Art Adventure

For our Game Design class, we have to find a game trailer that we enjoy, and comment about it.

The reason I chose this trailer, was firstly, I loved the original Mirror's Edge, and the producers of Mirror's Edge Catalyst did not deviate at all from the art style. The colors and bloom in each Mirror's Edge level was beautiful, and almost any screenshot in-game could be an excellent standalone image. In the trailer, they show off these colors in some of the footage. They also show off the skyline of the city -- a staple of the original, but at night.

Another reason I chose this trailer, was due to the tension and action portrayed. There is another, earlier trailer for Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which does not show off as much action, or story as this one does. Although the story is fairly cliche of dystopian future narratives, the gameplay is unique compared to most AAA games.

Lastly, the designs for the futuristic police armor and architecture is breath-taking. Sometimes after running though the levels in the first game, I would replay them just to stop and look around. From the looks of this trailer, I cannot wait for February!

For one of my classes, each student had to create an idea and image to convey an environment. We were each given only one week to create and pitch this idea to our fellow classmates. The craziest thing, is how each student would then have to vote, and the concept that won would be our project for the entire semester! Therefore, I went to work and came up with an idea focused on an alternate history of the Earth. One that centered around massive tectonic upheaval, which would bring China close to Egypt. The ancient Egyptians would have perished in this event, while the Chinese would have foretold this disaster in the stars. Therefore, the surviving Chinese would emerge, and behold the temples and structures of Egypt! Seeing most of these temples were built in alignment to celestial events, they would hold these temples in high regard, and try to repair them, and add their own motifs into the Egyptian architecture.

Here is an image I imagined one of these temples retrofitted into a temple honoring and serving to help the scribes to study the stars -- a Constellation Temple.


Because of the time constraints, our instructors encouraged us to photo-bash, so most of the content in the concept is from images I did not create.

Luckily, my concept was chosen by the class! Therefore, I'll have to act as a pseudo-art director for the project. I hope my vision does not disappoint!

So it beings -- a new year! As a Sophomore I am now taking classes like Game Design and Computer Animation for Games, really exciting stuff. For example, on the first day of game design our teacher took the twelve apprehensive students our class was comprised of, and told us to create a team based game right on the spot. To be fair, it was not a video game or board game, but a physical game. We ended up cobbling together a set of rules for a "obstacle course" type game by arranging furniture in the room, and blind folding our fellow students. With six members on a team, the goal was to send one member at a time across the field without hitting furniture, else that team would penalized. Each remaining member could shout only one command, from 'Go, Stop, Left, Right and, Strafe'. The point being once more people made it to the other size, teams would lose more precise options of communication. Of course for a game we made up on the spot, it was a bit silly, so we revised more rules and just had a great time!

 Other than Game Design I'm taking a coding class that utilizes Processing and a zbrush class that specializes in modelling human anatomy. For the coding class I made a little script that draws different colored rectangles. The user can change the colors by moving the mouse over the canvas, and once satisfied with a color, can click to draw another box, until the space is filled. Play around with it below!