Second year students get creative with 3D tools in Photoshop

The Visual Skills module covers getting to grips with 3D painting a panoramic canvas in Adobe Photoshop.
Examples by Tutor, Josh Taylor

The second year seeks to prepare students for presentation of their portfolio within the games industry. This is realised through a series of established and recognised visual presentation exercises. Students will also be developing their own visual interface ideas and interactive layouts under the guidance of staff and are encouraged to reference and analyse examples of successful games artists and designers. Students must become familiar with the means to showcase their work to industry standards.

During the Visual Skills single module, students are shown and practise research methods and how to gather and identify relevant material in conjunction with their course project work.

Students build upon visualisation skills for the effective presentation of game ideas, assets and visual interface.

This is a single module where graduates will typically undertake a variety of projects, which will explore user interface, layout and composition in order to develop their visual awareness. These briefs cover areas such UI design, use of interactive tools and presentation skills to showcase portfolio work. A portfolio of work will be submitted for assessment to determine whether the learning outcomes have been met effectively at the end of the module. This module will offer students the opportunity to further develop visual skills to showcase their work with aesthetically to industry standards

360 Digital Painting Brief

Through practice students are asked to develop digital painting skills
Students are required to use digital painting techniques within relevant software to learn and apply the process of creating a 360 panoramic image

Aims
Learning Outcomes:
To develop visual communication skills to showcase designs on current platforms
To develop digitally painting techniques to produce a panorama design.

On successful completion of the project you will be able to:
Demonstrate a range of presentation and visual skills using appropriate software
Apply suitable presentation techniques for visual concepts.

Submission & Assessment Requirements:
Follow the instructions provided so that the design can be viewed as a 360 degree image when uploaded to Facebook.
Submit design sketches, plus one panoramic image in JPEG format to demonstrate skills required in the process of creating a 360 panoramic digital image.

Here's some examples from our second years submissions.

Read More

The Great Northern Festival - Games Design day of Speakers from industry.

The Great Northern Creative Festival showcases the creative talent in Media, Film, Photography, Journalism & Performance.

The Festival introduces a variety of talent which will include Film, Photography, Media and Journalism with performances, workshops, masterclasses, music, monologues, networking, animation and inspiration to one and all. The Festival has attracted some of the leading creative talent (Nationally and Internationally) and we were pleased to offer staff, students and guests the opportunity to share a stimulating experience of creative talent which can be viewed, evaluated and enjoyed by everyone.

https://greatnortherncreativefestival.files.wordpress.com/

We were all inspired to see the presentations on the Industry Speakers Day at Uclan Games Design on Wed 15th Nov. with Hannah Spikings , Freelance Artist and Robert Andrew Duckworth, Construction Designer at TT Fusion and Naomi Robinson, Artist and Illustrator as part of the 

Great Northern Festival, plus a visit from OJ Farrell of White Paper Games on Tues 14th Nov.

Read More

Website updates

For the most part my website setup has been the same since 2011 when I launched www.redblobgames.com. It's a static site served by nginx. I'm currently working on two updates:

1. I'm (finally) setting up https. This has been more of a pain than I expected.
   
   

   
   I think I have OSCP working. I didn't set up ECDHE but may have that. I didn't set up DHE or ECDH. No POODLE or BEAST. Somehow got P-256. I have PFS. I'll do HSTS later. Didn't set up HPKP but it may be obsolete anyway. Can't set up CAA with my DNS provider. No RC4. I have ALPN, NPN. I have CORS. Don't need SRI. I have XFO and XXSS. I have CSP but don't like it.
   

   
   
   

   
   I have acronym overload.
   

   
   
   

   
   I'm also updating my internal links to link to the https version.
   

   
   
   



2. I'm (finally) learning responsive design.
   
   

   
   I have pages going back 27 22 years and I've been making layout changes less and less often. Every time I change something it takes a while to go back through all my pages to make sure it works on all of them.
   

   
   
   

   
   My older pages like polygon map generation are designed for a 400 450 pixel width. I had designed that layout to support desktop computers back in the 1990s. As I worked on more visual pages the 400 450 pixel width seemed limiting so I designed newer pages for 600 pixels. For mobile, I told the phone to treat the page as 640 pixels wide, and scale it to fit. I haven't updated that layout in years. I experimented with wider layouts for the probability page and the hexagon page (both pages switch to a two column layout when the browser is wide enough) but for the most part I've tried to stick to the 600 pixel width. It's simple. It works.
   

   
   
   

   
   In the past few years browsers have quickly added features like flexbox, grids, calc(), scaling of images, and high-dpi. I've seen some neat layouts using these features, and it would let me do several things I've wanted to do but couldn't figure out. I want more flexibility in my page design than a single 600 pixel column. Lots to learn!
   

   
   
   

   
   I'm also strongly considering dropping custom fonts. I don't think they're adding that much right now, and they slow down page loading. I'm also considering using serif. Back in the 1990s serif fonts were a poor choice, as screen resolutions weren't high enough to render them nicely. But today? After a decade of 1024x768 there's been a sudden increase in screen resolutions / density, so I should consider serif fonts.
   

