This Weekend I Played Shadow Complex

I'm going to take a small break from art updates for some likely-unfocused game punditry of my usual variety.

I had a little free time this weekend to actually game, and I have a lot of games in my stash that I haven't actually touched, on pretty much every system in my house. I spent a little time with Shadow Complex, the download-only X-box 360 game that by all rights I should have picked up last year.  I'm only a couple hours in, but I think I may be done with it for now. I had thought the whole "Metroidvania" genre was really for me, but I'm easily frustrated by this game.

I think a big part of it is character. It's sorta fun to be a vampire prettyboy and extremely fun to be Samus Aran, intergalactic badass female bounty hunter.  It's somehow a lot less fun to be Generic Brown-haired Guy, who is the protagonist of Shadow Complex. I think his name is Jason?  He's a very non-character and I don't really feel like an experience being him is meaningful.  The bad guys in the game are all astonished by his infiltration skills.  Yet I'm the one doing it, and even I don't buy it.  The cries of "oh my god, where is he?  Who is he?" and etc are pretty fun if I feel like some kind of superman but seem weird if I'm just some Regular Joe.

Also I feel like the game is designed to be replayable at the sacrifice of the fun of the first playthrough.  I keep seeing places I'd like to go but I don't have the thingie I need, and not in the good fun way but in the "grr why do I not have missiles yet I just want to save the damn game down there" way.  Maybe that's a weird complaint considering how much I love replayability in games, but I also love freedom to explore and it's hard sometimes to serve both masters.

I've come to realize that I'm only still playing the game so I can get to the next dialog chunk. I want to hear the words continue to majestically soar over the craggy landscape like giant leaden balloons.  I actually like Orson Scott Card, but my first impression of Shadow Complex involved this exchange:

"At least the Vice President is safe..."
BLAM!!!
"You mean, that Vice President? Of the United States?"

Really?  I literally cannot decide if that is the worst ever or if it is the best, in a camp ironic way.

I guess it seems like I'm slamming this one pretty hard, but it's okay. I admire what's going on with the very clever 2.5D perspective and the lush environments.  I just don't know if I'm gonna be taking it all the way.

So... what's next? Well, Other M will be out real soon, and that's definitely up my alley as long as I get to be Samus again.  Also, I've been loaned basically the entire Persona series by a friend, and since I enjoyed the fourth I'm moving in to that. For some reason it feels sacrilegious to sit down on the couch with the X-box 360 sitting cold in front of me while I play a portable hand-held system.  However, I should have plenty of quality time with the PSP while I'm on the airplane to Seattle this upcoming weekend.

Yes, that's how I segue in to mentioning that I will be at Penny Arcade Expo!   Stay tuned for trip reports or maybe I will see you there...

Dragonborn Model Status Update

Despite my optimism, the mesh for my Dragonborn isn't quite done. Well, the body is done, but I'm still working on the head. No new progress shots because the body was mostly done last time I uploaded, but here's my current area of focus - the eye:

One thing I haven't liked about other Dragonborn art I have seen around is the eyes pointing off to the side a lot. If possible I'd like for my dragon to be more front-facing and have a predator gaze which means more of a forward-oriented eye.  I'm not totally good with the snout yet as it feels too equine, so I might give that another pass.

But teeth are always good. Heh heh.

I am at 12,186 triangles out of a self-imposed limit of 15,000. This is before finishing the sword so that will probably put me right at the edge.

I cut my hair

I cut my hair, so, it was time for a new avatar.  This one comes courtesy of Len Peralta, though it's not a proper portrait of myself but instead an avatar given out to RiffTrax fans from last night's viewing of classic film Reefer Madness.  I'm a big fan of MST, Rifftrax by association, and B-movies in general, including the fantastic Smithee Awards held at Origins each year.  And the Reefer Madness chick does kinda look a little like me. Go fig.

Other movies for gamers and geeks that everyone is talking about right now are Inception and Scott Pilgrim Versus the World. You should see Scott Pilgrim; it is sad it hasn't done better at the box office than it has and the gamer-nerd quotient is off the chart.  As far as Inception goes, I found the discussions about it that happened afterward much more interesting than the movie itself.

Progress on Modeling my Dragonborn

Keeping up with my progress reports on my modeling project!

So I continued to model on the base mesh, until I have something that looks like this:

Notice it isn't entirely done yet, as I still have the boots to work on.  They aren't in my original sketches so I think I will just get creative with them.

A lot of people ask me all the time: when a video game character has armor, do I model the armor on top of the already-modeled character body, so there is a body model underneath? Generally: no.  It's way more efficient to just treat the armor and clothes as if they ARE the character, so there is no "naked character" underneath the model of the character. The general idea is not to model any polys you aren't going to see.  If a character has to wear a different outfit later, swap out the model entirely, or swap out parts of the model, which is how it works in games where you change clothing.  Sorry to disappoint people who thought that maybe underneath her uniform Chun-Li was totally naked, but if you delete her uniform you just get a woman with no torso.

Proof positive.

So anyway, there's a problem with the base mesh I made in that, well, it's missing that whole "Dragonborn" thing I was trying for.

From my earlier sketches I decided that the velociraptor was a dinosaur that had the sort of face shape I was looking for - something with a slightly thinner jaw. So I found some pictures of raptor skulls from around the net, and set them up as view planes in 3D Studio Max to use as a model sheet.  Here is a useful mockup someone made. I also stumbled across the gallery of Helen Zhu in my search, an artist who has done some amazing monster critters for D&D on-line.

Not that this rough draft measures up to that work at all but here is my very basic dragon head.  It's gonna need some major tweaks to make it fit right on the body, but for less than an hour's work it makes a suitable head to port over.

And here is the result of that.  I want to do a little more with the fins on the back of her head, so I'm working on that bit now.  Notice I'm keeping the head and body parts seperated in to individual materials. That's because I plan to use one texture file for the body and a different one for the various parts of the head.  Also the proportions do not yet make me happy. More next time, with a hopefully-finished mesh.

Working on some Armor

This is a continuation of my D&D Project Post.  Here's the sketches for armor designs that I made:

I ended up going with the one in the bottom-right there. The 'front view' sketch for that floated to the top of the file.

I'm not really one for making complex model sheets; I usually just do a lot of sketches and maybe a quick chart with head to body ratio lines to nail down proportions.  So that's a confessional part of my personal modeling process (though I have no trouble modeling from someone else's sheet). 

I did this now-headless base mesh during my in-class demo and now I'm modifying it slightly to fit my armor sketches. As you can see that process is nowhere near done, but I wanted to keep making status posts!  One of the things I was looking forward to on this project is working with the head and hands of this character so you can see my "cool" starter hand on the left side of the model, waiting to be fused on to the arm.  The legs need work - much too thin and boring so far!

And now for some student work, or at least a few of the blogs that have pictures:
Warforged Paladin
Drow Sorcerer
Human Wizard
Drow Rogue
Shardmind Bard

Oh, and hey! I finished Breath of Death last night. Fun little distraction from my other goings-on. Most of the humor is sort of just smile-worthy, but I got a good laugh at the lost sheep gag, and one particular fusion attack near the end.  Oh I'm so spoiler-sensitive lately; you know the one; it just comes out of nowhere.