As a game player, or an artist who modifies games, you will no doubt have heard of an engine in relation to games. However, many people are unaware what an engine actually is, what is does, and how it affects them as an artist. Many people confuse a game engine with the game itself. This is an attempt to explain what a game engine does and why they are used - but to stop this being a novel I’ll approach from the point of view of an artist.

Essentially, an engine is device for collecting, managing and using assets. You put art and sound and logic in one end, and a game comes out the other end.

There you go, that’s that cleared up.

More details?

As I mentioned, many people confuse the engine with the entire game - an engine is not a game, but the core around which a game is written. An engine contains no game, its a layer of abstraction, a layer of processing that sits between the game (fun, story, art, sound, controls) and the hardware.

In the old days games were essentially written for specific hardware. They were one off chunks of code - you came to your next game and you rewrote it from scratch. Quickly programmers built up a library of reusable code, so that, for example, once they written had a good system for handling sprites they could simply copy that code into their next game - perhaps verbatim, perhaps making minor or even major improvements.

Reusing code is a great idea - rather than starting everything from scratch each time, you get a major head start. Soon these little snippets of code build up, and then you realise that playing sound in your last game and playing sound in your next game is the same, it’s only the sounds that are different. Just record the new sounds, bung them in and hey-ho, away we go.

So, rather than writing a game from the ground up each time, an engine provides a core to work around. When developing a game, the artists export their models and textures and animations into a format that the engine can read, as do the sound engineers. The game programmers write a control system that maps buttons presses on a joypad or a keyboard to actions in the game, but the engine does the work of translating the signals from the joypad into something we understand, like ‘Up’ or ‘X Button’.

But what will all those programmers do now that we have engines? Lots of things - they’ll find and fix bugs in the engine. They’ll make the engine run faster. They’ll add new features (and then fix them. And then make them faster). And they’ll even write nice tools for us artists to make it easier to get our artwork out of our heads and into the game.

Hurray for engines!

Back in August I wrote a short piece on how you could use a free Wordpress blog and a free Flickr account to create a quick portfolio site. There were a few supporters, and a few detractors, and a few people gave it a go.

Shepiro went through a few designs before ending up with this: http://osart3d.wordpress.com/

I hadn’t thought of using pages, but Owen did, and it’s all the better for it. The front page simply links to the category pages, making it much more like a traditional website. It works. It looks great.

“I’ve got a great idea for a game. I think I’d be a good ideas person.”

I’ve heard that countless times when people find out what I do for a living. The conversation is usually along the lines of:

“So what do you do?”

I’m an artist.

“Ah, so do you get to design the games?”

No, I’m an artist, I make art.

Then the person decides that I must be rich, and games are easy work, and that they could make games for a living - except that they have no programming or art skills. So what does that leave (apart from producing, sound, localisation, testing, HR and PR (all of which require their own skillsets))?

Designing. They are an ideas person. Good at stories. And they have an idea - although generally I find that a lot of people mistake an idea for a design. I’d surmise that there are three levels: The Idea, the Concept and the Design, all of which rise in complexity and detail. Anyone can have an idea but very few people have a design.

…but back to The Idea.

I hate to burst anyones bubble, but games companies up and down the land are not gnashing their teeth and beating their breasts due to lack of ideas. Hell, ask any one person in a games company for 5 ideas and you’ll have them in 5 minutes. As someone who has never worked in games you are not going to walk into a company and have them proclaim ‘Hallelujah! We are saved! We had no ideas before and now we have thanks to you!’.

Putting it simply - games companies don’t need ideas.

The personal sounding title of this post is down to the fact that I don’t need your idea either. For one thing, I’ve already got ideas, and they’ve already been refined over time. Yes, I’m claiming that my ideas are better than yours because everyone thinks that their idea is the best. And yes, that probably does sound egotistical, but it is the truth - I don’t care about your idea, I care about mine.

I’m knocking talking about the ideas we have together when working together - there are hundreds of ides from dozens of people all of which go together to make a game. In that situation you listen to every persons ideas and try to make the best game you can. I’m talking about the idea you try to pitch to me in the pub.

Oh, and one final point - I legally don’t want to hear your idea. Let’s say that the place I worked for was making a game where you were a dinosaur that transformed into a spaceship to track down evil magic cowboys, and you told me in the pub that you had an idea where you were a magic cowboy hunting dinosaurs. The two are unrelated, but you could claim when the game was released that it had been your idea. This is not uncommon, and I’ve worked for a company where this happened - two guys claimed that we overheard them talking in a pub and stole their idea (when in fact the game idea had come from a few years previously in a city a few hundred miles away). They tried to sue - and whilst they lost, they had to be taken seriously.