   
   
   

Read More

Masa depan Mobile Games akan kalahkan segmen Console?

Beberapa media internasional bilang masa depan dari video games itu adalah mobile games, alias game yang ada di smart phone kita, industri mobile phone berkembang sangat pesat sekali. Laporan dari Newzoo menyebut kalau pada tahun 2020 segmen paling menguntungkan adalah mobile gaming dari pada home gaming console, Newzoo menyebutkan hampir dari setengah market total akan diambil oleh mobile gaming yakni sekitar 46,1 miliar dolar dari total 108.9 miliar dolar.

Namun saat ini trend mobile game pun sudah sangat berubah, beberapa tahun yang lalu, developer game masih mengeluarkan game-game dengan storyline yang lumayan bagus seperti judul Chaos Rings series, Dungeon Hunter, Dead Space, Asphalt, Infinity Blade dll, dimana sebuah game dengan storyline yang dapat kita "tamatkan".

Namun sekarang segmen ini sudah sangat berubah, sebuah ekosistem yang sudah berubah secara drastis, dimana banyak games dengan label gratis namun disisipi dengan mekanisme mikro transaksi dan loot boxes yang lebih mendominasi industri video games, bayangkan saja, developer membuat games dengan biaya paling minim namun memberikan untung yang luar biasa banyak dengan mekanisme mikro transaksi ini, ketimbang mereka harus membuat sebuah game AAA dengan biaya produksi besar namun untung yang belum pasti dan diterima pasaran atau tidak.

Sekarang ini sebuah game dalam mobile game menjadi endless, tidak bisa tamat, tidak terbatas dan bersifat online, kita secara tidak sadar juga harus beli kosmetik dari game tersebut supaya bisa se-level dengan player lain, sejago player lain, ada nya sistem waktu tunggu yang mana membuat player yang tidak sabar untuk menunggu akan merogoh kocek lebih dalam agar waktu tunggu ini bisa dilalui.

Untuk mobile game saya memainkan Pokemon Go dan Idle Poring Ragnarok, semua game itu penuh dengan mikro transaksi dan sebuah game dengan story nol besar, sebuah game yang tidak akan selesai sampai server gamenya ditutup. Jujur saya menjadi rindu dengan game-game seperti Chaos Rings dan game se era-nya, dimana pada saat itu saya mengira beberapa tahun ke depan akan banyak game dengan kualitas seperti ini dan mungkin grafis lama kelamaan akan menyamai PS3, saat itu saya merasa masa depan video games ada di tangan saya. Namun ternyata sistem mikro transaksi, loot boxes telah merusak ekosistem dari mobile gaming ini.

Bagi saya,
R.I.P Moblie Gaming..

Read More

Hahh Ngumpulin Trophy PS4 Bisa Dapat Uang??

Beberapa hari lalu muncul berita resmi dari Sony Rewards, yang mana Sony kini akan memberikan hadiah poin untuk trophy yang berhasil kita kumpulkan, Sekarang mengumpulkan trophy menjadi lebih memiliki arti jika Sony bisa menukarkannya dengan uang di PSN.

Menurut program tersebut, ketagori trophy di bagi menjadi 3 kategori :
- 100 Silver Trophy untuk 100 Poin, jadi 1 poin per 1 Silver
- 25 Gold Trophy untuk 250 Poin, jadi 10 Poin per 1 Gold
- 10 Platinum Trophy untuk 1000 Poin, jadi 100 poin per Platinum

Dari 3 kategori di atas bisa ditarik kesimpulan, jika kita mengumpulkan 10 Platinums maka kita akan mendapatkan 10$ PSN voucher, jika dihitung saya sudah mengumpulkan 211 Platinum, itu tandanya saya dapat men dapat 2110$ jika dikalikan dengan rupiah 13rb menjadi sekitar 27 Juta rupiah, Wow angka yang lumayan untuk ukuran pendapatan seorang gamer. Namun lagi-lagi 211 Platinum yang saya kumpulkan dalam kurun waktu 5 tahun.

Mimpi dapat uang segitu, kelihatannya manis dan indah, namun banyak ketentuan-ketentuan yang harus dipenuhi untuk mendapatkan uang dari Sony. Salah satu ketentuan nya adalah PSN id harus region 1 USA dan kita harus berdomisili di Amerika, kalo yang ini sudah bisa di akalin menggunakan VPN, satu lagi yang berat adalah trophy baru dihitung semenjak program ini aktif beberapa minggu yang lalu, jadi intinya semua trophy yang saya kumpulkan sebelumnya tidak bisa diklaim, bey-bey uang 27 Juta :).

Intinya sih sekarang Trophy mulai dianggap serius oleh Sony, dan Sony memberikan reward khusus bagi para gamers yang mengumpulkan trophy tersebut. Berdoa saja kalo program seperti ini akan meluas ke region lainnya khususnya Asia yang memiliki pasar Video Games cukup besar.

Read More