The Web Portfolio of Aimee Skeers
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Happy New Year!
Yes, I have been away. These are the reasons for my radio silence:
Giant sweater for Chris.
Giant tall socks for my dad:
Fingerless gloves for me (remember that last post about it being cold in our apartment? Yeah, still the case.):
A bag for my almost-mother-in-law:
And a hat and bolero set for me!
Also, I feel obligated to warn all of you. I got this:
And this:
For Christmas. I have to admit, this doesn’t exactly bode well for my free time…
Happy New Year, one and all!
posted January 01, 2010 | Comments (0)| Tags: bioshock, happy new year, holidays, knitting, spinning, yarn
Jesus Damn It’s Cold.
The heat has been on in my apartment for the last two hours and it’s still only 51 degrees in the living room. This is ridiculous. I am typing from the futon, which is heated with an electric mattress pad, and I am wearing a camisole, a tank top, a long-sleeved shirt, a pair of leggings, a pair of fleece pants, a flannel nightgown, a crocheted sweater (I made it for my boyfriend three years ago and have reclaimed it in the name of not freezing to death), a pair of wool socks, a pair of battery-powered socks, a pair of slippers, a scarf, a hat, and I am wrapped in a blanket. And I am still cold. Good lord and lady.
This actually has me thinking, though. In D&D, if you go gallivanting off into the snowy mountains without the proper gear, the DM will let your ass freeze to death. If you don’t have food and water, and remember to eat it, you will starve. There are many, many ways to screw yourself over in D&D, which will hopefully learn you a lesson about preparing properly. Are there any video games with the same consequences? I’ve played Planescape: Torment, which is based heavily in D&D for its rule system, but you still never have to eat, or worry about the cold or the heat. I’d be interested in playing a game where the environmental effects atually effect the environment. The ground is slippery when it rains, icy when it snows. One where the player would actually have to pay attention to her surroundings in order to stay healthy and hale.
However, such a game would probably be a pain in the ass to make, so I’m not holding my breath. Just shivering. Always shivering.
posted December 09, 2009 | Comments (1)| Tags: environment, game design, goddamn it's cold, musings, video games
Mac and Cheese Gaming.
Every once in a while, the gaming review community gets the idea that video games need to be innovative. If they’re not innovative, then they’re bad games that shouldn’t be made. Only innovative games should be creative! Games will get praised for their innovation! Games that are not innovative are horrible wastes of megabytes! Etc.
The thing is, sometimes as a gamer, you don’t want innovative. You don’t want something that breaks new and strange ground. Sometimes you just want to sit down with a game type you love, understand, and enjoy playing. It’s comfortable and fun and recognizable. I call this Mac and Cheese gaming. Let me explain.
Food can be an amazing thing that exposes you to new cultures and flavors. It can combine flavors in new and interesting ways. It can be prepared in an incredibly variety of fashions. Food can make you glad to be alive or make you kinda wish you were dead. But sometimes, for all the marvelous, amazing, fancy things that can be done with food… Sometimes you just want to sit down with a bowl of mac and cheese. Good, creamy, rich mac and cheese. Now, you don’t want bad mac and cheese. You want the pasta to be cooked just al dente, and the cheese sauce should be the right consistency, not too thick or too thin. There should be just enough cheese in the sauce that it has a cheesy richness, but not so much that the sauce breaks or get grainy. Mac and cheese, cooked just right, is a wonderful thing.
When I sit down to play some Zelda, I want some Mac and Cheese gaming. Is Twilight Princess amazingly innovative or mind-blowing? No. But it is delicious, and it’s just right for me.
… shit, now I want mac and cheese and we have no pasta. Thanks a lot, blog. I blame you for this.
posted December 03, 2009 | Comments (0)| Tags: game design, mac and cheese, musings, video games
How not to get hired.
Here’s a tip: Sending an unsolicited email to a game studio detailing the bugs you found in their released game is not a good way to get a job. I am assuming that was the reason for the email, because I can’t see any other logical purpose for it. The game is done. It is finished. It is released. There will not be a patch for it, there will not be any further revisions on it. There is no need for further bug-fixing. There is no need for further anything fixing. It’s done.
