More to come

As you can tell, the past few weeks have been a bit busy with arranging hand in stuff and getting everything together for major project deadline in two weeks, but I just wanted to share my happiness that I'm going to be having a busy summer afterwards as well!

Martell Masterclass

This one just sort of happened as a surprise. I won a ticket for Lucas Martell's Short Film Masterclass. For those of you who might not know Lucas Martell is responsible for the animation short Pigeon: Impossible. I've looked through what the sessions are going to cover and I'm quite excited about learning things more short film focused. I often feel like when I come up with ideas for short films I have no idea how to go forward with them or make them beyond my vision of an idea, so I really feel like this is going to open up my ability to comfortably direct this sort of project. (For those interested in the masterclass, you can get tickets by funding his new project oceanmaker.com)

London Symposium of Art and Design 

I booked my ticket for this a few months back now, and it's sort of crept up on me that it's almost time. It's an art workshop organised and run by conceptart.org, and looks like it's going to be an amazing life changing event from an artistic point of view. Honestly, I feel a little under prepared. I had a lot of plans to work on my art skills between then and the event and I feel like I haven't got to where I wanted before I went. Despite this, I am sure I will still find it just as helpful in my artistic progression. I really can't wait to meet the people there, and all of the workshops in general (gosh, the line up looks amazing so far). It feels like this is going to be a big stepping stone in my artistic knowledge and my realizations of where I want to be going.

inform.animation 

As I've said  few times by now I applied to do the inform.animation ERASMUS program in Sardinia. We got interviewed a few weeks ago, and I can now confirm I was one of the people picked for the trip. I was a little worried that as I didn't have any experience of much beyond games at this point in time that'd act against me, but it seems not! Its going to be two and a half weeks in Sardinia working on live briefs to produce informative animations with other students from around Europe. I really can't wait, and honestly think this is going to be an amazing opportunity to further my art and communication skills. I also feel this is really going to tie in with some interactive book projects I'm considering doing on the masters, as these are currently planned to be informative multimedia books.

I will now apologise for the possible overuse of the phrases 'great opportunity', 'I can't wait' and 'am really excited'.

And that's all I have planned between now and the end of June! 

Project Eches - Sneaky Peak

Here's a sneaky peak at the game we've all been working on for our final project this year. (Echoes)

Project Echoes - Sneaky Preview from Project Echoes (C) on Vimeo.

Still not finalized but the team all have a great feeling about this project and that it's going to be completed to a good standard before the deadline! We're holding a second play-test on our university campus this week after the great feedback from the 1st (and hopefully our playtesters will agree we've worked on that feedback!).

Less than 2 weeks to get this project done, so I'm going to keep working at it until then. Wish us all luck!

Flat-Packed

The interview for the Sardinia ERASMUS program has got a couple of us thinking about transferable skills. Leaving us to come up with a couple of rapid fire projects we could get going after our final deadline so that we could work on some of our less gamey skills in case we got picked!

For me, one of the things I'd definitely want to see strengthen in the next month or so is my drawing skills. Having spent a lot of my time in the past few months directing and working in engine I've found I've had little time to get as much drawing one as I've wanted to and I am sure I am uncomfortably rusty at he moment. One of the riggers on our course wants to work on a quick 2D rig some point around that time so I've agreed to do the 'model' for it.

I was only really introduced to this concept when I watched a talk by Blue Zoo a couple months back, before then I hadn't really considered 2D being animated in a program in Maya.

The Blue Zoo talk and the ERASMUS program have really got me thinking a lot more about TV, advertising and info-graphic creation. While it's something that's always been at the back of my head, I feel like it's something that I want to be working towards being able to do now, and feel that the Blue Zoo talk has helped inspire this as it's given me a lot of insight as to what working in one of these studios is like and to me it sounds like the sort of amosphere I could really see myself working in. Although most of my work this year has been with games engines, I'm quite eager to learn new skills (such as prepping at for 2D rig creation), to try and get more of a 'feel' for what area I want to be developing in at the moment. While it may seem a little bit like I'm flittering between disciplines there are a lot of transferable skills between them, and it allows me to understand where I am creatively. Then, if I do find that all's going well with these sorts of projects I'd like to see about applying for places like Blue Zoo after the MA Animation.

A Breath of Fresh Air and a Cup of Tea

So despite (and quite possibly because) it's just over 3 weeks until I finish our last project at university I've been thinking about other projects I want to get started on!

Not that I'm not enjoying Echoes, it's still a good project and continually teaching me new things as I work towards the deadline. However, the team is rounding a lot of things up now, and we've learnt a lot about the mistakes we've made and I'm really looking forward to making a project where I can take the things we've learnt and avoid them in the future. Also, it'd be lovely if I didn't have to see another creepy little devil girl this year.

At the moment the team I've been directing for Echoes are talking about what projects we want to work together on during the summer. 

Personally, I have in mind two things which I want to develop during the Summer.