People are always posting images of their models online and asking for feedback. Unfortunately at times the model is presented so poorly that it makes giving feedback nigh impossible. The main problems are tiny images with no contrast on the model but a huge contrast between the model and the background. Hopefully this will give you some points on how to present your work in a better way - because you’d rather people commented on your model than on your shoddy presentation skills.

Firstly, make the images big enough to see - a 200×200 pixel image just doesn’t cut it. The bigger the better, within reason, but remember to crop the dead space from the image as there is no point in posting an 800×800 pixel image and only using a tiny part to contain the artwork. With larger images come larger filesizes , so you’ll want to optimise it (Photoshop and ImageReady both do this well). Compression can be a problem, but if you save as JPG with 60-70% quality you’ll probably be fine.

To keep people focused on the artwork, make the background a neutral gray colour. Bright colours are distracting, and very light or dark backgrounds made it harder to pick out details, edges and contrast. Why do you think most 3d packages use a neutral gray background by default?

If you are posting on a website or a forum, try to embed the image into the discussion rather than using text links. It stops people having to click backwards are forwards.

There is always a debate over whether screengrabs or renders are better. I prefer renders, since I can drop a few lights in the scene to pop out the details, but they take time to set up.

If you do decide to render then you’ll want have at least 2 lights, one key light and one fill light so that the shape can be defined. You need lights to to pick out the shadows so that the form can be seen. Skylights are all the rage, but without at least one directional light they can make the model appear flat. There is an excellent tutorial on 3d lighting at http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html which will help you understand what the key and fill lights do.

The lighting of a model is subjective, and depends on what you want to highlight - the geometry, the colour/diffuse textures, the specular/normal maps all require different presentation to pick out various aspects. It’s often much easier to read geometry when there are no textures applied and you have one or two solid colours. Colour/diffuse textures often benefit from very flat lighting, and showing off normal/spec maps usually requires a strong directional light. Experimentation is the key here, but experimentation takes time, which is another reason screengrabs are popular.

Whether you choose to screengrab or render, you really should use a perspective view - using an orthographic view will cause the model to look distorted as you’ll have no foreshortening or depth. Ideally you’ll also render or grab your model from several angles and either post separate images or compile them onto one larger image. As well as front/back views, a 3/4 shot is very useful.

Render/screengrab with and without a wireframe. The wireframes are essential if you want people to give feedback on the flow of your mesh, and they are easy to setup. The simplest method in many 3d packages is to duplicate your model and make the duplicate every so slightly larger, then apply a wireframe material to it.

Some final thoughts
If you want critique on a specific area, ask for it and provide a closeup shot of that area - remember you can crop it to just the part you want to highlight. Similarly if youwant an area to be ignored for the purpose of feedback, state that - but don’t be upset if people comment on it anyway.

Technorati Tags: feedback, 3d artwork, presentation skills

Recently I was approached by a group of hobby gamers who wanted me to make some art for a game they were working on (for the record, I have no interest). They tried to persuade me that they were worth working with with the line “…and we’ve built our own engine.”

A few days later I heard the same on MSN, about a small hobby project - “We’ve built our own engine”.

Which made me ask - “WHY?”

If you are a programmer wanting to learn about engines, then by all means, go ahead (although you’ll learn quite a lot just tinkering with existing engines). But if you are a small group of hobbiests wanting to make a game, you really shouldn’t.

Writing engines is hard. Really hard. And there are already so many out there that there is bound to be one that suits your needs, or almost suits your needs without you having to write it all. Some do costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, but Torque costs $100 for a single license.

You’ll need to write your own tools, and probably exporters. You’ll need to figure out lighting, and memory access, and probably streaming. Oh, and animation systems and directional sound. Input and output routines. I almost forgot about particle systems, and the scripting language to write the actual gameplay with. Oh, did you want network code with that?

You are going to end up writing more engine code than game code.

“But it’s a great way to learn!”

Yes, for one or two people - but what are rest of your team going to do while you hack away for months? Yes, they can make assets, assets that they will not be able to see in game because there is no game yet, because there is no engine to build a game with.

