#i would maybe do more 3D modeling streams but NO stream I have EVER done has bombed as hard as the one I did recently | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

blazehedgehog · 3 years

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How exactly did the modern developers of SRB2 change the gameplay for the worse, in your opinion? (As a side note, it's completely hilarious to me that the sequel to such a "first-draft-is-final" game like SRB1 has been refined to such a point that, like, how many times have they remade GFZ1? They've redone Knuckles! After he was already redone from the 3D model!)

After the controller debacle and now that it’s mostly properly implemented, I don’t really have too many complaints about the state of SRB2 right now. That’s not to say it’s perfect or anything, but I’m happy enough with it and I’m eagerly awaiting the next major release.

My primary complaints right now are:

I still don’t like the “button to progress is hidden under goop” puzzle in Techno Hill Act 2. They do their best to try and set it up so you’re expecting it, but I feel like some of that setup comes in routes you could bypass entirely. I also think the ultimate test is just too hard to see. There needs to be like, I dunno, at the minimum some kind of wall decoration around buttons to clue you in that there’s something nearby. I would also maybe have a sequence of buttons leading up to the final button where the first one is exposed to the air, but each one you find after that is a little deeper in the goop, so you’re expecting it being so deep in the end (this is sort of what it already does, but it could be way more obvious). Combined with the signposting (wall decorations) this would be a logical progression, to me. The puzzle shouldn’t be finding the button, it should be figuring out how to reach the button. It’s a pretty heavy concept for the player to deal with to hide both the location and the solution, especially for the second zone of the game.

Sort of building off the previous thing, there’s a more general issue where it’s very easy to get turned around and lost in some levels. This is an issue the 2D Sonics and the more linear 3D Sonics don’t have to deal with. But in SRB2, particularly Castle Eggman and Arid Canyon, you can end up going backwards for up to a minute and not realize it until you stumble upon a checkpoint that’s already pre-activated. This is big brain stuff and would require heavy map edits, but I think about how, like, Valve, Bungie, and I think Naughty Dog have talked about designing maps with sight lines and using special environmental patterns to clue players in on which way is forward. Subtly incorporating arrow-like shapes in to their art direction that always point forward, things like that. SRB2 could use things like that, but it may be too late in development to think about now. Still, it’s very easy to get lost and that’s not very fun. Maybe more frequent checkpoints to increase the chances of finding out you’ve already touched one. And/or maybe checkpoints could show some kind of an arrow to point you in the right direction.

Eggrock sucks. It’s clearly now the oldest level still in the game and hasn’t received any major updates in a while. It’s a mean and messy level that drags on a little too long. It may be a precursor to the type of SRB2 levels we have now, but it still needs a once-over. Thankfully, I’ve heard the team is working on fixing that and will be debuting a refreshed Eggrock Zone at some point in the future.

...But there are also a few other places in the game that are a little too rude. There’s crushers in Deep Sea Zone, for example, that move up towards the ceiling. In 2D it’s easy to see the ceiling coming and get out of the way before you get smashed, but in 3D, you don’t know what’s happening until you’re dead. I’ve never seen anyone survive those crushers on their first attempt.

But I’m having fun enough with SRB2 nowadays that, like... I was trying out the “modern sonic” character mod a little while ago and I basically played through the entire game twice in one night and a had a blast. The first time, I got a game over at Eggrock Act 1 and quit out of the game to post my video. Upon booting it back up, I didn’t get my mod load order correctly and it wouldn’t let me access my save file, so I had to start over and do the whole game a second time.

Which... I didn’t mind! It was even more fun the second time around! Boost isn’t really that useful in SRB2 because levels weren’t designed for it, but having a proper homing attack and the stomp really does wonders. So much so that it ended up being the first time I’ve ever beaten the full version of SRB2. I liked it so much, if I wasn’t for this stupid renovation, I’d probably stream a full playthrough!

I know some people don’t agree, but I think SRB2 plays best when Sonic has a homing attack, and this is definitely the best implementation of that. Chengi’s soft homing attack in NeoSonic was fine, but having proper Modern Sonic is the best. Plus, getting to the race at the end of the game and being able to smoke Metal Sonic with one big long boost in the home stretch feels totally amazing.

The only thing I wonder, and I didn’t put this up above, is that most of SRB2′s bosses are kind of pushovers with a homing attack... except Metal Sonic? I guess I’ve never done the Metal Sonic boss fight without a homing attack, but it really feels structured towards you stunning him and then hitting him a second time before he recovers, which even with a homing attack can be extremely difficult, given how much he moves around.

But it’s... probably fine.

#questions #sonic the hedgehog #sega #sonic team jr.#sonic robo-blast 2 #srb2 #fanofsmbx

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comicteaparty · 5 years

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September 18th-September 24th, 2019 Reader Favorites Archive

The archive for the Reader Favorites chat that occurred from September 18th, 2019 to September 24th, 2019. The chat focused on the following question:

What webcomic(s) have you created fanart/fanfiction for? What inspired you to make it?

seetherabbit

During last years inktober, I had a theme which was "quick fanarts" where every piece was a maximum 30 min drawing of a fanart. Did lots of fanart of webcomics, including 32'Kickup, Maiz, Jasper Gold. Just to name a few. I'm thinking of doing it again this year, since it was a lot of fun.

The Q

What a great idea! I definitely want to make more fanart of webcomics and niche podcasts!

spacerocketbunny

Oh gosh I try to do fanart every once in a while and I've accumulated a lot!

Job Satisfaction https://spacerocketbunnyart.tumblr.com/post/187511608156 Superpose https://spacerocketbunnyart.tumblr.com/post/187365212571 O Sarilho https://spacerocketbunnyart.tumblr.com/post/185824775876/spacerocketbunny-summer-witch-vibes Tiger Tiger https://spacerocketbunnyart.tumblr.com/post/183426693926/spacerocketbunny-felt-like-drawing-some Never Satisfied https://spacerocketbunnyart.tumblr.com/post/179577275446/spacerocketbunny-i-got-the-chance-to-do-guest Shaderunners https://spacerocketbunnyart.tumblr.com/post/175472239131/spacerocketbunny-happy-third-anniversary TINF https://spacerocketbunnyart.tumblr.com/post/127396963621/spacerocketbunny-j-ust-kiss-alre-adyyyyy-its Parallax/ Devil's Candy https://spacerocketbunnyart.tumblr.com/post/116639381141/spacerocketbunny-felt-like-drawing-some(edited)

And more for Devil's Candy, Awaken, Prague Race etc!

spacerocketbunny

I'm always want to show love and support for the comics I read so there's always something I can draw from!

AntiBunny

Now this is a topic I can sink my teeth into.

For Sluggy Freelance http://sluggy.com/ of course. This art's a bit old (I should make some new stuff) https://www.deviantart.com/fragraham/art/Bunbun-114266731

Gunnerkrigg Court http://gunnerkrigg.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/fragraham/art/Antimony-679410561

seetherabbit

https://www.instagram.com/p/BoeRdLzh4rn/ Jack Legend

AntiBunny

I've done several pieces for Da Pukas http://dapukas.com/ but this one is my personal favorite https://www.deviantart.com/fragraham/art/Let-s-Draw-Malo-734648837

seetherabbit

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo1d6GEBUV5/ Maiz

https://www.instagram.com/p/BowTc50hLt0/ Paranatural

AntiBunny

For Latchkey Kingdom http://latchkeykingdom.smackjeeves.com/ I did this one a while back https://www.deviantart.com/fragraham/art/Willa-Dragonfly-623180930

seetherabbit

I've done three fanarts for 32'Kickup https://www.instagram.com/p/BooK-zrBswz/

http://www.32kickup.com/ http://jack-legend.com/ http://maizcomic.com/ http://www.paranatural.net/(edited)

AntiBunny

And this one for Slightly Damned http://sdamned.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/fragraham/art/Buwaro-620491813 I especially like this one because I did it while streaming with the author. Very fun to draw alongside other creators. At least before picarto stopped even working for those of us stuck with DSL in the boonies.

And one for Two Kinds http://twokinds.keenspot.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/fragraham/art/Inktober-2016-Day-29-Two-Kinds-Keith-643156576

Anyway, I'll stop there, because if I included all the art I've done for various comics over the years, some of which sadly aren't around anymore I'd be flooding this chat all day.

DaeofthePast

I’ve done fanart for my friends’ comics. The main thing that inspired me to draw for them was that I wanted to see how their characters would look in my style, and I also just like making fanart for people X3 https://twitter.com/daeofthepast/status/992160815653507072?s=21 https://twitter.com/daeofthepast/status/985002172189310976?s=21

Erin/Leif & Thorn on Kickstarter

...I keep all mine in a Twitter thread, should probably just link the whole shebang: https://twitter.com/ErinPtah/status/1031561632357527552

Deo101 (Millennium)

I've made fanart for Super Galaxy knights http://sgkdr.thecomicseries.com/comics/

And I did that because as soon as we met this character I just decided i loved his whole shebang. the look, the drama, the extreme confidence. love that

I've also made fanart for Court of Roses https://courtofroses.spiderforest.com/

cause similarly to the other one I just really like this guy. I don't make much fanart

The Q

Ummm love that Sven!

Nutty (Court of Roses)

IT'S SUCH A GOID SVEN UGH <3

HiddenElephant

I only ever drew fan-art the once, and it was for Zebra Girl, which wrapped up about a year ago I want to say, maybe more. I don't generally do fanart, and this was a good example why, because some design elements and anatomical features gave me a lot of trouble.

Nutty (Court of Roses)

I'm on my phone but i know I've done fanart for @Deo101 (Millennium) 's Millennium

khkddn

ive made a buncha fan art over the years uhhhhhh can't remember every comic. the comic ive made the most fan art for is prolly Super Duper Galaxy Knights Deluxe Extreme Mega Ultra R (http://sgkdr.thecomicseries.com/), for some reason that one's easy to think of stuff to draw for

Deo101 (Millennium)

Its cause of the its really good

khkddn

one of the latest fan arts ive done is for queens (http://queens.thecomicseries.com/) of Amelia, because i love her shirt

One fan art that I'm still quite happy with is this Sunstrike and Bluemist (http://sunstrikeandbluemist.thecomicseries.com/) art that I made for the fanwork initiative. I like how cute both of them turned out

jestershark

I have a whole webcomic fanart moment on my twitter-- I've been trying to do more fanart of indie stuff recently. http://www.ushalacomic.com/ https://bvbcomix.com/ https://sarilho.net/en/ http://www.peritale.com/ https://twitter.com/i/moments/1014897456566415360

Nutty (Court of Roses)

ok i'm home here's the art I did for @Deo101 (Millennium) 's Millennium https://millennium.spiderforest.com/

OH AND ALSO cuddles

JUNK

Here's some weird fanart i did for A Ghost Story https://www.aghoststorycomic.com/

snuffysam

I unfortunately don't get to do as much fanart as I'd like. Drawing is difficult for me, and it's a lot of front-end time to 3D model a character who I'm not going to render that often. So... pretty much all the fanart I do is part of the #fanwork_initiative lol. What I essentially do for that is write down all the comics I'm interested in doing fanart for, and pick one that I think I could do something interesting with relating to the theme.

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #comic tea party #ctp #reader favorites

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scorch-xiv · 5 years

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I talk a lot about FFX’s early prototype in this post

So about 4 years ago, I used to be one of the main contributors to a talk board called FFX-3 Chat, created at the time of the audio drama/novella hustle.

