Category: News

Donkey Kong 64 is about to turn 20, and to celebrate that marvelous but inevitable milestone, GamesRadar had a sit down chat with some of the creative leads behind the beloved platformer.

While the full interview contains plenty of tidbits and tales from day days gone by, it’s particularly interesting to hear how lead designer Mark Stevenson struggled to yank the franchise into the third dimension for the very first time. 

Describing the process, Stevenson, who was working for developer Rare at the time, explained how “going 3D was a whole different ball game” back in the ’90s. 

“The technology, at that point, was in its infancy,” he recalls. “From an art perspective, you couldn’t achieve anything visually comparable to the Donkey Kong Country games. It was an incredible challenge to produce 3D graphics, and building 3D models was really hard work — they only had a few hundred polygons but it was tough using the tools we had to manipulate them.” 

Having largely worked on 2D titles until then, Stevenson was so used to designing characters from a fixed side-on view, that he struggled to break those habits when making the switch to 3D. It meant a lot of trial and error before he landed on the models players eventually saw in-game. 

“As an artist who was on the Donkey Kong Country games, I used to build and animate the characters from a fixed side-on view,” continues Stevenson. “Being able to see this character from any angle, you’d make an animation, put it in the game, and you’d think it looked good side-on, but awful from every other angle. It was challenging from a technical and design perspective.”

For more game development anecdotes from yesteryear, be sure to check out the full interview on GamesRadar. It’s well worth a read.

Character artist Jonah Lobe is one of the talented folks who built the ferocious monsters of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. He’s an unparalleled creator of compelling video game creatures, and now you have the opportunity to learn from him in this December 4th GDC Masterclass!

Lobe’s iconic creatures aren’t just one of the defining features of Bethesda’s massively popular role-playing game, they’re also infused with a personal touch that has captured the attention of artists around the world.

His commitment to mixing the practical realities of game development with a vibrant artistic vision makes him one of the most reputable instructors in the world of game character art. And now you can learn from him in an interactive, tight-knit Masterclass!

In Lobe’s class, you’ll learn much of the following:

• Learn how to create characters and creatures that are strikingly original, totally plausible, and immediately iconic.
• Learn to target the foundations of your artistic ability by delving into the powers of line and shape, contrast and color theory, anatomy and personality.
• Discover how to develop new ideas and walk away ready to build.

This course also includes a free copy of Lobe’s Chimaera: A Creature Design Masterclass video, for further instruction to build on this course.

With Lobe’s help, you’ll improve the foundations of your artistic ability in order to create better creatures that can help your game shine.

Space is limited, be sure to sign up before all the seats are gone!

For more information on the GDC Masterclass program, be sure to visit our website or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Devolver Digital has acquired Serious Sam and The Talos Principle developer Croteam, a joining of forces that Devolver says builds on years of collaboration between key members of both teams.

According to a tongue-in-cheek blog posted by the folks at Devolver, Croteam is set to retain creative freedom even as a Devolver subsidiary. The team is set to continue development on The Talos Principle 2, new Serious Sam titles, and an unannounced original IP as well.

“A decade ago Devolver Digital was just getting started and looking for its first project to partner on in the emerging digital distribution world,” reads that blog post. “Similarly, Croteam was on the search for a partner it could trust to help them bring their beloved franchise back to prominence with the upcoming Serious Sam 3. And like that, the next big Serious Sam game brought old partners back together and forged a decade of friendship and dedication.”

“Since then Croteam and Devolver Digital have partnered on dozens of games – from the frantic Serious Sam series to the award-winning The Talos Principle across PC, consoles, VR and mobile platforms. Croteam and Devolver Digital have been dating for so long that we decided to go ahead and just get married.”

Hades developer Supergiant Games has put together a video to showcase how it turned hand-painted character art into the full character models players see in-game. 

The in-depth art deep dive is narrated by Supergiant 3D artist Paige Carter, and focuses on how she created the character model for Nyx. According to Carter, almost all of the NPC characters in Hades begin life as one of two base models, which are then molded into new characters. 

In the case of Nyx, also known as ‘Mother Night,’ the model was directly based on portrait art created in-house. Carter explains how she would typically put the portrait art behind her Z Brush file while working, and would use the sculpting tool’s ‘see-through’ function to compare the facial features of both the 2D artwork and 3D model in close detail. 

It’s a technique that allowed her to transport all the nuance and personality of the 2D model into her 3D sculpture, before eventually moving it into Maya for further refinement.  

“Once taking it into Maya I can refine the model and retopo all of the pieces so they deform well and render quickly,” she explains in the video. “After the model is complete and I’m happy with it and the UVs are there, I will import it into substance where I immediately turn off the lighting and stick a base color on the model, which is typically just the character’s skin tone. 

“I also bake textures within Substance. So, I’ll bake in an ambient inclusion map, a curvature map, and a thickness map, which I’ll overlay over the base color so I can actually see where the characters features are.

“From that point, I stick basic color blocks in their own separate layers so I can adjust the colors to better match the 2D art. […] After all of the base colors are there I put a black line art layer on top of everything and go in and hand paint all of the black lifework to try and match the 2D look of the character as much as possible.”

Carter goes on to explain how that hand painted line work is critical to bringing characters to life, and reveals it’s her favorite part of the entire process. If that little slice of insight whet your appetite, you can hear more from the Supergiant artist by checking out the full video (also embedded above). 

A crew of former Blizzard developers have set up a new studio to develop real-time strategy games, and have landed $4.7 million in seed funding to get the effort off the ground.

That new outfit is Frost Giant Games, and its helmed by former Blizzard developers Tim Morten and Tim Campbell.

Both have experience in the genre from their days at the StarCraft developer, with Morten having previously worked as production director on StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty and Campbell having served as lead campaign designer for Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne.

According to a chat with VentureBeat, the founding duo plans to use the funding infusion to grow the team at Frost Giant, build out a prototype, conduct consumer research, and expand operations altogether. That $4.7 seed funding round was led by Bitkraft Ventures, and saw contributions from 1UP Ventures, GC Tracker, fellow dev studio Riot Games, and Griffin Gaming Partners as well.

The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) wants to save our source code with a new initiative called the Video Game Source Project. 

The non-profit, which is dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games, wants to ensure source code is preserved and made more accessible so it can be studied for decades to come. 

The term ‘source code’ essentially described the raw materials used to create a video game, and comprises everything from the code itself to animation artwork, design documentation, and records of correspondence. 

The VGHF explained that preserving that source code allows a title to survive past its initial release (possibly facilitating bona fide remasters in the future), and when archived properly is “the next best thing to time travel.”

“Video game source code and other source materials are inarguably the best resources for those studying how a game was made. And yet the availability of these materials is scarce at best, with few examples available online and even fewer in institutional archives. Worse, historical source code from the earliest days of the medium is being lost by the day,” explained the VGHF. 

“We’d like to change that. Today, we’re announcing what we’re calling our Video Game Source Project, the VGHF’s most ambitious initiative to date. It’s a wake-up call to preserve this endangered resource, a call to arms to locate it and make it accessible, and a forward-thinking vision of a world in which using this material as an educational resource is commonplace.”

With that goal in mind, the VGHF will establish an advisory committee comprised of members form the games industry, academia, and non-profit institutions to investigate and address the plethora of issues that make source code such a rare commodity. 

It also plans to produce content that demonstrates the power of source material in a historian’s hands, and will host educational events like the recently announced 30th Anniversary celebration of The Secret of Monkey Island that will see the VGHF and its creator Rod Gilbert look through its source material. 

You learn more about the VGHF’s preservation efforts by clicking right here.