In the end, an engine is a program that maintains the game world, and if you want to make a game, why not concentrate your efforts on making a game? An off the shelf engine will probably suit most of your needs, allowing you to spend more time on the fun stuff.

Thank you to Dino for the phrase I used for the title.

Technorati Tags: Games, programming, engine

It seems that every week there are dozens of new portfolio sites popping up - sometimes they look good, and sometimes they look bad. Storage space is often hard to find, some free hosts make it almost impossible to directly link to your images, and some people are still manually editing and upload HTML.

Why not use the easy route? Blog it. These days image sharing sites and blogging sites are closely linked, so we can use them to store and display all the content.

I’m going to show you how to quickly create a portfolio site that will look good, be simple to update, and display your art easily. It will use default settings for most things, but I’ll point you in the right direction for customisation. I said quickly, and I mean it - with a high speed internet connection you should have everything running in about 15 minutes.

The Blog

Firstly, we need a blog to hold all the content. There are dozens to choose from, but you’ll want one that lets you integrate other sites into it using an API. I’ll use Wordpress for this example, but you could equally use LiveJournal, Blogger, Moveable Type, Typepad or whatever.

So I went to http://www.wordpress.com and signed up for a blog. This took about 30 seconds - they emailed my password to me, and http://rickstirling.wordpress.com/ was up and running. Using Wordpress is a breeze - just click ‘Add new post’ and type away.

So, in 2 minutes I had a site with my own content on it - but it used the default Wordpress template so it looked like every other Wordpress site out there. My rsart.co.uk site is a Wordpress based site, but I used my own hosting and installed their blogging software myself. I really went to work on rsart, editing the stylesheet and layout templates to get something that worked for me, and you can do this on a Wordpress.com hosted account just as easily - but you have to pay for the privilege (about $15). But since this article is all about speed, for now we are simply going to pick a template design.

If you go to the Presentation tab on the Wordpress dashboard you can edit the CSS, or you can simply pick from one of the 40 or so themes that are just sitting there (with nice big preview images). I went for Benevolence - it was the first one on the list that I liked.

The images

Now we need an image host - and we might as well use Flickr as it has excellent ties with Wordpress. I already have a Flickr account, so I’ll not set up a new one, but I assure that it is simplicity itself. When you sign up you get a coded id, like n001828-a, but you can change this to something much easier to remember. I choose rickstirling for mine, and you can view my images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickstirling/

Once you account is setup you can upload you images. Flickr has a web based uploader, but you can also upload by email or by using a variety of applications - you can also send photos directly from your camera phone. I have a plugin for iPhoto that lets me upload directly to Flickr. Since I have a lot of images online, I’ll not upload a new one and instead I’ll use an existing image for my blog.

We need to configure Flickr to know where our blog is - fortunately this is easy. By going to http://www.flickr.com/blogs.gne you can add a blog to your Flickr profile. Choose the blog type (in this case it’s Wordpress), Then you fill in the API address - Flickr tells you what it is, in my case it will be http://rickstirling.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php and then I give my blog login details. Press next and Flickr will try to verify this - 15 seconds later I’m good to go.

The setup is complete for the blog and image hosting.

Blogging the images

Now the final stage - getting an image onto your blog. This is the easiest part - simply upload your images to Flickr, navigate to the image that you want, and click the ‘Blog This’ button. This brings up a text editor, where you can give the image a different title and write a blog post about it. Press Post, and a few seconds later it’s done! Flickr has posted a blog post onto your site with the image.

You can see the images I posted from Flickr on my test Wordpress.com site http://rickstirling.wordpress.com/

Taking it further

This short article was just a quick run through, showing you how to build an image blog in minutes. Of course you’ll want to take this further, so I’ll leave you with some links.

• The latest version of Wordpress.com allows you embed video from Google Video and You Tube - perfect for showing off your animation.
• Flickr has a section dedicated to getting the most out out Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/get_the_most.gne
• Flickr also provide several methods of uploading you images - http://www.flickr.com/tools/
• Wordpress can be installed on your own site, give you much greater flexibility - http://wordpress.org/
• Wordpress blogs can be edited off line using several blog editors - Ecto and Windows Live Writer are just 2

Other Portfolio Thoughts

• Go read Jon Jones article, Your Portfolio Repels Jobs

Technorati Tags: Art, blog tool, ecto, flickr, photograph, portfolio, Web Development, windows live writer, wordpress

Lots of people ask questions about getting a job in the games industry - just look at the wiki for example - so I thought I’d pull together a list of top tips for the interview. Most of these as it turns out apply to any job interview.