This was a place where we gathered to talk about things FFX and X-2, discuss some things about a potential FFX-3, and try to get some translators on board to convert the entirety of X-2.5: The Price of Eternity to English. The board is largely dead now, but it’s still up on the internet and I’ve linked it if you want to check it out. I’m making this post today because when I went back to the board for nostalgia’s sake, I remembered sharing a bit of interesting and, from I can tell, very obscure concept art for FFX that could possibly be linked to its prototype development. This is a bit long and image heavy, so I’ve put it under a Read More tag so you can check it out on my blog.

So if you’re a fan of Final Fantasy X or even of Final Fantasy in general, I’m sure you may have heard of FFX’s prototype shown off at the Square Millenium Event in 2000. This is the first bit of FFX footage ever shown to the public and right away it shows off its ambitions for the new generation of the franchise. Free-moving camera, full 3D maps, integration of Square’s online service (PlayOnline) as a strategy guide for each area, and complex geometry as seen in the Remiem Temple footage. However as the years went on and this footage resurfaced on the internet for the wider public to see, most of the attention was drawn to the early version of Tidus - the player character. Specifically his dark hair and his realistic cloth and hair physics, which obviously aren’t present in the final game.

(The first and last sighting of Goth Tidus. RIP Goth Tidus)

People wondered for years why the supposed ‘beta’ of FFX looked much more technically advanced than the final game, and the simple answer is... because it’s not a beta. It’s a prototype.

See, when an up and coming console (in this case the PS2) was coming out and its specs and dev kit weren’t yet disclosed to game companies, it was common for developers to make prototypes of their next-gen titles on PC, using their own custom framework. This was done so that they could lay out the games’ design early, so that when the console eventually did come out, they were able to recreate something similar to the prototype on the downgraded hardware much more quickly. Plus they looked good at expos, that too.

Another example of this would be the 1999 prototype for Playstation 2′s Dark Cloud, which not only also featured realistic cloth and hair physics, but a magic carpet ride across an impressively realistic river. Which were not present in the final release, of course. But I digress! Little ol’ me back in 2014 was searching through the deep recesses of FFWiki, seeing if I could dig out any Final Fantasy X goodies that weren’t already on its Concept Art page or immediately easy to find. While doing so, I found two files that didn’t look like the rest. For one thing, they used the Tidus model from the prototype.

This is concept art of a scrapped Overdrive for Tidus and an early design of the Blitzball minigame respectively. Obviously, these aren’t stills of gameplay footage. This is just a series of 3D models posed on a background, with mockups of effects and HUDs added on in post.

So from what we can see here, the ideas presented were pretty different from what made it into the final game. Tidus’ Overdrive here is called Rapid Fire, showing him engulfing the early design of a Blitzball in flames and then throwing it with his sword. Pretty rad that he can control fire like that, despite water being his main element. Blitzball here is pretty interesting too. Presumably players would have used their weapons to catch the ball and launch it across the pool. Tidus’ stats here are HP, Dribble, Pass and Shoot, and has commands called Dolphin Wave, Cross Stream and Sack -- most likely techniques that could be used at any point in the game. Strangely, this weird hollow husk of a blitzball design looks oddly similar to the big lantern in the middle of the Luca cafe in the final game -- the place where Yuna gets kidnapped as she and Tidus are searching the town for Auron.

Perhaps this is just a coincidence, or better, a leftover from the early stages of development. Either way it’s pretty cool. Looks like a futuristic honeycomb! So that’s that! I just felt like sharing this with you guys, as I considered everybody at FFX-3 Chat a good friend, even if we all did have wacky ideas. :p I hope I did them and my work justice, and hell, if X-3 does happen someday, maybe it’ll come back to life again.

#final fantasy x #ffx #final fantasy 10 #ff10 #ff 10 #ff x #final fantasy x-2 #ffx-2 #ffx 2 #final fantasy x2 #ffx2 #ff10-2 #ff10 2 #concept art #final fantasy #final fantasy concept art #ffx beta #final fantasy x beta

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acehotel · 6 years

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Interview: Archie Lee Coates IV, PlayLab

NYC’s premier dream factory, our indefinable friends at PlayLab define themselves simply: “creative studio, no focus, lots of ideas.” This week, they unveiled their latest mercurial art campaign in Midtown — Grown Up Flowers. We sat down with the ‘Lab’s lead alchemist Archie Lee Coates IV to get the details.

When exactly did this Grown Up Flowers project start, and what was the initial impetus for it?

As a studio, PlayLab wants to constantly move into new territory; we don't necessarily know how to do projects at a certain scale, but always want to try. We had started a conversation with Sarah Berman of the Berman Group, who we met through Plus Pool —we told her that we really wanted to get into large-scale public work.

She represents a lot of developers, property owners, things like that. She was saying that quite often they have an interest in art, and hosting art to some degree, to help draw people to their buildings. She mentioned that there this association called Avenue of the Americas — a coalition of property owners on the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown — and that they were interested in bringing more people there for the purpose of art. It just sounded like a dream. We were like, "Okay, cool. Well, let's start that conversation, see where it goes."

We presented maybe a dozen ideas to the board, and they liked pretty much all of them, but it was really just for one or two specific properties at the time.

This was the Flowers project?

They hadn't even seen the flowers yet. There was this project that we wanted to do called Say What You Want to Say, which was gonna be a massive billboard in the center of Midtown, staffed full-time by an attendant with a phone. The idea was, you could text his phone and say whatever you wanted to say, and he would change it physically on a giant billboard marquee. They were like, "This is awesome! Let's do it!" But, we spec'd it out and it was pretty expensive, and they only had the budget to do one. Eventually, there were five other property owners that want to get involved, so they asked if we could do something for the budget that hits all five properties at a giant scale. The only thing we knew that could do that was either projections or inflatables. So we started going down this path of inflatables, and flowers just kind of came to mind.

Flowers have been painted and sculpted since the beginning of time, and Jeff [Franklin, co-founder of PlayLab] said this really amazing thing to me early on with the project: “You don't really have to ask permission to paint a flower.” Everybody's gonna have a different perception of what that is, but it's such a naturally beautiful object.. so, yeah, we were like: "Let's just make big, giant flowers."

Did you have previous experience working with inflatables, or was this a first time venture?

Yeah, it was a first time venture. I think we always had an ambition to do inflatables. We always referenced them for projects, and we didn't know what the cost would be — it turns out the cost was exactly perfect for a five site budget.

We had a lot of ideas. One of them was making smaller-scale, inflatable replicas of the buildings — or maybe inflatable nesting dolls, with, like, five different scales of the building in front of the actual building. With a little shop in front that sold tiny tourist trinkets of the building.

One day, we were walking through Midtown — this giant jungle of concrete and glass —and occasionally there are these small little flower beds. We were like, “wouldn’t it be amazing if there were just just giant flowers everywhere?

There’s something interesting about how the flowers look like original design objects, but also as if there’s some kind of generic template —they're not so dissimilar to what you’d expect to see a vendor at a street parade handing out to kids.

Right.

So, who originally designed them? Are they based off templates?

I'm so glad you are observing that and asked that question, because a large part of the project was sculpting these flowers and figuring out our approach to them. Because it was a blank template, we could make anything we wanted to make. But we don't know... like, we don't have 3D software. We just don't have that skill set or experience. So we literally started by drawing with pencil, shading to show three dimensions, with Jeff and Anya [Shcherbakova] — who led that charge in the studio — doing hundreds and hundreds of options. It got really difficult once we got to forms, so we started modeling them out of clay — then made new drawings from that. We would sculpt and then do still lives of those. it was really a blank template.

There are stock flowers, but there's not a crazy variation of them, and they all look like what you’d see at like a car dealership... these kind of like wavy things. So we made our own, but tried to make them to feel a little like they might be stock ones. The limitations turned out to be super fun. We really like the artist Paul McCarthy, so we found out the place where he makes his inflatables, and they ended up making them for us.

Your sculptures are a little more G-rated than his.

They are 100% more G-rated, with the best family-friendly intentions. But the New York Post definitely had their mind in the gutter when they said they looked like giant penises.

Really? The Post said that?

Yeah, it was just funny. The were like “We reached out to PlayLab, but they declined to comment.” But they didn't. We didn't hear from them at all.

Whenever I think about inflatables, like at the Macy's Day parade or wherever, I think about how easy it seems to be for these objects to be ruined or penetrated or disrupted in some way. What measures are taken to preserve their structural integrity?

We were super nervous about that, obviously, but these people at Inflatable Images in Ohio have done this so many times, and they were like, "Look, based on probability, nobody's going to screw with these." Plus, each of these buildings has security like 24 hours a day — not like guarding the flowers, but they're around, you know?

Mm-hmm.

For the majority of them, there's so much air going through the blowers, a pinprick isn’t really gonna do anything. If you look closely at the flowers that have the blowers there are little tiny holes where the seams are at every little joint. So I think they're relatively safe.

There's like a constant stream of air coming into them?

Yeah, constant.

How long does the exhibition run?

Three months. Through July.

And what happens to the flowers after that?

The Avenue of the Americas Association owns them now, which is awesome, but we already have interest in showing them in other places. We're talking to them about the idea, because they're just too big and beautiful to just keep in storage.

Do you have any dream locations?

Man, I don't know... like, right in front of the U.N. building? I don't know.

That makes me wonder — are the flowers geographically specific? Are they like, native New York flowers?

No, they're more like caricatures of a bunch of flowers, combined. Like, if you took every archetypical flower in your mind and joined them together.

You’ve said that New York was once an island of flowers, and now it's an island of buildings. When I think about the average viewer — like, a tourist or something — that comes across them out of context, that narrative might not immediately translate.

Totally.

So what are you hoping their immediate takeaway is? Is it just sort of, you know, “art! Its big, it's beautiful, it's great?”

Yeah, definitely — just a feeling of positivity and fun. You know, we don't usually make hashtags for any of our projects, but we did for this one, because it was so public that we wanted to see what people were posting. As soon as the flowers went up, it became an immediate selfie zone. There's tons of people posting photos that are like, "Spring is here, life is great, thanks for the flowers!,” you know? No political statement, no negative conversation around it. It's just supposed to be a delightful break from the ordinary visual, or whatever thing you're doing at that moment. They're not so big that they're overpowering, and they're not small that they can be forgotten. When I see photos of them they still look like renderings to me, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's kind of hard to think, "why they would be there?” because they're just so obviously out of place.

They're all in publicly accessible places, right? Even in the buildings?

Yeah. They're all in plazas, except for one in the Hippodrome lobby. That one's really special, he’s called Wilt, after Wilt Chamberlain, because he's so tall. And he's so tall that once he hits the ceiling he has to bend down... so the flowers are looking over everybody that walks into the lobby. When you just stand there for 15 minutes, you have all these people take a photo of it, or a selfie in front of it. We asked a few of them, "Have you ever taken a photo in this lobby before?" And they were like, "No, never." You know, like simple things like that. They're stopping, and just enjoying the buildings and Midtown. It's just kind of like a rounded edged project.

#yes #nyc #ace hotel #ace hotel new york #Archie Lee Coates IV #playlab #avenue of the americas

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finsterhund · 4 years

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Exhaustion and updates

Hoping it's just an issue on twitch's end or the ISP but my test stream had the occasional drop of frames and freezing for half a second. No issues to me but it was present in the VOD.

Really hoping that's not a thing that is going to occur commonly.

Might want to see about getting better upload speed.

But yeah. Expect an update on my computer soon. I've been very busy and very sore and tired from doing errands, setting up my computer (it's a heavy boy) and tons of stuff. Laundry tomorrow and I'm still sore from all the lifting and running around so I'll be out of it for a while still.

I'll be posting photos and stuff. I'm very proud.

I was and still am so anxious about my computer being okay. I'm paranoid about that sorta stuff. There were some hiccups and troubleshooting and I'm sad I didn't get the no CD patch of Heart of Darkness working on it, but it is happy and healthy now.