Furthermore, if you’re playing a game and you come across some kind of bug in it, chances are the developers know. Many, if not most games will ship with some kind of bug. It might be a simple art bug where a door is slightly offset from the wall. It might be a collision issue where you get blocked from walking for no actual reason, or, alternately, where you can walk straight through a wall that shouldn’t allow passage. It might be possible to get permanently stuck in the scenery, or have the audio skip disjointedly, or have the player just straight-up fall out of the world. The thing is, the developers probably know damn well the game is shipping with bugs. You really don’t need to tell them that.
Why do games ship with bugs, then? Well, sometimes schedules get drastically cut, and there just isn’t time. Sometimes schedules were poorly planned to begin with, and there just isn’t time. Sometimes the very nature of the game you’re working on gets dramatically changed, requiring a lot of re-working, and there just isn’t time. Sometimes half the people at a studio get laid off, and there just aren’t enough people to complete the game in time. (Have you noticed a pattern yet?) Sometimes a minor bug is known about and it just doesn’t get fixed because it’s not important enough to risk breaking the level for. Toward the end of development, a game is like a house of cards. If you have framerate, memory, gameplay and story all working together reasonably well, you do not risk breaking that balance for something as small as a trash plane sticking through a wall or a chair floating slightly above the floor.
My boss often says there are two kinds of games: Game that are perfect, and games that ship. It’s much better to work on games that ship.
posted December 01, 2009 | Comments (0)| Tags: bugs, game design, industry, job, misconceptions, video games
It lives! It lives!
All the links are back up and running on here, so regular posting will resume this week on a variety of subjects.
On that note, here is some yarn I made!
YanYan approves this message.
One I am done with my somewhat massive amounts of holiday yarncrafting, I will be back to playing video games and posting about those. Until then, you can probably expect more yarn.
At least it’s pretty yarn, eh?
posted November 29, 2009 | Comments (0)| Tags: hobbies, knitting, spinning, yarn
And we’re back!
Hi there! Sorry about the hiatus, we migrated the site to a new server and now things are a little bit broken around here. It’s going to take a little while to get this figured back out, but the site is mostly functional at the moment and that’s the important part!
I hope everyone out there in internetland had a happy Thanksgiving, because mine was freaking awesome!
posted November 27, 2009 | Comments (0)| Tags: internet
Video Games Live
Chris and I drove down to Portland over the weekend to catch the Portland Symphony performing Video Games Live. It was amazing. If you love video games and video game music, I cannot recommend this show enough. Video game music is an often underestimated art, both by people who play games and people who look down on games. Hearing pieces like One Winged Angel from FFVII performed by a full orchestra and a choir is mind-blowing. These pieces are composed brilliantly, and it is a shame that often their original media masks their true artistry. Take, for example, the Zelda suite.
My first experience with the Zelda music was when my brothers were playing Ocarina of Time on the N64. I liked the music even then, MIDI-fied as it was. Hearing some of the same music on the Wii with Twilight Princess was even better. Hearing it live, as it was meant to be played? Incomparable. (I was disappointed that they did not perform the Gerudo Valley Theme–it was my favorite piece from Ocarina of Time. Maybe the next time I see the show, they’ll play it.)
Video Games Live was also an amazingly sneaky way of getting people to go to the symphony who ordinarily wouldn’t attend. There was a costume contest (won by a tiny Princess Zelda). There was a Guitar Hero contest beforehand, and the winner of that had the chance to come up on stage and play a song, live, with the symphony as backup, and the promise of a pretty sweet prize if he managed to score 100,000 points on the selected song. (He won. Easily. Little shit, being way better than me at Guitar Hero. Grumble grumble.) An audience member was selected to play Space Invaders, with HIMSELF as the right-left sensor, while the orchestra played the background music and changed it according to how well he was doing. People got to yell “Wooooo!” I think the Portland Orchestra has probably never been “Woooooo!”ed so much in their lives before this. Hopefully some of the kids who attended will leave thinking classical instruments are pretty awesome. Hopefully some of the attendees will go back to the symphony for other performances. (Hopefully the symphony members didn’t think we were all completely insane!)
In short, Video Games Live is made of WIN AND AWESOME. Go see it if you can.
posted November 11, 2009 | Comments (0)| Tags: music, soundtrack, video games, video games live
Get to know your GDD.