• Be on time for the interview - actually be a little early. This is pretty obvious, but there is a reason - you will more often than not be asked to take a seat in a area where you can observe the environment for a few minutes.
• Wear something suitable - try to find out what sort of clothing most people that work in that company wear, and then wear something similar but smart. This will say “I’d fit in with you people, but I’ve made an effort’
• Research the company and their games - how long have they been around, how many games have they made, how well did the last game sell and how were the reviews for it. Look for interviews and features on them on the internet. Be able to show that you have some knowledge.
• Play their last game! Be able to say what you did and didn’t like about it, and don’t be afraid to be critical of some areas to show that you have your own opinions. You will often be asked questions about the last game, and trust me, if you try to bullshit this you will look stupid.
• Ask questions. Be prepared with a list, and ask relevant ones. Don not be afraid to ask what the benefits are - what the pension scheme is like, are there bonuses, does the company provide private healthcare, are their training courses.

Technorati Tags: interview tips, getting a job

“Why are there no females working in the games industry?” was a question on an internet message board once, and the quick answer was “There are”. I’m not talking about admin roles - for some reason those are generally always female positions, I’m talking about artists, animators, programmers and designers.

But since then I’ve thought that a better question might be “Why there are not more females in the games industry?”

I think the answer is - “Why would they want to be”?

Why would making games appeal to women, when few games appeal to them?

My girlfriend enjoys video games - console games, not on the PC. However, she finds it really difficult to find any that interest her. Most are games seem to fall into categories - sports or killing. Most of the people that I work with also have a spouse that enjoys games to some extent, and generally they feel the same way. They enjoy games, but it’s difficult for them to find a game that they actually want to play.

Case in point - my girlfriend loved Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain. Plenty of puzzles, a good solid platformer, some fighting. Roll on 2 sequels and she hated it - what few puzzles remained had been dumbed right down and it had mutated into a hack and slash platform game.

(This is not unique- take Ico, where practically every room was a puzzle, you had to balance searching for the way out and performing tasks with keeping the girl safe. Shadow of the Colussus is: find monster climb monster kill monster.)

It seems that the main reason that girls don’t play games, is that there are very few games that girls want to play.

Various surveys tell us that around 35% of gamers are female, and 25% of the games market are females over the age of 18, yet more and more are complaining about the lack of games that they want to play - WHY AREN”T WE TARGETTING THIS MARKET? We’d all be rich. Instead of spending some time and effort finding out what appeals, we end up with horrific poorly thought out pink games. We don’t need more games with falling jewels, or stars, or ponies.

Those are not games for girls, those are games made by men targeted towards women who have no idea idea whatsoever what the female audience want. I’ve seen exactly the same with kids games, for I have worked on a few. You get 35 year old men designing a game for kids with no idea whatsoever what kids actually want. I’ve seen designers believing kids to be too stupid for feature x/y/z to be included and dumbing the product down to a primary-coloured button mashing monstrosity.
But people vote with their wallets, don’t they? Popular games sell, that’s why there are no games targeted at females!

You can’t buy what doesn’t exist. Girls do buy games, and complain that there aren’t games that they want to play. They do vote with their wallets - by not purchasing. If they did just buy all and sundry then the developers and publishers would say “Why bother making games that girls will like, they buy our products anyway?”

So “Why there are not more females in the games industry?” has been answered in my mind, and the next question should be “How can we encourage more to join us?”?
In December 2002 Volvo started a new project to get women to design a concept car for them. There reasoning was simple and forward thinking:

The idea of catering more to women’s needs makes perfect business sense, said Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research in Bandon, Ore. Spinella said women either will act alone or have a say in roughly 80% of all vehicle purchases in the United States this year.

And what were the results of this 2 year experiment? A stunning car that was fuel efficient, self regulating car that was fun to drive

“We learned that if you meet women’s expectations, you exceed those for men,” said Hans-Olov Olsson, president and chief executive of the Swedish carmaker.

The car wasn’t pink.

We need more females in the industry, to push INTERESTING ideas forward.

We shouldn’t try to cater towards female gamers as a marketing strategy based on our current system -that will fail. What we’d have is guys making games for girls, not guys and girls making games for guys and girls.

What we need are games that will appeal to both sexes, and to do this we need to have a more balanced ratio of males to females in the workplace.

Women - apply.

Technorati Tags: Gaming, Female gamers, Games, Games Industry