Spot from my friend arrived too. The black fur on the back is damaged somehow which means not as soft and also shedding. Upsets me a lot but maybe that's a reason to get this Spot a service dog vest.

Also not big enough to be the proposed "giant Spot" but large enough to take on trips and stuff. Good for hugs. So good for hugs. Second favourite Spot after the OG Cuddle Clone Spot.

My computer is a handsome machine. So many lights and fans. Graphics card has lights and fans, heatsink has lights and fan, etc.

Also my friend finally gave me his old monitor officially for real this time. Because I bought it off him. So I actually have space on my desk.

I also fixed my chair. It's still loud and squeaky and broken but at least the back stays up again.

Expect some crisp HoD footage soon. Planning a high resolution death scene video. It's a long time coming.

Also planning to use the absolute beast of a computer to get back into Minecraft and start playing Among Us with friends. I can't tell health wise if I'll be able to finally get into 3D modeling but perhaps. Especially if I can get a new chair or start physiotherapy.

I discovered a way that twitter is broken. If you report tweets for abuse towards you/targeted harassment and twitter decides that the tweets were abuse and against the rules but doesn't think that justifies terminating the entire account, the person who made those tweets is told specifically which ones they were and has their account locked until they manually delete them.

In case you're wondering, yes, that does absolutely inspire them to immediately go right back to targeting the person who got them a slap on the wrist.

Like, if twitter just temporarily banned them and deleted the tweets without explaining which ones they were that would be fine, but not temp banning them and just locking their accounts until they delete the offending tweets literally does nothing except open up the person harassed to more harassment.

Nobody who gets away with harassment and keeps their account is gonna say "uh oh, twitter shook its finger at me I better leave this guy alone."

No wonder the site is so toxic. Not even Tumblr moderation was this horrendous.

Back to positives, I'm hoping once I'm no longer physically and mentally exhausted to start drawing some more again. Maybe with my chair fixed it'll be easier.

A Paper Beast unfolded edition stream is on the horizon, as are HoD speedrunning practice streams. That'll be a good way to iron out whatever weird freezing thing happens.

Now that I no longer am putting away money for my computer I hope to get back to commissioning art. I've sorta lost the drive for it due to my physical and emotional health.

I'm hoping to be more active with friends in the coming months, even though seasonal depression has already started to punch me in the gut.

They already have christmas stuff out. Walmart didn't even have halloween stuff this year they just went straight to christmas. All I can think about when reminded of the holiday is how it's the reason my last dog is dead. I have absolutely no reason to get into any sort of festivities this year and I am dreading how the corporate world is going to smother me with it in a way that is unavoidable.

Don't think I'm even going to celebrate the Winter Solstice this year. It just feels wrong.

Friends are already talking about doing their shopping and getting gifts and I'm walking past the isles in the stores and it just hurts. Just wish this year could just be fall and then spring. No winter.

I know this year is tough for everyone so I don't want to ruin whatever comfort my friends may be getting from the holiday, but it's a painful reminder to me and I was already avoidant of christmas on account of celebrating the Solstice instead. Before I could celebrate christmas with friends who did and had my own fun surrounding it but now all I can think about is how the last light of my life died of a preventable respiratory infection because the emergency vet office was closed. I'm the one who should have died of respiratory issues. That's what I'm predisposed to. Not her. It's one of the most horrific ways to die and I'd only ever wish it on my worst enemies. How many times have I scraped by from viral pneumonia and everything else and when my Zippy gets kennel cough for no fucking reason they just fucking kill her without telling me.

The thing is, the Spot photos are from Christmas so I wish I could just associate it with Spot instead but no.

I meant for this post to be positive primarily but in writing this out I think I've pinpointed why the seasonal depression is so hard on me right now.

My friend and I are going to be watching horror movies in costume on Halloween eating candy so I'm looking forward to that.

A green apple scented Spot is also coming from Lilsprout (same person who made Penumbra) so that's something good to look forward to as well.

I may try weighting and scenting my new Spot who I'm planning to get a service dog vest for. Also if anyone knows how to fix heat damaged fake fur fabric please let me know.

I just wish I could ignore christmas. It's such an alienating and depressing holiday if your loved ones are dead and you feel alone and hopeless.

I've started taking melatonin and it is really helping me sleep. Apparently it causes very lucid dreams. The first night I took it I had a lucid dream that was like I was awake but not. Briefly the new Spot lying beside me shifted into being Zippy (her specifically, not Spot) and I felt such a profound comfort as if she had visited me. I feel that's what Red Spot originally felt like when I was little, thinking this imaginary dog was Spot visiting me.

Was sad when I finally woke up though. Tried to do the thing where I stayed in the dream but my back pain got too bad and I had to get up.

Once I've done the laundry tomorrow and had some time to rest I'm sure I'll be more active online again. I hope. Will is streaming the Seventh Brother on the 30th so a bunch of friends are finally going to see the movie that the tired and weak crying puppy is from.

I don't really have any tasks out of my house to do right now except maybe some more groceries in a couple weeks. Of course my desire to go to thrift stores is ever present. I help buy gas so I should get to go lmao.

Think I'll listen to upbeat music now and then take my medicine. Hopefully less serious updates in the future soon.

For now my test stream is still available in VOD form on my twitch http://www.twitch.tv/finsterhund and I'm planning to upload it to YouTube later.

Take care of yourselves, and if you see stuffed dogs I'm your travels that look like Spot... I am interested. 👀

#text post #negative #long post #update

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zanytimetravelenthusiast-blog · 4 years

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iexistband-blog · 4 years

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Spotify meets Augmented Reality - A Five Year Journey

The I-Exist app is available now on the App Store and Google Play!

Thinking about how music might evolve into the future has always been interesting to us, but really, this project started as two guys looking to the past - imagining their younger selves being obsessed with their favorite bands and listening to those albums on repeat. Back then, we would buy physical cds - with the plastic case and the album artwork and everything. Usually all of the lyrics would be in there too, and if you were really into the music, you could look through the pages and sort of get lost in the whole thing while the music played.

Flash forward to today, and here we are with our smartphones and these unlimited music streaming services. It’s a pretty amazing thing with all of it at our fingertips, but we felt like there was still something missing. With all of today’s crazy technology, we imagined what it might be like to take that old school album art of cd’s and vinyl, and somehow wrap it around a listener’s head to transport them into another world.

That was five years ago.

We are I-Exist, two life-long musicians who took the red pill and learned how to program and develop in order to bring this idea to life. Looking back on things, it was without a doubt the most challenging thing we’ve ever done, but we learned so much and are finally ready to share some of that perspective with you here.

ENTER THE ALBUM

So with our new album Consciousness, we thought of what it might be like to create a world for our songs to live in - and for people to come and experience them in different ways. We started developing in VR, even though we knew the world wasn’t ready. There is something so undeniable about its power in completely immersing the listener once they have the headset on, but we also kept mobile in mind, knowing that everyone has a powerful smartphone - and wondered if we could create some kind of window into that same world, so everyone could check it out.

As we built out smartphone functionality, we eventually landed on a camera system that reacts to the way you tilt and move your device, similar to how a lot of augmented reality apps work. We layered that with a traditional music player UI so that the user can enter and exit the space - and also have access to traditional app buttons and options.

We thought to ourselves, now that we have these new systems in place, what kind of content is really worth delivering?

IS THIS THE FUTURE?

It’s exciting to come up with something new, but is it what listeners really want? People already have an established routine for listening to music, whether it’s in the car, at the gym, or maybe multitasking with something else while they have their headphones on. How are we supposed to compete with that?

And the answer there is that we probably can’t. Spotify and Apple Music have pretty much perfected the modern listening experience, no matter how passive it might be. But right there is where the key is for us, it’s a PASSIVE experience. We wondered if we could add something more ACTIVE when you want to dig deeper - or for when you finally become a “super fan” of your new favorite artist.

As it turns out, musicians have been creating content like this for years, it’s just gotten lost a bit here in the streaming age. Do you remember deluxe cds? The ones that maybe had a few additional acoustic tracks thrown in at the end? Or maybe a collectors edition that had a full commentary section from the artist? We found that kind of content to be the most compelling and ended up mixing it into our interactive 3D scenes.

We were already familiar with the status quo, and wondered which new ideas are actually worth delivering. Over five years of testing and brainstorming, we landed on three concepts that ended up working best.

EVERY SONG IS A WORLD

We wanted to create an easy and relaxing way to take in the lyrics, so we ended up creating a basic 3D environment for each song - which gives the listener full freedom of movement to walk around in and explore. We imagined each section of the song being represented as a space on the map, and as they move deeper into that space, lines from the song rise up from the ground as text along with an ambient vocal sample playing in the background. They can take it as slow or as fast as they want, it’s all happening in real time..

While you could argue that reading lyrics from a random web search gets the job done, for us, that just isn’t very inspiring. Thankfully, bringing people into this surreal type of dimension turned out to be a pretty cool experience.. You could imagine more ways to give the listener freedom, whether that’s interacting with other sounds or manipulating physical objects, but we’re pretty happy with the basic movement and idea.

AMBISONIC CHAMBER

By the time you download the app, you might have already heard the studio recording of the song somewhere else, but what about the live performance? One thing that traditional music players are stuck with are their static left and right audio channels. What’s great about AR and VR though, is that you are essentially giving the listener control back of their head and ears, which means they can look around freely in the world. This opens up a lot of opportunities for a more immersive listening experience. Audiophiles out there are probably already aware of this stuff, but the way our head and ears move around in a physical space can give our brains cues that they're actually inside a certain type of room.

Anyway, we utilized real-time spatial audio and ambisonics, modeled the room for our private performance, and had a multitrack recording session with acoustic instruments. It ended up being a pretty cool way to give exclusive content to our fans, especially when you consider that we’ll probably never get to play in their living rooms… but now it kind of sounds like we are.

FIRESIDE CHAT

We thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we could sit down at a fire with our fans and tell them some of the deeper stories of how the songs came to be. That would be a pretty intimate way to talk and connect. So that’s what we did. We created a sandy outdoor area with a fire, took the same spatial audio concept from the acoustic room, and just like that… we’re all sitting next to each other by the fire, talking about each song on our new album.

WHAT ABOUT VR?

So those are the ideas that worked out for both AR and VR, but like we said at the beginning, nothing really beats the immersion of a virtual reality headset. If you think about it, this is really the only time we’ll ever have someone’s full focus and attention, and that makes every part of the app more effective. We even made a VR exclusive mode that sort of acts like an interactive visualizer while the original track plays. When you combine that with something like the SubPac, which is a haptic, subwoofer backpack... now their whole body is moving and vibrating with the music. This is pretty much the holy grail, multi-sensory experience that we’d love to give all our listeners, but realize it’s not for most ;-)

WHERE WE ARE TODAY

So after all this time, here we are reporting back to the world with this thing we made. It’s definitely not perfect and we could write multiple other articles about what it’s missing and how it needs improvement - but we’re glad that we didn’t quit and are curious what people might think.

We’re releasing it today with the intro and first world, but in the coming days and weeks we’ll be unlocking portals inside the app that open up new areas and songs. With the whole COVID-19 thing, hopefully that can give something for people to look forward to as they’re locked inside.

Since everyone has a phone, we focused on the mobile build first, which is available now. We’re also releasing on SteamVR on May 12th for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Valve Index, and Windows Mixed Reality. PSVR and Oculus Quest versions are also planned for later in the year, but those are going to take a little more optimization.

