I’d claim it’s apt for me to write a post about procrastination, considering how long it has been since my last blog post, but really, the blog wasn’t the catalyst for this post. As is often the case I wanted to reflect on this topic based upon some new art of mine. Below you’ll see a sculpture I started over 2 years ago. A piece that has been sitting in plain sight all along, as well as reserving its own space on numerous todo lists I created over those years.

It is a work that when I started it, I was enamored with how it was proceeding. I was so proud and muscled through about 75% of the piece. Then the problems. I was concerned about finishing, concerned that I would ruin what I already had in front of me if I tried to do the remaining portions of the piece. I didn’t feel like I knew HOW to do the details I hadn’t gotten to yet. So, the piece languished. It took a permanent residence on my only large-scale sculpture stand, taking up a piece of equipment that I needed if I wanted to make more sculptures.

When I returned to it recently. I did so with a different outlook. I held resentment to the piece. I still enjoyed the concept of it and thought it was decent, but I wanted it behind me. No longer was I afraid of proceeding in a way that could ruin the figure. I just wanted to be done so that I could move on. If I completed it I could start my next piece and learn more to make better works. In short, I wanted control back.

I think that is the bottom line of procrastination. Being in control of what you want to do. Being able to stick to a list of goals or tasks, and being able to follow through. I’m experimenting currently with setting personal deadlines for my artistic hobbies, but often find it difficult to measure how I go about smaller tasks, like sketching, and how I can approximate how long something like a sculpture will take when it isn’t the only item on my list. I’m curios if, for those of you who read this blog, what methods you use to keep organized, and keep from letting projects go by the wayside? Do you complete everything you start, or do you dump things that have sat around too long or lost your interest? Feel free to contribute your input in the comments.

Also, saddly after taking pictures of the sculpt and 2/3rds through this post… the stand that I put this on broke. The sculpture is now once again balancing on my sculpture stand, waiting for me to connect it to a better stand so it won’t fall over. Hopefully I’ll get to that soon, and not let another year pass me by on this.

Just throwing up a sculpture pic today. I’ve been working on this little guy for a bit to get back into the habit of sculpting. Apparently I have a habit of making characters with large arms, with tight shoulders and skinny legs. I like how the balance with his back hand came out to keep the figure from falling, but wish I had done a tighter job in a few places (The fist and some aspects of the face specifically). I think I want to get my characters to have a little more emotion in their expressions, as the face ended up pretty generic. Feel free to provide your own feedback if you have any. I do try to take into consideration all opinions that come my way. Same goes for camera-work if you’ve got any tips. Using a camera is kinda new to me so I don’t think I’m getting the best shots out of it.

As those who have talked with me recently know I’ve been considering expanding this blog beyond the scope of games, and using it to post some of the artwork I do in my spare time. This is a combination of my own self-interest in showing my art around to more people, as well as wanting to be able to make relevant posts more often. To me this blog works to an extent as a form of practice in improving my writing skills. In my work and everyday life I tend to not write in long form often. I was concerned about the decision to have both my interests in games and art in the same space without the art being relevant to games because I feared the lack of focus would drive people away who were interested in games, but not so much in art. I decided to move ahead anyway because I feel that this blog is more for myself than for the readers and because, to be quite frank about it, I don’t think my readership is vast enough to care. I get some hits from my friends, and some hits when I link to my blog from various forum posts. It’s not a vast audience I should be concerning myself over here. I thank you for coming and reading my posts, but there’s no reason for me currently to cater to any particular group.

Long story short, I’m going to try to start posting my art regularly as well as any rants I have to make. This may mean eventually adding a new page for a gallery, but at the moment you’ll have to be content with my little sketches that end up in posts. Feel free to critique or comment about them.

Here’s some work I did recently. I’ve been practicing with my tablet in black and white forms to try and loosen up my style a bit more with varying results.

These are various robot poses based on my robots from Entervoid.com.

Just a guy. He’s a bit stiff, and feels kind of like clipart to me

An orc. I like it, but I know I spent too much time making clean, sharp lines and not enough time on anatomy and the pose itself.

So, ToJam ended this Sunday night and it was a fun experience. Our team ended up being 5 people, plus some help from a graphics floater who was helping various teams at the event.

To outline our time, it was pretty much a frantic dash from Friday to Sunday to make the game we had designed. A large portion of Friday was taken up just in getting our entire team setup at the event. Packing up our desktops, bringing them to the event, finding out one of them had their heat sink fall off onto their video card (makes me cringe just thinking about that happening!) and various issues of connecting to a very busy wireless network. Two of our members were doing the majority of the coding on Friday, setting up XNA and our program’s basic architecture so that we could more easily split up the programming tasks in the next days between the 4 programmers we had available. I spent Friday with a bit of code, but also doing the drawings for our game’s buildings. The weekend itself was the team building the actual game, filling in all the planned, but unimplemented pieces of functionality needed to meet our vision.

Our game itself was a resource-management game where the player competes for world resources with an AI opponent. Our idea was to have competing ISPs fighting for houses to use them as their internet provider and get a monopoly over the city. The good part was we got the engine made needed to implement the game. The bad news was that to get that engine finished we cut it really close to the wire, and as such never got a chance to properly playtest the gameplay. Due to the size of levels, concentration of buildings, costs of network maintenance, and all the numerous variables associated with how satisfied a customer is with a certain ISP in the game, our game worked, but didn’t have the balance we would have liked to make it truly shine in its own right.

