Archive for the ‘The art of VGS’ Category

A level mockup of M:A:D

Another shot we took somedays ago. Here you can see a full level mockup with both player and AI positioned and some terrain detail.

The destroyed cities are part of the game by the way… we just won’t tell you what for, that’s how evil we are, muwahahahahah!

Images courtesy of Marco, general bla bla bla courtesy of Vlad!

See you all soon…

M:A:D Screenshot #1

Hi,

Sharing a simple screenshot we took some days ago showing buildings, units and the first version of the GUI.

All feedback is welcome and see you soon!

Marco

Going slightly M:A:D

Hi everyone, Marco here.

Me and Vlad decided to show you our current project. We don’t know how it will evolve (read previous post) but since we like what we see we decided to share it with you and get some feedback.

It’s the first time we are disclosing any info about a yet to release game publicly, so this is kind of a new experience for us.

Game name is Mechs and Drones: Annihilation or M:A:D for short. It’s a real time strategy game and we have been around it for sometime now but in the middle of contracts and even Atomik Kaos 2, it only got the deserved attention in the last couple of weeks.

When I posted about conceptual design, I was talking about M:A:D. Right now we have all structure and unit micro AI working along with path finding. Enemy AI is the current step.

Here’s a huge logo pic, more pics (and screenshots I heard) later on.

See you soon for more M:A:D stuff!

Conceptual design is a logical thing

Though some artists and designers may disagree, I prefer to believe that conceptual designing is a form of logical thinking that uses methods from the artistic realm to express it self. I don’t trust inspiration to guide me as often as logic does. My clients aren’t paying me to wait for inspiration. They pay and expect me to act as a professional that sits down and gets the job done without drama or frustration because inspiration doesn’t come.

For a new in-house project we are working on at VGS, I had to design a series of buildings that represent different features of the game. Without revealing much of the game itself, I’m going to try and explain the reasons behind the final images that came out of this arduous yet very satisfying and motivational conceptual design process.

Originally I made some quick sprites for Vlad to work on his first tests. just placeholders. He was rather quick to let out a big fat “MEH” when he saw the two little structures.

After some discussion the structures we have are:

A central, a couple of factories, a lab, a workshop, a metalworks building, a radar and a repair building.

The only one that resides on “inspiration” is the central, which was the first to be designed and drawn out on paper, modeled and detailed.

The concept was “something that is set on its own center and has supports to keep it there”. That pushed me to a tripod concept.  And while you can certainly allow inspiration to let you come up with this, a logical approach will likely yield similar results. Write down stuff that has a center and supports. “Tripod” will quickly come up.

These were originally sketched in flash, because I can use a movieclip with its mirrored instance next to it. I draw and it updates.

All the other buildings that followed were in a way… doodled on the “paper”. I really was hoping for inspiration to help me out. But no!
The only thing I kept was the fact that I wanted them to have very distinct silhouettes for readability. I want the player to be able to look at them and automatically see what structures they are.

In some specific cases, like the radar, I gave it a bit of a satellite dish look. For the lab I had different sections and both the workshop and metal works were just mere doodles, trying to find a shape that I liked. And that’s where I failed, because I already had a shape I liked. The Central’s shape.

So I trusted my judgment and modeled it and rendered it. I also liked the original repair building so I went with it as well. They came out as good as I hoped and I stuck with them. The problem was the other buildings

So, not satisfied and at a dead end, I showed them to a couple of friends and they said “Cool! looks very alienish and very distinct from each other”. So, one of the parts was done – differentiation. Now for the second part – making them look not alien, but robotic.

And one thing I think that robots would believe is “if something works, stick to it”. And that’s what I did. I chose a couple of shapes I liked from the Central building, and used them to replicate the original layouts.

The lab was now 3 “departments” instead of 4. The workshop was no longer a smoothed building but more of a office building structure to it, with a big outer area for whatever tests that need to be done (and also to convey a square area for the  whole building). The factories have long warehouse areas to create the sense of big work areas. The metal works has a central area that creates a connection between two big furnaces.

While modeling them, I still messed around with the designs, to make them more interesting and have more readability as iconic shapes. Here they are, compared to the previous designs so you can see how much artistic liberty I took while modeling them.

So as you can see the central’s got a two color scheme to match the rest of the buildings, as I felt they needed a base color and a “team” color. The metal works was rotated 45º to create a diamond area instead of a square one and now has a big chimney for the furnace and a dome area for the metal to pour in. The workshop is very close to the previous design and has a court yard, much like the repair. The laboratory’s departments where scaled differently just for extra visual interest and the radar was put a bit more in par with the overall designs. Both factories have a big dome like area to suggest the “brain” of the building and then a smaller warehouse or storage area. They were also rotated the same amount of degrees but in opposite directions, to suggest that even though they are both factories, they generate different things.

Here are the very final desings :

The central building lost one of the elements that looked like a wrench that was put on the repair building. Looking like a wrench actually works better on the repair building.
there was also added some detail to the workshop building to suggest a garage entrance, exhausts on the roof and some pipes, for air circulation.

This is the process that was involved in creating the original central, from concept to finished.

I hope this was an interesting read. The final result pleases me and Vlad, or at least he says so, and I chose to trust him.
Stay tuned on the blog for more interesting stuff that comes out of the VGS’s incubator!

Our logo is our face

Naughty Pixel

Some years ago, while I was still in design school, I had this project in which I had to create the logo and all the stationary for my future company. I remember thinking I would like to do Web Design and Multimedia stuff. At that point the “naughty pixel” was born.

This logo featured a winking smiley face, tilted. The idea was to give it a friendly “come and play” look.

Years later, VGS was born and while struggling to find the perfect image to represent our vision, we knew we needed a character.

Tests with Vlad's toon

“Vortix” was the name of a character Ricardo was always drawing on any random piece of paper. The idea of a devilish character was appealing, but once reduced to smaller sizes the features and fur were lost, turning it into a blob with eyes. That’s when the naughty pixel was rescued from a dusty desk drawer and brought back to life.

Our first logos

The corners where rounded to remove the harshness of the sharp outline, the wink was removed to make the face clearer and the nose removed for simplicity. This left us with a friendly face but all it did was smile. A couple of months after we settled on the new not-so-naughty-anymore pixel we gave it a small face-lift to help him stand out a bit more as a real thing, instead of just a shape. By adding the tongue we gave it a certain “determination” or “defiance” to it that, while keeping the smile, makes it look like the little pixel is really focused on playing. We also un-tilted it for better use in smaller formats such as icons and avatars.

Final tests and logos

We’re pretty happy with the result!

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