So we’ve made it to the end and some things have become clear, but there are still a lot of unknowns. Like… is this something the world even wants? Should we open source the project? If we start getting feedback and decide to continue development, where else could we take it? Feel free to check out the app and let us know what you think! We’ll be waiting for you in a digital, alternate dimension.

Brian and Cameron

I-Exist

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vohskyfire · 7 years

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Metroid: Samus Returns Review

2017 has been a great year for games. Like, a really great year.

Nintendo had the critically acclaimed Breath of the Wild, the Switch has been a massive success, Persona 5 happened, Crash Trilogy was released to the public, Fire Emblem Shadows of Valentia: Echoes was released, Fire Emblem Heroes has been received nicely, Splatoon 2 and Arms are awesome. And surprisingly, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is one of the best new games to come out from the Mario franchise. (And that's saying something since it's the Rabbids.)

Then E3 happened. While it was mostly boring, a lot of people got incredibly hyped up for Nintendo. Who came out swinging with big names for their franchises, and ONE game was dropped that shocked everyone.

Metroid Prime 4.

Metroid, which many people thought was dead, was alive again. And people were screaming in joy.

Little did we know though, that it wasn't the only Metroid to be revealed.

Another one was shown at E3 as well during that live stream, a new 2D Metroid that was the official remake from Nintendo for Metroid 2, Return of Samus. Entitled "Metroid: Samus Returns."

(And then everyone knew why that pulled a take down on AMR2, but that is NOT the subject of this review.)

Everyone immediately flipped their shit. 2 Metroid games announced, and one was coming out THIS YEAR in September. And it was clear as day to see, Metroid was alive and kicking.

Samus Returns, while having a big hand from Nintendo during the development, was developed my Mercury Steam. A company that got famous for doing Castlevania Lords of Shadow, a series that has the fans split, and before that game Clive Barker's Jericho. So it was very interesting to see this European team come to Nintendo with the idea of remaking a Metroid title.

And to me at least? Nintendo and Sakamoto picked the right team to do the job.

Without a doubt, this is the 3DS' Swan Song. The last great game on the system before Nintendo eventually pulls the plug on the greatest hand held ever to give the Switch the attention that it deserves.

Samus Returns is a fantastic game. Everything that fans of the 2D Metroids love is in this game, and it is done beautifully. Environments look crisp, character models look right at home for the 3DS, though at times they can appear to be a little jagged, are beautiful models. Graphics wise, it's probably one of the best looking 3DS games on the market. If not the best looking 3DS game to date.

Gameplay wise, Samus Returns is a, no pun intended, a return to the series' 2D giant map exploring roots from the previous entrees in the franchise. Samus can jump, roll, shoot, and collect items just like she could in the older games. So nothing has really changed all that much in terms of gameplay from the older games.

Though, there are new functions that help make the game feel a lot better than the predecessors in the 2D Metroid games.

The ability to aim in a 360 angle. The counter attack. And the Aeion abilities.

The first one is something I feel Metroid games SHOULD have had from the very beginning. Being able to aim in ANY direction is a goddamn god send. Especially when you're trying to make some of the trickier shots in this game. (TAKE NOTE, SUPER METROID YOU OVERRATED PIECE OF-) The only kind of down side is that you can't move and aim anywhere you want when you use this mode. I guess they were aiming for realism a bit that Samus can only shoot at all directions when standing still, but being able to shoot anywhere on the move would help as well. But for what it was meant to do, the 360 aiming does it well.

The next is the counter attack. Hands down, one of the best new moves in the series. And by best, I mean it can be ridiculous OP in the right moments. Whenever you counter an enemy, be it boss or regular, the counter will leave them wide open enough for you to unleash a powerful attack into them that kills them in one shot (Or if it's a Metroid, you get a cool moment of Samus just owning the fuck out of the Metroid evolution) that often gives you energy or missile ammo as an award for pulling off a successful counter. If you get really good with the Counter, you might find yourself using it way more than the actual weapons that Samus usually uses.

And finally, the Aeion abilities.

Hands down, one of the best things to be added into the series.

The Aeion abilities give Samus four unique skills that can be used by equipping them with the D-Pad and using them with the A Button. Scan (which reveals a part of the map and hidden items), Lighting Armor (reduces damage you take and hurts the enemy that hit you), Rapid Fire (WHICH KILLS EVERYTHING), and Slow Time Down (Obvious explanation is obvious) These four moves are incredibly useful and are necessarily for your survival and exploration of SR388. Now don't worry, they maybe overpowered by they require a new energy bar. The Aeion Energy Bar. This bar goes down quiet a bit if you abuse your Aeion abilities way too much. And in this game resources for your weapons and abilities are everything. There's also little robots that activate an EMP of some kind to fuck around with your ability to use the Aeion Abilities, so don't rely on them TOO much.

The overall objective of this game is pretty much what Metroid 2, and AMR2, was. Kill all the Metroids in sight. And while the ending does have a bit of a twist to it, it's a cut and paste version of the story. Nothing needed to be changed that much, and it is good to see them not change the story too much.

Bottom line though? This is easily one of the best 3DS games ever made. And it damn sure is the best 2D Metroid game ever made as well. Yes, even better than SUPER Metroid. If Mercury Steam is brought back to make Metroid Dread, or even remake Super Metroid, I would be a hundred percent down with this idea.

There's really not a lot to complain about with this game. Other than the fact that you can get lost easily, it's a solid damn good game.

9.5/10: Get it and play it/ It deserves the praise.

#Metroid: Samus Returns #Review #3DS #Nintendo #Samus Aran #Metroids #Baby Metroid

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mthrynn · 6 years

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Thus week’s SC17 keynote – Life, the Universe and Computing: The Story of the SKA Telescope – was a powerful pitch for the potential of Big Science projects that also showcased the foundational role of high performance computing in modern science. It was also visually stunning as images of stars and galaxies and tiny telescopes and giant telescopes streamed across the high definition screen extended the length of Colorado Convention Center ballroom’s stage. One was reminded of astronomer Carl Sagan narrating the Cosmos TV series.

SKA, you may know, is the Square Kilometre Array project being run by an international consortium and intended to build the largest radio telescope in the world; it be 50 times more powerful than any other radio telescope today. The largest today is ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) located in Chile and has 66 dishes.

SKA will be sited in two locations, South Africa, and Australia. The two keynoters Philip Diamond, Director General of SKA, and Rosie Bolton, SKA Regional Centre Project Scientist and Project Scientist for the international engineering consortium designing the high performance computers, took turns outlining radio astronomy history and SKA ambition to build on that. Theirs was a swiftly-moving talk, both entertaining and informative. The visuals flashing adding to the impact.

Their core message: This massive new telescope (I guess you could say two telescopes) will open a new window on astrophysical phenomena and create a mountain of data for scientists to work on for years. SKA, say Diamond and Bolton, will help clarify the early evolution of the universe, be able to detect gravitational waves by their effect on pulsars, shed light on dark matter, produce insight around cosmic magnetism, create detailed, accurate 3D maps of galaxies, and much more. It could even play a SETI like role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

“When fully deployed, SKA will be able to detect TV signals, if they exist, from the nearest tens maybe 100 stars and will be able to detect the airport radars across the entire galaxy,” said Diamond, in response to a question. SKA is creating a new government organization to run the observatory, “something like CERN or the European Space Agency, and [we] are now very close to having this process finalized,” said Diamond.

Indeed this is exciting stuff. It is also incredibly computationally intensive. Think about an army of dish arrays and antennas, capturing signals 24×7, moving them over high speed networks to one of two digital “signal processing facilities”, one for each location, and then on to two ‘science data processors” centers (think big computers). And let’s not forget data must be made available to scientists around the world.

Consider just a few data points, shown below, that were flashed across stage during the keynote presentation. The context will become clearer later.

It’s a grand vision and there’s still a long way to go. SKA, like all Big Science projects, won’t happen overnight. SKA was first conceived in 90s at the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) which established the Large Telescope Working Group to begin a worldwide effort to develop the scientific goals and technical specifications for a next generation radio observatory. The idea arose to create a “hydrogen array” able to detect H radiofrequency emission (~1420 MHz). A square kilometer was required to have a large enough collection area to see back into the early universe. In 2011 those efforts consolidated in a not-for-project company that now has ten member countries (link to brief history of SKA). The U.S. which did participate in early SKA efforts chose not to join the consortium at the time.

Although first conceived as a hydrogen array, Diamond emphasized, “With a telescope of that size you can study many things. Even in its early stages SKA will be able to map galaxies early in the universe evolution. When full deployed it will conduct fullest galaxy mapping in 3D encompassing up to one million individual galaxies and cover 12.5 billon years of cosmic history.”

A two-phase deployment is planned. “We’re heading full steam towards critical design reviews next year,” said Diamond. Full construction starts in two years with construction of the first phase expected to begin in 2019. So far €200 have been committed for design along with “a large fraction” of the €640 required for first phase construction. Clearly there are technology and funding hurdles ahead. Diamond quipped if the U.S. were to join SKA and pony up, say $2 billion, they would ‘fix’ the spelling of kilometre to kilometer.

There will actually be two telescopes, one in South Africa about 600 km north of Cape Town and another one roughly 800 km north of Perth in western Australia. They are being located in remote regions to reduce radiofrequency interference from human activities.

“In South Africa we are going to be building close to 200 dishes, 15 meters in diameter, and the dishes will be spread over 150 km. They [will operate] over a frequency range of 350 MHz to 14 GHz. In Australia we will build 512 clusters, each of 256 antennas. That means a total of over 130,000 2-meter tall antennas, spread over 65 km. these low frequency antennas will be tapered with periodic dipoles and will cover the frequency range 50 to 350MHz. It is this array that will be the time machine that observes hydrogen all the way back to the dawn of the universe.”

Pretty cool stuff. Converting those signals is a mammoth task. SKA plans two different types of processing center for each location. “The radio waves induce voltages in the receivers that capture them and modern technology allows us to digitize them to high precision than ever before. From there optical fibers transmit the digital data from the telescopes to what we call central processing facilities or (CPFs). There’s one for each telescope,” said Bolton.

Using a variety of technologies including “some exciting FPGA, CPU-GU, and hybrids”, CPFs are where the signals are combined. Great care must be taken to first synchronize the data so it enters the processing chain exactly when it should to account for the fact the radio waves from space reached one antenna before reaching another. “We need to correct that phase offset down to the nanosecond,” said Bolton.

Once that’s done a Fourier transform is applied to the data. “It decomposes essentially a function of time into the frequencies that make it up; it moves us into the frequency domain. We do this with such precision that the SKA will be able to process 65000 different radio frequencies simultaneously,” said Diamond

Once the signals have been separated in frequencies they processed one of two ways. “We can either stack the signals together of various antenna in what we call a time domain data. Each stacking operation corresponds to a different direction in the sky. We’ll be able to look at 2000 such directions simultaneously. This time domain processing analysis detects repeating objects such as pulsars or one off events like gamma ray explosions. If we do find an event, we are planning to store the raw voltage signals at the antennae for a few minutes so we can go back in time and investigate them to see what happened,” said Bolton.

This time domain data can be used by researchers to measure pulsar – which are a bit like cosmic lighthouses – signal arrival times accurately and detect the drift if there is one as a gravitational wave passes through.

“We can also use these radio signals to make images of the sky. To do that we take the signals from each pair if antennas, each baseline, and effectively multiply them together generating data objects we call visibilities. Imagine it will be done for 200 dishes and 512 groups of antennas, that’s 150,000 baselines ad 65000 different frequencies. That makes up to 10B different data streams. Doing this is a data intensive process that requires around 50 petaflops of dedicated digital signal processing.