I want to develop a mod in CryENGINE during the summer, after working in Unity I've built up a lot of confidence working in games engines and feel like CryEngine is the next place I want to develop my engine skills. I have very much enjoyed the level design aspect of my role within Echoes, and it's a skill I can really see myself developing and working in within the future. My first idea is unsurprisingly inspired by Crytek, though more specifically (and possibly embarrassingly) Fibble – Flick 'n' Roll. I know, I know, all that power and I want to do something cutesy that Crytek did with their mobile engine? True, however I like to believe that games don't have to be all gribbles and mundane realism. Also, while I'm thinking something colourful and light, I'm not necessarily thinking the simplicity of mobile games. One of the things I really admire about Crytek is the beauty of their games, and CryEngine has the reputation that goes with that, and I would like to work on something which I would hope has the potentional to look just as visually stunning as Crytek's games.

Another company which is influencing me at the moment is Blizzard. I've always been a great fan of their games (and trust me, once major project is over I will finally be getting Mists of Pandaria!). I love the art style, I love the cinematics  and I think they generally have a very high standard of tone and feel to their games. I would love to work on something similar as I feel the games have such a good environment and amospshere to them it's something I would love a chance to recreate.  I'm not entirely sure where I want to take this inspiration. I'm currently thinking I want to take this down a more Starcraft route than fanatsy, as I've worked a lot on fantasy settings while at university and want to grow more into different areas. I'm tempted to do something influenced by Kerrigan, but take it down a more techy route than an alien route and see where that goes. I'll most likely want to do some sci-fi environments to go along with, but it'l depending on what other people I know are interested in working on, as I'd prefer to work as part of a team and create something bigger together than just do a character and some environment sets and then have nothing more to do with them!

And so, on with Echoes! Just to get this project finished and then I can delve into the potentional of new projects once this one's over.

Project Echoes - Optimized Ivy and Ninja Theory

As you've probably seen I've been posting some images of heavily ivy-ified props recently which I keep saying that I'll be optimizing soon. Which I have now got around to doing! I suppose a very important question might be why did I decide to do so much damned foliage considering it's known for being a pain in games? 

One of my main influences for this aspect of the environment has been playing Enslaved and getting to move around the environments in that, which I can honestly say despite very linear levels (infact, because they are so linear) are beautiful artistically speaking. Here's some shorts of the environments which I've found influenced me during this project -

I love Ninja Theory's use of colour and foilage in Enslaved, and I feel the broken down post-apocalyptic future covered in green plentiful grass has wonderful juxapostion and really adds to making the environment feel like a plausible place where the world doesn't end after it's apocalypse,  instead it grows anew. 

I've just started playing DmC (and have Heavenly Sword on my wishlist on LoveFILM), and I can see the same level of work and detail in this game as seen in Enslaved, which has been motivating while working on the levels for Echoes. DmC has the same wonderful use of colours seen in Enslaved in a completely different palette but still clearly the same style, and the concept art is gorgeous. This is the style in which I'm going to be trying to develop my art within the next year or so, as it always feels so fresh and engaging to an audience. Currently this is the vein I'm seeing my art develop in and in the future I would love to do some work for Ninja Theory.

So here's my first post of some optimized foliage covering my ruins for the game. Personally I'm loving the addition to my ruins, and feel like it's giving them a munch more personalized and overgrown and abandoned feeling than I was getting before, and I feel this is getting me closer to where I want to head with my work

However after optimizing this I do have a lot more understanding why some games have shyed away from ivy, especially before generators and in game tools. The first stages were especially time consuming, but it got a lot quicker afterwards. I'll be posting up a tutorial for how I did it in the next few weeks once I've got some more of it done with the other ruin pieces. So watch out!

Fuel: Lemon and Ginger Tea

Put together two rough videos of the 2 art projects I'm going for my major project. We had 4 projects worth of time to fill, and each project is meant to take roughly 4 weeks. All of my project's were involved in the Echoes project.

I only have 2 art projects as my other two projects got consumed by directing and game engine stuff. 

Project Echoes - Dragon from Ruth Beresford (C) 2013 on Vimeo.


Project Echoes - Props from Ruth Beresford (C) 2013 on Vimeo.

As you can see from the videos, I need to quickly wrap up all the props I've made, while also wrapping up the games engine and directing. About 3 weeks left, so you can really feel the tension rising on the course, but the excitement is quite a good feeling to be around. Everyone is really motivated and positive atm, so let's just hope that continues ;)

3 and a half weeks left

Been quite quiet recently, as a lot of my work at the moment has been either directing for Project Echoes, or scripting for it. But as we had to submit a bunch of our work this week for '1st submittal' (I suppose a tester round of our final hand in) I had to do some renders anyway and thought I would share this one. 

I know, I know, I know. I need to optimize that ivy. It's on my do to list once I've got a bunch of the game-play straightened out!

In other news, I've applied for an erasmus program to Sardinia during the summer. It'll focus on doing live briefs creating informative animations. Had the interview and I'm really hoping that I'll be successful. I really want to get involved in projects outside of game to help widen my skill bases, and refresh my creativity. Also, it'd be a great opportunity to further my (possibly dreadful) communication skills. I should find out Friday, so wish me luck! (I suppose if I don't get on I can have Download Festival/Rezzed/WalesGameDevelopmentShow to keep me from sulking ;) )