On a recent comment, rhiandmoi suggested that I make a post on the life cycle of a game. That’s a great idea, but it would take way more than a single post to sum it up! I thought I would start at the logical place to do so: The beginning.
Games start with a GDD, or Game Design Document. Games that do not start with a GDD are pretty much doomed to fail, because they will have no concrete guidance on what game they are making. The GDD contains story and character information, but it also contains much more than that. A GDD will describe what genre the game falls into. It will describe gameplay decisions and the consequences of those decisions. It will describe character movement, enemy types, weapons, and puzzles. It will contain descriptions of the levels, and the actions the player will need to perform in order to progress through said levels. A GDD is the game, albeit in a 2-d, non-interactive form.
GDDs are important for both the developer and the publisher. They’re used to pitch games to publishers, so both parties understand exactly what kind of game is being discussed. The GDD will of course be amended and altered over the course of the project, but it’s still a very vital starting point.
The GDD for Grim Fandango can actually be downloaded in PDF form from here. It’s worth a read for aspiring designers.
posted November 05, 2009 | Comments (0)| Tags: advice, game design, industry, musings, portfolio, Q&A, video games
Polycounts and you.
Before I continue… Look! Knitting!
Now that that is out of the way…
On a previous post, Robert asked:
So, I have a question pertaining to 3-D modeling. For the purposes of my portfolio, I’m wondering how high-res my pieces should be? I frequently find myself creating models that are shaped very well, but they have a rather large poly count. So, I guess the underlying question here is whether it is more impressive in a portfolio to see very high poly count models with good texture or to see lower poly count models with textures that just give the appearance of higher resolution? (Keeping in mind that my painting/drawing skills are rather poor at present so the textures are a definite weakness for me right now)
This is a good question, and the answer is almost always, “It depends.” As a general guideline, you should never put more geometry into a model than is absolutely necessary to create the shape you want. If you’re making a cube, that cube only needs to be 6 polygons. A cube that is 600 polygons is ridiculous, because you really only need 6 in order to make the cube look like a cube. The more complex the object you’re creating, the more polygons you’ll probably need to make it look right. If you have a set budget for polygons, use them where you’ll get the most bang for your buck. People won’t care if a door is made up of six polygons, but they’ll notice if the doorknob is blocky and unrealistic. Have a look at the wireframe on one of my meshes:
This is a fairly high-poly mesh, but I spent those polys where it would show. If those curves were choppy and blocky, the mesh would just look bad. Since I spent the polygons on those important parts, the blocky headboard and footboard can be very simple.
Generally, it’s more impressive to see a lower-poly model that looks good than a ridiculously high-poly model. Anyone can throw extra polygons at a mesh to make it look smoother, but it’s much harder to serve modeling steak on a hamburger budget and it shows more skill. Texturing is also really important–if you model really well but you can’t texture for poo, you’ll probably have a very hard time getting hired. There really aren’t separate modeling and texturing positions in most companies–3-D artists do both, so good skills in both areas are pretty necessary for the job.
Thanks for the question! I hope this was helpful.
posted November 02, 2009 | Comments (0)| Tags: 3-d artist, advice, getting a job, industry, job, knitting, portfolio, Q&A, questions, video games
My Yarns. Let me show you them.
Since I am not annoyed at any aspects of video gaming right at the moment (and annoyance is the source of my powers!) I will instead be sharing with you some of my yarn-related pursuits today. I recently purchased a drop spindle and some fiber, and over the course of a few days I managed to turn a pile of this:
Into this:
It’s about 22 yards of my very first handspun yarn, and I’m quite proud of my lumpy messed-up wool baby. I’m finding spinning to be very relaxing, in a similar way to yoga. You do some of the same movements over and over again, slowly and carefully, and just pay attention to what happens. In yoga, what happens is you get some nice exercise and are hopefully a little closer to being able to touch your toes when you bend over. In spinning, you end up with yarn! I found it so enjoyable I felt the need to repeat the process with another pile of roving:
Mmm… The colors.
PS: If anyone has any questions they’d like to me answer about video games or whatever, please ask ‘em in the comments! I’d like to make the Q&A a more regular part of the blog.