Signals are processed inside these central processing facilities in a way that depends on the science that “we want to do with them. Once processed the data are then sent via more fiber optic cables to the Science Data Processors or SDPs. Two of these “great supercomputers” are planned, one in Cape Town for the dish array and one in Perth for low frequency antennas.

“We have two flavors of data within the science processor. In the time domain we’ll do panning for astrophysical gold, searching over 1.5M candidate objects every ten minutes sniffing out the real astrophysical phenomena such as pulsar signals or flashes of radio light,” said Diamond. The expectation is for a 10,000 to 1 negative-to-positive events. Machine learning will play a key role in finding the “gold”.

Making sense of the 10 billion incoming visibility data streams poses the greatest computational burden, emphasized Bolton: “This is really hard because inside the visibilities (data objects) of the sky and antenna responses are all jumbled. We need to do another massive Fourier transform to get from the visibility space that depends on the antenna separations to sky planes. Ultimately we need to develop self-consistent models not only of the sky that generated the signals but also how each antenna was behaving and even how the atmosphere was changing during the data gathering.

“We can’t do that in one fell swoop. Instead we’ll have several iterations trying to find the calibration parameters and source positions of brightnesses.” With each iteration bit by bit, fainter and fainter signal emerge from the noise. “Every time we do another iteration we apply different calibration techniques and we improve a lot of them but we can’t be sure when this process is going to converge so it is going to be difficult,” said Bolton.

A typical SKA map, she said, will probably contain hundreds of thousands of radio array sources. The incoming images are about 10 petabytes in size. Output 3D images are 5000 pixels on each axis and 1 petabyte in size.

Distributing this data to scientists for analysis is another huge challenge. The plan is to distribute data via fiber to SKA regional centers. “This another real game changer that the SKA, CERN, and a few other facilities are bringing about. Scientists will use the computing power of the SKA regional centers to analyze these data products,” said Diamond.

The keynote was a wowing, multimedia presentation, and warmly received by attendees. It bears repeating that many issues remain and schedules have slipped slightly, but it is still a stellar example of Big Science, requiring massively coordinated international efforts, and underpinned with enormous computing resources. Such collaboration is well aligned with SC17’s theme – HPC Connects.

Link to video recording of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2522&v=VceKNiRxDBc

The post SC17 Keynote – HPC Powers SKA Efforts to Peer Deep into the Cosmos appeared first on HPCwire.

via Government – HPCwire

#Government – HPCwire

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samjduffy4 · 7 years

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Assignment 1 Reflection

The first assignment has been a big learning curve for me. Not only for the content covered in the subject, but for how I manage my time, work through the pipeline for each task and in general how to create a better-looking outcome. I feel like as the milestones progressed, I put more and more effort into creating a better product and I want that to continue in the work I do in the future. In terms of content, I have experimented with character creation, something I have always wanted to do but never have done before, animation, which is something that I love doing and am half decent at, compositing and finally lighting. Out of these, my strongest ability is the animation, I have animated multiple scenes before and hope to continue to animate more. From the start of this assignment I haven’t been satisfied with my animations, and that I believe comes down to me and will only improve if I improve my habits. The animations always felt rushed for me, as if I always left them till they were either too late, or I thought that I left it till it was too late so I would move onto the next parts of the assignment that I was less confident in.

Through researching and experimenting, I have learnt how to light a character and started learning how composite the character in the shot, which is something that I would like to learn more about and do more with in the future. I believe that composition is one of the most important parts of any kind of film making and although I know a little bit about it, I want to learn how to composite a shot really well as it will help in every kind of film and photography. Another part of the milestones that I was really intrigued by was the ARTV1 tools and creating the basic geometry character models. This is one of the first times that I have experimented with character creation and is something that I have always been interested in doing. The character creation is also something that I would like to improve on and do more of as it incorporates elements from modelling, texturing and rigging, all of which will be used in the creation of virtual environments and storytelling assets. I think that the main improvements that I need to do are create habits to manage my time and stop me from getting distracted as this is definitely a huge problem that if fixed can completely enhance the quality of my work.

As of this moment, I am unsure of exactly which specialised stream that I would like to further explore, however, I have narrowed it down to focus on either building a character rig or something in the visual effects development stream. I would love to focus on the character creation stream as it will give me experience in modelling, texturing and rigging which is important in all asset creation. It also gives me an opportunity to further develop my animation skills and give me a better understanding and experience in the animation pipeline. I would also like to develop my skills in visual effects because it is something I haven’t had as much experience in and would find it interesting to try out. Despite which stream I choose to focus my time in, my objectives for the next assignment is to produce something that is quality and that I can not only be proud of but keep for my future portfolio and maybe even show reel.

A job that I would love to do in the future is a visual effects artist at a studio like AltVFX or Cutting edge. These studios do a lot of work for Australian television and film and that is what got me interested in animation and visual effects. These studios also do a lot of visual effects that relate to the visual effects stream for digital matte painting and creating believable worlds out of already existing environments. Another dream studio that I aspire to work for is Pixar animation studios. This studio creates the most incredible animations, characters and stories I have ever seen. I love how they take situations that are unbelievable and make you feel as though they could happen. Their animation quality is beautiful and is something that I aspire to be like.

For the two streams that I am looking at, I will definitely require a lot of extra knowledge that I currently don’t have. For the character creation stream, I will mostly need to understand how a character model interacts with a rigging skeleton and how to actually create that rig. Finding out how a rig interacts with a model is something that I know the basics of and have had experience in with animating, however, I will need to research it further so that I can understand what will work when I am creating the actual model. I will also have to learn the rigging tools because I have never created a skeleton for a character before.

I have a current understanding in animation, basic motion graphics and VFX, modelling and texturing, all which will be useful working towards my goal of working at one of these studios I mentioned earlier. However, throughout this semester and the rest of my time at UNI, I will have to better develop my time management skills, understand the pipeline in more detail, get a better understanding of VFX and animation and learn how to rig a character that not only works but is easy to use.

To further develop my understanding of these concepts, I have found a few resources. The first resource is provided by QUT and is Pluralsight. This tool will be invaluable to my research as it will take me through the process of how to not only set up a rig for animation but will also explain how to matte paint and other such VFX. Another valuable resource will be the School of Media Design. This resource shows the basics of rigging at a beginner’s level, this will help me as I have never done any rigging before. The final resource that I have found is the UE4 YouTube channel as they show how to implement everything else into a real-time 3d environment.

Hopefully this will all aid me in creating the best product I can possibly create in the second assignment.

#KNB221 #CGTOOLKIT #ASSIGNMENT 1 #REFLECTION

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occupyscifi · 7 years

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Chaff

"hey, I don't mind adverts" said Shellay Smithson as she casually vaped from the e-meth pipe. It was Friday night at the Junior Hedonists Ball and all the perma-terns were there drinking their weekly salary "I just don't like adverts that try to sell me things I actually want" "yeah, too right" said Sampson, ur bald androgynous head bobbing in time to the music ee was streaming direct to ur ears. For her part Shellay preferred to hear the house tunes, old fashioned style. Though the Junior Hedonists Ball tended to have a very specific aesthetic it took place in the nearest pub to the office. The pub itself was an ancient looking glazed brick building, its interior ripped out to satisfy certain steampunk machine gothic tastes. That the entire building had been standing for less time than Shellay had been working in social media relations didn't matter. The city around her changed so much and so quickly Shellay barely noticed even when whole streets and neighbourhoods vanished. Once upon a time fashion had merely been about clothes and hairstyles. Now with largescale 3d printing meaning that the average time to build an entire street could be measured in days whole neighbourhoods came and went according to the whims of fashion. Shellay could still remember last season’s look- Bauhaus glam with a hint of gay seventies New York. Not her favourite style, but she was clearly in a minority. Even so she knew she only needed to go across the river to the parklands to drink up the whole Victorian glasshouse vibe. She could never get enough of Crystal Palaces with their ornate manmade flower displays. She wondered idly if it was still there, but then a glance in her smartglasses told her the truth. Day pass to the new arboretum extension for half price. Just the thing to take her latest fella on the weekend. That grated, made her feel cheap. What was the point in doing anything if it was given straight to you? Everyone knew the best things in life were what you earned for yourself. "I'm getting sick of getting what I want" continued Sampson, ur delicate eyes narrowing "maybe it’s time to start getting what I don't want" "no, but seriously. It’s really pissing me off” said Shellay, knowing that Sampson was just quoting the lines from a song. Probably one ee'd written as well. All artists were self referential but Sampson found it hard to be anything else "it just, well, it just sucks the fun out of life. I'd like things to be a little random, know what I mean?" she took a hit on the pipe and looked around the lounge of the junior hedonists ball. Several dozen long thin creatives lounged at different fey angles. On the walls adverts that were linked to her smartglasses told her of her favourite bands and when they'd be in town "I used to like being surprised by getting ads for shit I'd never ever want" "life insurance" said Sampson with a grin "or incontinence pants. Seeing hundreds of ads on the tube trying to sell me bank products I could never afford. I used to like that" ee looked nostalgically into the middle distance "knowing that it didn't matter how little money I had, because I certainly wasn't going to spend it on any of that crap" ee sighed "now I find myself reaching into my pocket all the time because as soon as there's a new line of grungesynths in at Hypersound or if they start reissuing genuine vintage Konverse I know about it, like, point 9 seconds later. I'm just one click away from bankruptcy" "yeah, it’s killing me too" agreed Shellay, leaning back against the black crushed velvet furnishings. She noticed that there was a link on the wall for a new hypermodernist night club on the New Kent Road. One she had been wanting to go to for weeks but her bank balance hadn't been healthy enough "I mean, for fucks sake, how do they always know?" "S'your line of work love" said Sampson, taking a deep draught of ur snakebite and black "all algorithms isn't it? Way we learned it at school every time you do a search, every time you buy something or even look too long at an ad it gets recorded. Ol' google and FB and the rest keep a big bloody list so advertisers can build a virtual model of what you like and what you hate so they can make sure your eyeballs only ever see good old high value content" "huh. Well I guess you paid attention at school more than me" said Shellay, sipping her red wine "besides, I do apps. I design little programs that make life easier for people. Algorithms and all that are big level stuff. Not my cup of tea at all" "well maybe you should design an app" said Sampson, eyeing an ad for the sort of casual cuddle encounter that ee craved on those long lonely weekends "you know, like an adblocker, but instead of showing nothing it lets in ads people don't want to buy. Same difference I guess, but at least someone sees the ads" "yeah, I like that” said shellay idly "but don't they still have the death penalty for ad blocking software?" "nah" said Samspon "just life with no WIFI" “you’re right. That’s probably worse”

