approach towards game studies starts with an analysis of interface structures and challenges the keyboard-mouse paradigm with what is called "ludic interfaces"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies

This passage, describes the different practices that have emerged in the study of games. Games have only been around since the early 1970's. There are claims that the games industry surpasses that of the film industry, this claim would suggest that the audience for games is greater than that for film. However, according to kristen thompson, the games industry combines sales of software (games) with hardware (consoles, accessories) in its figures, whereas film only show figures relating to sales of 'software' (films sales and rentals. This would not include sales of DVD players, consoles etc.) So with all 'hardware' removed from this equation, the games industry will account to half of the film industries total sales globally.
http://gamepolitics.com/2010/12/28/games-v-movies-numbers#.UIkeLcUmdAM



The earliest recorded video game was created by William Higinbotham, 1958. Claims that an earlier game was created 1948, almost 10 years earlier by Thomas t. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle R. mann, who patented their game "Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device". However, the player was required to place pictures/illustration onto the screen, whereas Higinbotham's game which displayed its visuals on the screen.

The game was played on a brookhaven national laboratory oscilloscope. Players queued up to play.

William Higinbotham

"Tennis for two"
"Tennis for Two was first introduced on October 18, 1958, at one of the Lab’s annual visitors’ days."

"Higinbotham realized how static and non-interactive most science exhibits were at that time. As head of Brookhaven Lab’s Instrumentation Division, he would change that. While reflecting on his creation, Higinbotham wrote, “it might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society." 
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp

It wasn't until 1962 the first game created for the computer, by Steve Russell, who created the game 'spacewars'. The aim of the game was to shoot obstructions/ asteroids in space.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blcomputer_videogames.htm

The earliest games created were built with one function, with no narrative whatsoever, and still were successful as games. As games developed and graphics, functionality and networking has become more complex across this medium, games are being recognized by narratologists as a medium for story and narration.

Games such as Zelda, Final fantasy and Assassins creed could all be considered story driven games. All are extremely successful, but the same can be said for games like Mario brothers, Sonic the hedgehog and street fighter. Its difficult at this point to really know what it is about these games that make them so successful. Some clear parameters need to be made on arguments made by:

• Ludologists
• Narratologists

Both parties have clear ideas on what makes a game successful and what games purposes have within society today. 

With that in mind I will then look at the purposes of a game (games meaning any board game, book, video etc. and key devices that are specific to games) and then the purpose of a story and the devices that make a story successful (or unsuccessful). I'll be able to compare the two forms, and hopefully find a formula that shows how these two mediums can be combined.

Ludology

etymology: 'Ludo' latin for game, ludology simply means the study of games, particularly of board games, until recently as games have developed.

Though ludology would include video game theory, it goes beyond this as this area of study includes ALL games. It takes a formal approach to the study of games and its place in media ecology.
http://www.ludology.org/2001/07/what-is-ludolog.html

David Jaffe, creator of the game 'God of War', believes stories in video games is a set back and claims this has even stunted the development of video games.

"Jaffe claimed the industry has mistakenly focused on storytelling since the early 90s, and elaborated in a recent interview, "I think with...the advent of CDs for game storage, and then high end graphics and voice actors and all this -- cutscenes -- games kind of got off on a bit of a wrong track that was very appealing, but it wasn't necessarily the only track we should have got off on. And I think that's what the lesson taught me" - Gamesutra
http://www.1up.com/news/god-war-creator-calls-story

Narratology

narratology is primarily the study and representation of narrative within literature, film and digital media.
http://www.narratology.net/

narratologist Stephen Dinehart, founder of the Narrative Design Explorer, which combines lugology, narratology and game design to create interactive storytelling or a term he coined as 'transmedia storytelling'.

"He was final nominee for “Best Writing for a Game Production” for Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts at the 2nd Annual Canadian Awards for the Electronic & Animated Arts(2007), and the game won “Nokia Award for Outstanding Innovation in Gaming."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Dinehart

I will explore the purposes of games and narration in depth and compare later on for my own study and conclude my response on the ludology vs. narratology debate. I hope to identify the future for both practices within games, individually and combined.

The zoo

I collected these references for the way they show animals behind bars. In my own animation I want to be able to create a desolate atmosphere. 

Dodo

Its difficult to really depict the dodo in a realistic way. There have been many paintings and drawings of representations of what the birds may have looked like. The dodo skeletons in some museums would be made up of bones from other birds, according to research by on the dodo at oxford.

"The dodos were a curiosity, and some were brought to Europe by wealthy collectors. One
of these birds was exhibited in John
Tradescant’s London museum. His collections
were later left to Elias Ashmole and so came to
Oxford, where now only the mummified head
and foot remain. Although minimal, these
specimens represent the most complete
remains of a single dodo, and are of great
value to scientists today. "

"Fat or thin?
The best information about the dodo might be
expected to come from the people who saw the
bird in its native habitat. Unfortunately, most
of the written accounts tell us more about 17th
century attitudes to nature and the writers’
own concerns than they do about the dodo
itself. Images produced by some of the first
Europeans to visit Mauritius in 1598 showed
very thin birds. In a scene from Admiral Van
Neck’s account, a rather athletic dodo is
striding off into the distance. This is in
marked contrast to the fatter, European
representations."

http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/learning/pdfs/dodo.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo

Ian livingstone

Ian Livingstone, born 1949 in Cheshire, UK, is most known for co writing the adventure game stories and board games 'Dungeons and dragons'

Ian Livingstone is co founder of GAMES WORKSHOP with Steve Jackson and John Peake. The store was founded in 1975, crafting and selling board games, but with the success of 'Dungeons and dragons', the shop become the main distributer for Dungeons and dragons and publisher. They also published other stories they wrote, i.e. the 'Fighting Fantasy' book series
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/home.jsp

In the interview below Livingstone describes how fans of the books are given the oppurtunity to create a phone app game using the Fighting Fantasy books.

http://www.fightingfantasy.com/




An observation from this: the devices used for game play will differ across different gaming platforms, e.g. books use chance to determine battle outcomes, computer games use the players skill to control the games protagonist. But all gaming outlets (i.e. books, computers, board games etc.) will have the aim of 'winning'.

The narratives in the 'Fighting Fantasy' allow the fundamental aspects of the game to be ported from one medium to the next and still remain the same game, simply played differently.







http://www.gamebasedlearning2009.com/conference/speakers/907-spekers/181-ian-livingstone-co-founder-eidos-chair-computer-games-skills-council-skillset-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Livingstone