Mountain base
Originally uploaded by Rick Stirling.
Looking towards the restaurant and observation point on the aguille de midi.
Processed with Photoshop - the image was sharpened and colour corrected. I also overlayed a blue duotone version of the image with a little grain.
Geneva Tree
Originally uploaded by Rick Stirling.
I’ve got no idea what the species is - they were all over Geneva and I snapped this one in Parc De Bastion.
I photoshopped out a stray branch that was leaking into the top left corner, and spent a while working with the colour and tonal balance.
Then I went and bunged a multiplied blurred copy over the top of it.
The developer and publisher relationship can often be confusing, but in it’s simplest form it can be explained as Developers make the game, and Publishers put the game into a box and get it into the shops.
Where it gets more difficult is that some publishers develop their games as well, and sometimes it’s difficult to see where specific roles lie in the developer/publisher relationship.
Developers
A developer is a group of people who make games. They design the game, program it and make all the art and sound (or sub-contract some or all of these tasks to other developers). At the end of the day they are people who create the fun.
Publisher
Publishers are not simply responsible for getting the game into the shop, but they also handle the packaging, distribution, promotion, language localisation and providing legal help when needed - negotiating licenses for example. Often a publisher will approach a developer and ask them to develop a specific game for them, providing a design overview.
Since the publisher is often the party with money, they will often seek a creative role in the games development to protect their interests. This can take the form of assigning producers or project managers to the developer to ensure that deadlines are met. This can often cause tension between the publisher and developer, as the developer may feel the publisher is trying to interfere with what they as developers do best.
Internal Developers
Some developers are self publishing, and some publishers own development studios. EA and Ubisoft, for example, are international publishers who also happen to own several development studios. These studios are known as internal studios, only develop games for their parent publisher. Both Ubisoft and EA however also publish games developed by external studios - studios which they do not own.
There is also now a growing trend towards online distribution of games, thus removing the publisher from the equation, but this is not as simple as it sounds. As described above, Publishing is not simply the job of putting the game in the box and getting it into the shop, and games still need to be advertised and promoted.
I was just re-reading some of the latest posts on Jon Jones site, and I came across his thoughts on using a folder of Windows shortcuts to other folders.
Yes Jon, Yes. That’s something a lot of people miss, and I curse myself for not mentioning it myself.
I’m working on a fairly massive project, and I’m working with ingame characters, and cinematic characters, and stand-in cinematic characters, and exported data, and raw exported data, and the game, and the tools, spread over different folders, drives and network drives. I know where everything is (most of the time), but navigating that by going up and down and across folders is a nightmare. Programs like 3DSMax often store the last 8 or 10 folders you worked with, but at this point in time Zbrush doesn’t, so the act of finding a model and it’s textures to load is annoying. Not hard, or impossible, just annoying.
Like Jon, I’ve got a folder on my desktop called Game Shortcuts, and in this folder I have shortcuts to all my common project folders.
Incidentally, Jons site is full of useful little (and large) workflow and productivity tips, well work adding to your feed reader.
Now, back to Photoshop for me.
Whilst browsing Polycount, dishing out advice with my uncalibrated moral compass, I stumbled upon a link to 3dCreature. You should pop along to it for a good look.
This website is aimed at being a quick stop-over for digital artists to check out cool art and update themselves on news that matter. The content on this site is mostly tailored towards character art. You can also find news about the games and film industry. Let’s just say that the content has been filtered and streamlined so you can surf more in less time.
Portobello beach
Originally uploaded by Rick Stirling.
Went for a walk along the beach this afternoon
Eric Elwell has a new tutorial online covering basic game lighting. It shows how a model is affected by the deafult and advanced lights in the Torque engine, and will be followed by a texturing tutorial to take advantage of this knowledge.