The idea should have joined the other half drunk, half stoned conversations between Sampson and Shellay- posted to social media and then forgotten about. But for some reason it didn't, not least because several days later Shellay saw some market research that confirmed that it wasn't just her and Sampson that were getting pissed off at getting all they wanted. Shellay read through it thoughtfully and got designing. "I mean, it wouldn't be too hard to do, would it?" she asked Jackie Oh, her legal advisor and chief coder. They were sitting in Regents park, in a popup coffee place resembling a Mongol Yurt – one seemingly designed by Alexander Hemingway "we don't even have to use adblocker, we can rip off some of that old TOR code, right?" "no one's used TOR in years" said Jackie "it’s like a red rag to the software gods" she nodded up at the holy trinity up on the wall- Google, Apple and Facebook "because for them if they don't know who you are then they don't have a business model. If you aren't a trackable node then they can't sell your data. And without that they've got nothing" "well, that isn't really what I want to do" said Shellay "it’s really the opposite. I want to send out false data, you know get the app to do random searches for things so you get ads for tampons if you're a bloke or whatever. The advertisers shouldn't notice because it’s not like you're blocking the ads, if anything technically you should be seeing even more of them" "I guess it can be done” said Jackie, scratching her head. The open plan coffee yurt in the park was a focal point for the sort of popup office in which Shellay like to do business "but why? I mean, who the fuck wants to see ads for things they don't want to buy?" "you'd be surprised" said Shellay "there's always a niche in the market, and besides as soon as people get what they want then they usually want the opposite straight away. That's a law of human nature. I mean that's why Hindr was so successful. Who'd have thought a dating app that matched you with the most unsuitable person ever would be so popular? It's like half of my married friends met on there" “Huh, I suppose" said Jackie, stretching her fingers in the imitation gauze contact gloves that allowed her to manipulate the code she spent her life immersed in "but, you know, just in case it's not. I'm still getting paid. Right?" "this will work" said Shellay, sketching out the design of the app already. She'd make sure that the interface showed a melange of ads that people didn't usually see anymore. She paused for a moment to think about the name. Something short and punchy. Well, that would come last. You always knew a good name when you heard it, and sometimes a rubbish name was even better. So long as it stuck in your head it didn’t matter. "chaff" said Jackie after a few minutes, a statement so out of the blue that Shellay almost spilled hr cup of magic mushroom tea. It didn't help of course that the shrooms were coming along a little stronger than planned. Her own fault for ordering the grande instead of the regular. "the fuck?" "its what the code was for. Back in the day. The TOR code" sighed Jackie, wondering why people didn't just have the auto explain on their smartglasses enabled at all times. It had certainly helped her navigate the minefields of social interaction. Now she was so socially adept she could detect irony so long as it was made fairly obvious "it’s a military thing. Best way apparently if you're in a jet plane and someone locks a missile onto you. Well, you can't outrun it and you probably can't shoot it down because it’s too small. Instead what the jet would do was let out a bunch of little silver bits of paper that would confuse the targeting system of the missile. Meant that instead of detonating against the jet they'd just blow up in the air" "what's this got to do with my software?" asked Shellay, wondering whether the shrooms were making this impossible to understand or whether Jackie was just babbling shit. "it’s what the TOR code did. False positives. Means that the missile- you know, Google or whoever – can't get a lock on you because the software performs random searches in your name. Added into that the software can access your cam and fuck with the eye recognition. Meaning you can pretend that you've spent ages looking at this or that ad. It'll totally fuck the tracking software. They won't know who you are or what you want" "cool" said Shellay "people get tired of their own personality anyway. They like to have someone else for a while. There's a reason people used to check into hotels using a false name" as she spoke she selfied, a quick kooky shot of her on the beanbag, evidence of her creativity around her. A few drawing pencils to make it look like she designed her apps the old fashioned way. This she then uploaded to the dozen or so social media sites on which she carefully curated her public persona "its nice to be anonymous for a change" "right" said Jackie, eyeing her own feed as it suddenly became dominated by chatter about the new app that Shellay was working on. As she watched Shellay carefully massaged into life several twitterbots and zombie accounts who would speculate wildly on the new idea she had "I'm sure you do. Anyway, at least you can use that for the name" "eh?" asked Shellay, slightly distracted "chaff" said Jackie, idly surfing in her e-glasses through great DNA ribbons of code, cutting and repasting them together into a new pattern as demanded by Shellay "S' what you can call the app" "genius" said Shellay, her eyes half closing as she looked at the light filtering into the yurt from outside. It made such pretty patterns on the inside of her eyelids.

Shellay didn't have many dealings with the police, what with her being a moderately wealthy middle class white woman coupled with the almost complete eradication of poor people from entering the city. So when the not very plainclothes man and woman grabbed her on the way back to her apartment some days later Shellay immediately texted her lawyer. "what’s the trouble officer?" she asked, then instantly regretted it. Using the word trouble suggested that she had a guilty conscience "how can I help you?" "oh, we're not with the police" said the male “you could have fooled me” said Shellay “what with the whole earpiece things you’ve got going on and the fact you’re both obviously wearing bulletproof vests. You couldn’t be more obviously in security if you were wearing a uniform” "we’re from an independent agency" said the female, her smile all sharp teeth and no humour. "one that dabbles in your chosen economic sphere" echoed the man "I'm not sure what that means" said Shellay baffled "are you the app police?" "no" said the female "but we represent some large advertising concerns. They aren't happy with your app" "why not?" asked Shellay “people still look at the adverts. So they get paid either way. What difference does it make to them?" "oh, it makes none. In fact they don't really give a shit. If they did, well, we'd probably be beating the crap out of you. They just wanted you to know that it’ll probably cause something of a shit storm" "why?" asked shellay "look at it this way" said the female "everything we do in society is based on market research. The sort of market research that comes from using ad revenues and pageviews. If enough people buy your app then it’s going to get seriously skewed because we won't know what people actually want" "you exaggerate" said shellay "all that's going to happen is a few people are gonna download my app, go 'huh, fun' for about ten seconds. Then they'll go onto something else. That’s what apps are about. It’s not something life changing, is it?" "lets hope not" said the female humourlessly "otherwise we'll be back, and we won't be so friendly"

"…and raise our glasses to Shellay, who made this event possible by making a fuck load of cash this week" Sampson raised ur glass and saluted the group of friends and hangers on who had filled the Junior Delinquents ball. The app had been out two weeks and so far had beaten even the most optimistic estimates, even those made by the most obvious of Shellay's sock puppets. "hey, it was nothing" said Shellay modestly, placing her lace gloved hand against her chest "and by that I mean I actually worked really fucking hard. And usually that means nothing. So its ace that people actually bothered to download this app" she saluted with her glass "Cheers guys" she added, and drained the glass in one. The evening would on as expected, Shellay prowled the room, making sure to flirt with anything and everything with two functioning legs. Eventually she found herself pressed against an earnest young researcher from a local bespoke search company. Rather like the bespoke tailors of years gone by his company specialised in finding all the things that google couldn't. The name that were too common to give a unique google search, the information redacted for copyright or decency reasons. If it existed and was worth looking for, it was reasoned, then someone was probably trying to hide it from you. Bespoke search meant you always found what you were looking for. "sounds fascinating" Shellay had yawned. She had a low threshold for earnest people. They always made the world sound so difficult. Full of hard moral choices when in reality everything was equally compromised, so you may as well have a good time. "well, we can't all do what you do" said the boy, and Shellay glared at him, one eye pressed closed so she could see whether he was being sarcastic or not through all the booze she'd drunk. "I'm serious" the boy added, his face blushing slightly "I think its genius. And so subtle. The big software boys don't seem to have twigged yet. By the time they do they'll be up shit creek and no mistake" "what d'you mean?” said Shellay, unsure whether the boy knew he was talking to. "chaff" said the boy, helpfully reminding her "its genius, pitched perfectly to take in both the retro market of people who remember when adverts weren't all micro targeted to our specific desires and to people like me who get the real deal" "real deal?" said Shellay weakly, the room was starting to spin and she was feeling suddenly rather sloshed. "that it's going to fuck capitalism up royally" beamed the boy "you got their weak spot. Without accurate information they can't know what we want. If they don't know what we want then they can't give us what we want. If they can't give us what we want then we'll rebel and take it ourselves. Its genius. Absolute bloody genius" "yeah. Yeah I meant that" said Shellay, leaning into the boy and putting an arm around his tweed encased shoulder "we should discuss this further. Perhaps somewhere quieter" But if they did discuss it Shellay didn't remember. When she woke up in the boy’s bed all she could recall was how he had pleasured her in the back of a self driving pedicab. They'd been riding through the new Manga district that had just been built and she'd orgasmed to the sight of a giant mecha Pikachu shooting past. Its jetsteam had been like rainbows, and if the boy had still been discussing the overthrow of the capitalist system she certainly wasn't listening.

The first time that Shellay noticed something was wrong was when she wanted to visit Regents Park. She was hankering for a grande Shroom latte and Jackie had wanted to go over some updates. The Chaff app was still selling well, and selling well enough to make sure that there were now about twenty knockoffs floating around. Shellay had cheerfully launched legal challenges in the hope of being bought off in order to add to her revenue stream. All in all life was going rather well, or it was until she noticed what had happened to the park. "what the fuck" said Shellay "oh yeah" said Jackie who had shared the uber with her "yeah, they changed it. I guess it just wasn't popular anymore" "what?" said Shellay, pointing at the vast block of buildings that had replaced one of her favourite haunts "and this is?" "well, I guess people like modernism again" Jackie replied, looking at the cold brutalist features of the blocks of buildings. They were the colour of London sky, and the windows were small and mean looking "I suppose we could hope that its going to get resprayed by graffiti artists or something. You know this grey block look really offsets electric pink…." "no such luck" said Shellay with a sigh, she had brought up the plans on the googlemaps app which tracked the ever changing city as it emerged from the great collective unconscious of the millions that lived there "its just going to stay like this. Why the fuck? I can't think anyone would like this" Jackie folded her arms "really, you don't know?" "trust me, apart from a few architecture perverts I can't think of anyone" "Maybe your app is having an effect already" "no way" said Shellay "come on, its random. It shouldn't have any effect on the data that goes into the great google-lord. There are filters and stuff" "clearly they aren't working" said Jackie, peeking at the planned developments on the drawing board for the next six months "and I can't see a single new district I'd actually like to live in. World of leather sounds so much more exciting than it really is" "seriously?" said Shellay, scrolling in horror through what the city would look like in a few mere weeks time. All the fashion chains she had loved to hate, the trashbarn where you could get an entire new wardrobe for a quid, all of them were being demolished in favour of entertainments that barely deserved the name. Museums of stamp collecting. Monuments to great engineers past and present. Massage parlours for the elderly. Who the fuck would want to visit that? "you think our app is doing this?" "I can't think of anything else that would" said Jackie "not unless the people of this city have a sudden stiffy for a district made of glass dogs, or one built to resemble the bombed out London streets of the blitz" "that last one sounds fun" said Shellay hopefully "no, its very realistic" said Jackie "right down to the dead bodies and the potholes in the road. And the rationing. I saw it this morning. It was trending on WTFF news" "shit. Maybe it is us" said Shellay, blinking in surprise "fuck, maybe we did do this. We broke the world with our app. And if we broke the world with randomness…." she turned to Jackie with shining eyes "just imagine what we could do if we planned it" "way ahead of you boss" said Jackie, tapping away in the empty air "I can change the code so we can get anything we want. You fancy having a district based on that crappy kids show you loved?" "hey, Round the Twist was ace" said Shellay irately "and yes, yes I do" "then its just a matter of…." Began Jackie and then trailed off, the smile draining from her face "what is it?" asked Shellay "can't we alter the code? We put it there, so we should be able to" "you didn't tell me you did this" said Jackie, looking at Shellay accusingly. "do what?" asked Shellay, suddenly confused "I've been locked out" said Jackie "specifically you’ve locked me out. Is it because you've found another coder? Because if it is can I just tell you that…." "what other coder? What are you talking about?" asked shellay "I haven't done anything with the code. I'm a designer. I do concepts and colours. Numbers is your domain" "well somehow you locked me out” said Jackie irately "and so I can't do anything till you let me back in" "oh for fucks sake" said Shellay "clearly there's been some kind of mistake" she pulled on her smartglasses and brought up the interface for her app "I'll reset the admin privileges so you can get back in there. And hurry, I want to start fucking with the city. I’ve always wanted to shape something using just the power of my psyche" But it would be easier said than done. Passwords were entered only to be rejected. Appeals to the higher name of security scans, iris and thumb print were likewise rejected. "someone's hacked you" said Jackie plainly "they've changed your access codes. You better just hope they're doing it to extort money, because if they've twigged how powerful Chaff can be then we are in deep shit" Jackie looked closely at Shellay "so is there anyone you suspect could have done this? Have you shared any intimate moments recently?" "just one" said Shellay "but he was such a sweet guy. All he went on about was…." She trailed off, recalling the boy who'd gone on about the end of capitalism. The swirl of pink mist where her memories should be "that bloody bastard" she cursed "he's hacked me. He's going to bring about the end of capitalism, using my fucking app" she stared about her at the city, recoiling with horror as she imagined the blasphemies that the errant code would create. She imagined whole districts devoted to living examples of Marxist theory, roads that were named after obscure soviet thinkers “oh christ” she said, looking at Jackie in terror “I think we broke the world”

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mikegchambers · 7 years

Text

NOW Is the Time to Start Thinking About the First Killer IoT App

Start with your wildest Sci-Fi fantasies, drill down to practical use cases, then work backward toward available tools & technologies

It would seem IoT is off the blocks and out of the garage at last, but it’s still more or less idling in the driveway while everyone figures out what kind of vehicle it is and where to drive it.

We’ve yet to see the first IoT killer app: the use case that will take IoT to the next level by blowing right past all the nice-to-have and fun-to-have capabilities we’ve already seen — and cross into how-did-I-ever-live-without-this territory.

Stop Thinking Outside The Box. With IoT — There Is No Box

With IoT, the greatest breakthroughs will only come when devs fully internalize the fact that with IoT there is no box, and it’s a mistake to keep using the box as a reference point.

IoT functionality we’ve seen released for consumers to date is based on, and to some extent, modeled after mobile apps. Developers typically start with a mobile app or mobile app / hardware interactivity concept, then essentially port some of its functionality to a voice interface or automated process. Which is not much more of an upgrade, or difference in user experience, than going from a mouse click to a screen swipe.

The trick — and it’s a difficult one — is to start with a mindset that imagines there has never been such a thing as a mobile app, computer program or web browser. That’s how Amazon invented the Echo.

Forget About The Tools — Focus On The Use Case

The Echo came from a brainstorming thought experiment among engineers at Amazon’s Lab 126. They were asked to come up with ideas for new devices, technologies and services that could truly improve peoples’ lives, in the absence of all real-world limitations.

In other words, if anything were possible technologically and financially, no matter how ambitious, what would they invent? A time machine, transporter or replicator? A hover car? A caregiver robot? A mind-reading ice cream maker? The sky was no limit.

The engineers started with a huge pile of ideas, then trimmed the list down to those that had the potential to have a truly practical, positive impact on lives. The next step was to refine each concept into an imagined service or device, fully detailed in terms of general form and use case(s), but still not giving a second thought to available materials or technologies.

It wasn’t until several fully fleshed-out concepts were done that the engineers were asked, “Okay. Now which of these, if any, are currently possible?” Surprisingly — or maybe not so surprisingly — by the time the engineers had culled their list down to only those ideas with the most promise and practical application, they found the distance from concept to finished product was not so very long.

The Toy Box Is Full — What Will You Do With It?

Starting with pre-existing SDKs and toolkits and trying to brainstorm from there imposes limits on the creative process. This approach fosters an instinct to do a twist or incremental improvement on something that’s already out there rather than come up with something totally original that, in hindsight, seems like an obvious and elegant application of available technology.

Something that makes developers and end users alike think, “Well of course this exists now, the only question is why didn’t anyone think of it before?” Kind of like the iPod, when it first launched. I don’t know the development history of the iPod, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it germinated from a use case concept — not from an extrapolation of then-available hardware or SDKs.

IoT developers now have voice interfaces, touch interfaces, smart home devices and appliances, scheduled processes, cameras, motion sensors, light sensors, sound sensors, mechanical devices, streaming media, on- and offline databases, social media integration, fingerprint, voice print and iris print security locks, bar code and QR code scanning, 3D printing, virtual reality, augmented reality and and cloud connectivity at their disposal. What more could we possibly need to create something amazing?

Start with your wildest sci fi fantasies, then drill down to practical use cases, and finally, work backward to reverse engineer toward available tools and technologies.

The first IoT killer app is out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered, and someone will find it.

Why not YOU?

April Hamilton is a tech blogger, app developer, and author who was part of a select group of independent developers invited by Amazon to create Alexa skills when Alexa first launched. Her Crystal Ball and Bingo skills are among the first four skills from independent developers to be released by Amazon for Echo. She holds the rank of Alexa Guru on Amazon’s developer forums.

In addition to being founder and editor in chief of Love My Echo, she’s also founder and editor in chief of Digital Media Mom. April’s tech knowledge and skills were honed during her many years working as a software engineer, web developer, and database administrator in the aerospace field.

NOW Is the Time to Start Thinking About the First Killer IoT App was originally published in A Cloud Guru on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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symbianosgames · 7 years

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I recently had the opportunity to share some tips and tricks with game development students at both Stockholm University and the Swedish Game Awards Conference - and since I don't seem to have made too big a fool of myself, I thought I should share the Toolbox I offered with the rest of the world as well. This is a list of things that will hopefully stop budding game developers from reinventing the wheel and tumble into pitfalls that others have already been in. The insights below have been collected while I was working at a publisher, a mid-size developer and my own indie company, as well as from other people.

Just like with a physical toolbox, you don’t have to use all of these tools. You might find that some of them are like those weird ones in the corner you don’t really know how to use. Some, however, might turn out to be your hammer and screwdriver.

So, let’s get started!

(By the way, you might need some popcorn. This is a long one.

1. Make games It pains me to see how necessary this point seems to be, when it should be fairly obvious. If you are a game student and plan to work with games for a long time, you should at the very least put in 8 hours a day, and do so with joy! I’m not saying you have to start crunching even before you get your first job - but you can't be bothered to at least spend the equivalent of a normal work day on studies and game development every day, how can you assume that you will enjoy actually working in the games industry?

You can either go the whole mile and spend your spare time making games with friends or on your own, or you can focus on the part of game development that you have a personal interest in - be it making 3D models, writing, modding, or what have you. This will show a future employer that you have passion and ambition, which will give you a brightly colored life vest out in the sea of students who want to break into the industry. More than that, you will have things to put in your portfolio, which is critical when looking for a game job.

2. Make mistakes - and admit it Your time as a student is the ideal, safe environment to try new things, and to fail. So do it! It is okay to make mistakes - as long as you admit them, learn all you can from the experience, and then move on. To many people, trial and error is the best way to get familiar with new things, so embrace that and create an environment among your fellow students where it is okay to fail. If you don't have that, people will not make less mistakes - they will just lie more about it. What sounds like a more sustainable way to make a game, do you think? You will also learn more this way, as you will be less likely to take the safe path you already know.

This might seem horrible but personally, I get inspired by other people's mistakes. Hearing about failed projects, or even better the mistakes a developer did on a successful project, makes you look at yourself and your own projects in a new light. Surely if they could do that, you should be fine? It makes people you admire look human and their accomplishments more reachable, which, if nothing else, helps relieving imposter syndrome.

3. Ask for help, pay it forward For some, asking for help when needed is probably the most natural thing in the world - but for others, me included, it really isn't. You want to be the lone hero, who can tackle any challenge on your own. That, however, can be directly harmful. Few will acknowledge your ability to isolate yourself and create something alone - it's far more likely that people will appreciate your ability to show that you are human and not too proud to ask for help.

Time for a personal anecdote! When I did not land a publisher for my game Midvinter, I was really bummed out. I cancelled the dev stream I had planned for that evening, and more or less wanted to shut myself in and not meet anyone for a few days. But then I remembered this great TED Talk by Amanda Palmer. In it, she basically encourages people to show vulnerability and ask for help - because that is when other people will step up and shower you with love. So I wrote a message for my friends and followers on Facebook, explaining the situation with the publishers and asking them to please share and like posts, so that I could get more visibility through them. The response was overwhelming (for a company that size), which of course proved that I have awesome friends - but also that people are more than willing to show that they have your back when you ask them to. Keep that in mind!

Just don’t forget to offer support back to the people who help you, and be there when they actually need you. Also, pay any help you get forward to others. We all benefit from an open industry where people help each other, so it’s win-win-win all around.

4. Game Jams Just like your time as a student is a great time to try new things, so are game jams. You go through almost all phases of game development in just a few days - and even if you do not have a finished game in the end, you will most likely have learned a lot and made some new friends. If you are not able to make it to the ones that take place in a particular physical location, there are many that run online over for example one month. On the final day, you simply submit your game to the jam’s website. Check out itch.io for jams like that!

5. Open Development

As a small developer - either while you still study, or if you chose to take the indie path after graduation - you can’t afford to have secrets. AAA companies do, but they also have marketing budgets the size of small countries’ yearly expenses. In order to sell your game in the end, you want to build a fanbase already during development - and what better what to do in than to include people in what you are doing? Make them feel involved, and they will be so much more loyal to you! A nice side effect is also that you learn a lot from watching other people playing your game and discussing ideas with them. They will most likely find things to do with the game that you did not even know about yourself, and tell you that the best part of your game is something you would never have anticipated.

Remmeber, ideas are cheap - execution is everything. Let me write that again, in bold.

Ideas are cheap - execution is everything.

No one is going to steal your idea. If there is one thing the games industry has in abundance, it’s ideas for games. Even great ideas - mindblowing ideas - are as common as bugs in the production phase. What matters is what you do with your idea. Therefore, you are better off allowing people to give input on your game, adjusting your development based on their opinions. It’s the difference between protecting an idea that in the end is not interesting to anyone, and making a game in the open that aligns with what people actually want.

6. Unique Selling Point In my experience, students are good at making pretty cool games, but not necessarily unique ones. To some extent, that’s okay - you need to learn the craft before you can master it, and looking at what other people have done is a great way of doing that. If you want to sell your game at some point, however, you will have to give a good reason as to why someone would buy your game instead of the one next to it.

The Unique Selling Point (USP) is what makes your game stand out from the crowd. What’s the edge? What’s the deal? This, you will have to be able to communicate to your consumers - and also investors and other potential partners (more about that below).

You see, back in the age of physical games on a shelf, you competed only with the games released at roughly the same time as yours. After a while, they were replaced with other games, and so it went on. Today, as we continue to move more and more towards digital platforms, you compete not only with the games released at the same time, but also all the games ever released on that platform. If you make a game inspired by DotA 2 and put it on Steam, you are competing with DotA 2. The player needs to have a clear reason as to why they should choose your game instead of all the other games in the same genre.

7. Elevator Pitch Imagine that you step into an elevator, and - lo and behold - standing there is a representative for a publisher, or your CEO, or maybe a journalist. You have one minute to pitch your game idea, before they get out of the elevator. Go!

The elevator pitch is a quick description of your game, with a good reason as to why someone would be interested in it. The USP needs to be front and center, most likely along with a mention of theme and setting.

If you are heavily inspired by the Diablo game series, you might feel compelled to say something like: “It’s kind of like Diablo”. Expand on that! “It has much of the gameplay of Diablo 3, only your primary weapon is a badass rocket launcher. Also, it takes place in the New York subway system.” While that might not be the best idea ever (but how about that game with excellent execution?), it gives a fairly good view of roughly what you would experience while playing the game. The listener will be much more interested in learning more, than if you would have stopped at the first sentence.

This is hard, no doubt about it - but it is worth it. If you have trouble finding your Elevator Pitch, I would recommend going to conferences and game developer meetups, if you are able to. In an environment when people are more than happy to hear what others are working on, you will most likely have plenty of opportunities to tweak your pitch and fine-tune it based on the reactions you get.

8. Synchronize within the team While you and your team are working on your game, you may suddenly find that you have some trouble knowing what kind of game you are actually making together. The artist’s colorful, Blizzard-esque art might not work with the writer’s dark and gritty noir story, and suddenly you realize that the programmer has implemented a complex crafting system for a game focused on sneaking. It could work - but without great execution and clear leadership, you are more likely to end up with a game that feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be.

A former colleague taught me a good way to avoid this. Everyone on the team should write down the game’s elevator pitch - in their own words - on a piece of paper. If these all turn out to be more or less the same, you seem to be fairly synchronized when it comes to what the game is all about. If not, you will have to take a step back and agree on what your vision is, before you continue.

9. Minimum Viable Product When making, say, a set amount of characters to your game, don’t work on one until it is 100% done before you move on to the next one. Instead, make the right amount of okay characters first, and then iterate, itarate, iterate. The product of each iteration should be a model that’s a bit better than the last one, and good enough to show other people while still not necessarily all the way there. This way, you minimize the risk of running out of time and/or money all of a sudden, leaving you with one perfect character and a bunch of white capsules.

You also decrease the risk of wasting time on unnecessary things. One example: I recently heard about a student who had made an enemy for their game that was probably good enough for Pixar. Every hair of its fur was there, and it was beautifully animated. The only problem was that it had to be very small once in the game, so none of the details would actually be visible to the player. If they had just thrown an early, rough draft into the game right away, they would have realized that much earlier. In the end, the student could probably have spent a couple of weeks or even days on the character, instead of two months.

It’s also easier to get feedback on your game and the part of it you are making this way. Instead of going “oh and all those gray boxes will be buildings”, you can then say “those buildings are WIP (Work in Progress), but I think you get the idea”. If the viewer is at least somewhat experienced, they will see in which direction you’re heading. It’s easier to test the game this way as well, for the same reason. It’s hard to make sure for example the combat system works properly when it’s just boxes jumping around - even the most crude models will help visualizing what you have in mind.

10. Plan When you get that great game idea you will most likely be tempted to just jump straight into it and start coding right away - trust me, I know. But try not to do that. Start by planning the project, both when it comes to time estimates and schematics for the systems themselves. How will the features interact with each other? What exactly can the player do when in the Marketplace? All things like that should go into your Game Design Document (GDD), before you write even the first line of code.

When you know which systems you want to use, start estimating how long time it will take to implement them. This, of course, goes for art, writing, sound etc as well. It always takes longer to create something than you think, so be generous here. If you have a financial budget to stick to, this is where you go through that as well. Make sure you know how much leeway you have if the project takes longer than anticipated, and remember to put some money aside for things like software licenses and marketing. This is an artform in itself, so I recommend reading other, more in-depth articles on the subject.

Once you are ready to start developing the game, make sure the whole team is up to speed with what everyone else is doing, whether or not you are on time, and what is next in the pipeline. This is achievable by using a Kanban board and/or Scrum. You can keep your tasks in either a physical or digital place - as long as you do keep track, and everyone in the team has access to the same information.

11. Production, Alpha, Beta, GM

Let us quickly look at the stages a game normally goes through when in development. People will tell you different things here so don’t take for granted that your future employers use exactly these definitions - but I will use terms I have been taught and am personally comfortable with.

Going from left to right in the bar representing development above, you will find that the majority of the time consists of production and pre-production. Their relative sizes may of course vary a lot, but this simply means that a well-planned projects spends a lot of time preparing for production and then even more just creating the basic systems.

When the game is starting to shape up, you enter Alpha. A good definition of Alpha is “feature complete”, which means that if you want an approved Alpha build, all systems will have to be implemented and working (albeit with a few bugs). This means that for example the dialog system needs to be in the game, but all dialogs do not have to be finished. It is important to remember that after this phase, you can no longer implement new features. It is far too dangerous, since you risk breaking other features late in development if you do.

To get an approved Beta build however, all those dialogs mentioned above need to be in the game. They are allowed to have flaws, but there can no longer be any major placeholders. Beta can therefore be described as “content complete”. Character portraits, animations, sound effects, game modes - they should all be done and implemented at this point.

After the Beta phase, you are getting close to release. There are many different words people use here - but for the sake of this post, I will only use Gold Master (GM). The term comes from the music industry, and refers to the actually golden disc which all other records were copied from. For games, that is the build that is as close to perfect as it can be. After completing a GM build, you should freeze the code and not touch it between then and the actual release. If you still have fixes to make before release, you should work on a separate build meanwhile, and release a stable version as a day-one patch. This decreases the risk of introducing new bugs when fixing others just before launch, making it a safer method than not freezing the code.

12. Test, test, test

There really is no way of stressing this enough. You need to test your game, and others need to do it too. As for you, don’t just test the little snippet of code you just implemented or check how that artwork looks in-game - play the game. Run through a few levels every day, put together an office Multiplayer session, or whatever works for you.

It is important go get others’ opinions on your game as well. You will inevitably be affected by your knowledge of how the game “is supposed to” work and look, which will skew your perception of it. You will also be very good at the game after having worked on it for a while, even if you do not recognize it yourself. The input of a few friends, family members or (preferably) total strangers can many times prove totally invaluable. If nothing else, they have more time to actually think outside the box and tear your game apart than you, since all you want to do is making the game - right?

Test the game before you even feel completely comfortable showing it to others. The earlier you find issues, the cheaper they are to fix. A good idea is to get input already on the Game Design Document. As mentioned earlier - the benefit gained from that input is much greater than the risk of someone potentially stealing your ideas.

Finally, make sure that you get input on all of these three areas:

Playability - is the game fun/engaging/entertaining/scary (whichever feeling you’re going for)?

Usability - do the players know what to do, and how to interact with the game?

Stability - is the game free from bugs?

13. Find inspiration everywhere

When you are designing your game or a part of it, don’t just look at other games for inspiration - go explore other forms of media and culture as well. Digital games are still the new kids on the block, and we haven’t figured everything out yet. Some of the others kids have, and they can teach us a great deal.

Some examples of things I recommend delving into:

Theatre, opera and ballet

Movies and tv-series

Music

Literature, graphic novels and comics

History, mythology and folklore

I want to especially recommend you to read up on history, if you are looking for inspiration for something you’re writing - and not just that of your own country. So many things have happened through the years that are literally stranger - and more badass - than fiction. I have personally tried to base fictional characters on historical ones, but ended up with a much more modest version of them because some parts just did not seem plausible.

As for the other things mentioned above, they are often dealing with themes you could use as well. There are also more technical things you can look at. How do comics use lighting and colors? How did that tv-series use music to achieve that dramatic effect? What did that opera do to give you goose bumps? If games are to be considered worthy of standing alongside for example works of classical art and literature, we have to put ourselves on their level - and the only way of knowing where that level is is to explore what it is they actually do.

14. Marketing

When I gave my lectures about this, I would here ask the students to put their hands up if they agreed with the following:

“A good game sells itself”

I would then go on to make fun of those who did, using these patronizing gifs:

I thought, rather me than the world - and this way they will hopefully remember it. Luckily only one person raised their hand anyway, so no great harm done.

No, a good game does not sell itself.

As mentioned earlier, we are today figuratively drowning in good games on our digital platforms, and getting seen in that sea is not an easy task. That is why you need to do marketing, whether you like it or not.

There are many ways to do this, all of which people more experienced than me have written long articles about. But in short, one point you could and should focus on as a small developer is social media. Make a presence, update often (even if you don’t think you have anything to share), and connect with other people. Create content that people want to share, like Armin Ibrisagic would say. You can also have an in-game share function, to encourage your players to show what they have created to their friends.

Streamers and YouTubers can also provide great exposure for your game. If you have fun gameplay that translates easily into an easy-to-follow video, people will run to buy your game after seeing someone have fun with it. This might be less effective for a linear story game, since you get most of the experience from just watching - but it’s still worth looking into.

You could argue that traditional journalism has lost ground in the last few years, but they are still relevant. As a rookie developer, try reaching out to smaller sites - maybe some that focus on indies - first. The big ones will be more hesitant to pick up your story if no one has covered you before. There are tons of articles on the subject here as well. But in short - remember to be brief and to-the-point in your email (remember your elevator pitch!), but also friendly. Show that you understand that the person you contact is a human being, not just another entry in a large spreadsheet.

15. Don’t say “I can’t do X”

Anecdote time again! Eight months ago I could hardly code. I had passed three university courses in programming, but I told myself I was rubbish at it. Then I looked at some code again in another context, and realized I could read and eventually apply it without any problems. That is when I started to change my way of thinking. I could code just fine - I just hadn’t done it on my own terms, on a project I had designed myself based on my own abilities. Now, six months later, I am about to finish my first game, for my one-person indie studio.

That is why now, whenever I hear someone say “oh but I can’t do X”, I add “...yet!” Ever so often, it’s just that your teacher’s way of teaching doesn’t match your way of learning. So try it! Find alternative routes to get around the things you “can’t”. For example: can’t do art? Make it wiggle!

16. Be prepared

If you want to become a successful game developer, you should prepare yourself for what will come. Know that there most likely will be rough patches. You may have a hard time finding a job, or a publisher, or getting press coverage. When your game finally launches, you might be greeted by a wave of hate from even your most dedicated players.

And you know what?

That’s okay.

Everyone started out somewhere, and most of the really successful creators you can think of have stories of how people doubted them and told them they would never succeed at what they did - but they kept at it anyway. So don’t give up, don’t take critique personally, and you’ll be fine in the end!

17. Take care of yourselves!

This might be the most obvious item on this list - but also the most important one, and the one I sadly think we compromise far too often.

Don’t think about the sprint, think about the marathon. Hopefully, you have a long and wonderful career in the games industry in front of you, so make sure you are well enough both physically and mentally to enjoy it!

Eat well! Kick that sugar addiction, cut down on at least the red meat, don’t skip breakfast. You know this already. It might be tough in the beginning to change your habits, but it’s worth it in the end!

Drink water. Coffee and beer can only get you so far - all sorts of good stuff comes out of being properly hydrated. Always keep a bottle of water on your desk.

Sleep. A good night’s sleep is better than all the energy drinks in the world. Staying up a few extra hours to work might be okay short-term, but it’s not a sustainable solution in the long run. Your brain needs the sleep to process what has happened during the day, and come up with new ideas.

Work out. If you don’t do this already, you might be one of those people who simply don’t like working out. The biggest problem here is probably that you haven’t found the right type of training for you - the kind that makes you forget that’s what you’re doing. Exercising makes you feel better short-term as well as long-term. It releases those nice little endorphins and gives your brain the oxygen in needs for long hours working on the game. Also, if you have access to adjustable tables, stand up for at least one hour every day. All the cool kids do it.

Take care of the people around you. The human is a social creature. Our bodies reward us for being nice to each other, so use that to your benefit! Take the time to show people that you like them, and note how much you get back. The greatest people of the industry, in my opinion, are not the ones who have made successful things, but the ones who truly care about the wellbeing of others. It’s the ones who humbly share all their knowledge, listen to input with open ears, and offer praise and confidence boosts when needed. Someone told me recently that a production company once wanted to make a reality show about game developers, but quickly cancelled it when they realized that the devs gladly helped each other out and refused to talk smack about each other. That’s the industry I want to work in. So continue being awesome, and tell others that they are too!

And there you go! A toolbox of tips and tricks to get you going. I hope that many of them were obvious to you - that means that you are already well on your way.

Please share any additional tips you may have in the comments!

Written by Anna Jenelius Independent Game Developer, Talecore Studios @TheAnaka

Thanks to Johan Dorell and Laura Bularca for giving input on this article, and the students who shared their thoughts after the talks!

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