It was a great experience overall and I’d love to do it again, but there are definitely some mistakes I’d try to avoid next time to try and assure that at any step midway through the process, not only do we have something that runs and is interactive/playable, but that the “fun” of the game is iterating as well. There were some very good games I saw that were based on relatively simple concepts. You could see these teams had an enjoyable”toy” to begin with, and although they may have not hit every goal they wanted, their end results were still fun, and could just be made increasingly enjoyable with more time. Our game had a good engine and a strong team, but I feel it was too big a step to go from “engine” to game in the time we had. If we had weeks instead of days it would be a completely different matter, but I think the time we had didn’t lend itself well to the genre of game we chose to pursue.

Once the organizers put up the games that were made during this Jam, I would highly suggest looking at my favorite two games of the event, “Cheese is War” and “Super Cheese Repulsor”. Both of these games I found to have fun gameplay, although you’ll have to invite a friend because they are both multiplayer. Cheese is War used the farseer physics engine for XNA to make some interesting physics based gameplay, and of course I’m even more proud to say that they were another UofT team with most, if not all, of the participants from the UofT Game Design and Development Club.

One other happy surprise I had was in my own programming competence. I was concerned over using C# and XNA for the first time at this event, as I hadn’t even touched either beforehand due to the busyness of classes and my final exams. My teammates assured me that C# would be easy since I knew C and Java, but I’m often a skeptic on such matters. Fortunately they were right. I took to game programming in XNA quickly and once I was programming it was easy to get my tasks done. Sure I don’t know all the intricacies of the language yet, but being able to work on a simple engine was a good starting point if I want to pursue learning C# or XNA further.

For those of you who were in Toronto but missed it, I just came back from GameCamp Toronto which ran today, and it was a blast.

There were a ton of great presentations from various people and things went very smoothly thanks to the organizers Andrei Petrov and Mark Cautillo (both of their blogs should be in my blogroll links to the right). I was sitting on the sidelines the whole time taking photos of the event which I’ll try to get up at the GameCamp gallery soon. Unforunately, my batteries died by the last two presenters, but I think there were a few people there with spare cameras who covered what I missed.

I think my favourite presentations came in the morning sessions. Specifically, Jim McGinley and Andy Smith were showing games that they have developed recently, reflecting on their experiences and talking about the lessons they learned. Both were very different kind of games in terms of teams and their scope, but I love hearing about development lessons and seeing the development of a game. Maybe it’s because I’m a very visual person and like seeing art from a game, or maybe I just like hearing how others screwed up in their postmortems, or perhaps those who reflect on games they made provide the best insight to share with others. Either way, these two kept me riveted throughout their presentations. Other presenters gave me some interesting topics which I’m going to be looking to further, but design reflections feel more “complete” in my understanding of them within a conference. Check out here for a video that has cheese pliers IN SPACE! Andy’s team is insane!

I’m already looking forward to the next GameCamp. Thankfully it’s seasonal and if everything goes smoothly we’ll see another in 3 to 4 months.

Also, ToJam is coming! If you’re a Toronto game developer and don’t know about ToJam, you should. It’s a 3 day event happening from May 9th to the 11th where you make a team to develop a game in 3 days. It’s going to be hectic and amazing. I’ll try to post about my team’s game as we work on it during those days, and perhaps aim for a postmortem at the end. It will be my first time using XNA (and a crash course in C#) but I’m going to be working with some really talented people, so I’m not too worried.

Quick post today, no real rant. Just wanted to provide the first piece of art for the game myself and Jacques are creating for the UofT Game Making Deathmatch. I’ve been working on character images and soforth, so this is a splash image of all the characters. We’ve both been busy with school work but hopefully we’ll be able to pull together something respectable. We plan to use Ogre3D with OpenAL to make the game itself.

I love when I can make a comparison between coding and art, because it gives me an excuse to post my latest piece and not feel guilty about “just” having the art there. I just finished this last night, inspired to create this from the vinyl toys scene. Specifically, designer/do-it-yourself forms like the Munny/Dunny craze. I wanted to see if I could make a form that was appealing based on the possibilities of “decorating” the form in different ways. This meant making a form that, although distinct, was not detailed in a way that would force people down a “paint by numbers” path.

So I created my little amorphous quadruped, planned how I would paint him up, and began the painting process… and then reality started to set in. Now, probably the more ideal way to color this piece for me would have been to use an airbrush to paint on masked sections of the piece to get a smooth, even coating with sharp, clean lines. But I’m not a professional painter. I don’t own an airbrush, and of the acrylic paints I had I didn’t even have orange for the body. Now, mixing my own orange using normal paints wouldn’t usually be a problem, except that my yellow paint was a bad bottle, and had a lot of solid “chunks” in it. Throughout the body’s paint there are little uneven patches and tiny dried bumps of paint. It’s not horrible, but it’s frustrating. In fact, none of the paint is perfect. everything takes on a bit of a layered effect and the texture of the brushes I used, and the “matte” varnish was shinier than I expected. I completed my goal with this project, but didn’t quite get the results I hoped for.

Now how does this apply to coding and game development? Think about the last project you made, and what limitations you had imposed. Either due to time, libraries, or tools used to create your game. If you were told about a new development tool which you hadn’t used before (whether it be a physics/graphics library, or a development environment such as Torque or 3d Game Studio) you start to think what great things you could make using the tool with such ease. Excitement for your opportunities starts to grasp at you as you leap at the opportunity to use a tool that will help you do your work easier and faster… and then reality starts to set in. There is an advantage in using the tools, but they are definitely not limitless. There are learning curves and new limitations. Maybe you hoped that your library would have an easy, intuitive particle-system that allowed for complex particle interaction. Maybe you believed your physics engine could handle soft body deformations. Whatever the case, your hopes didn’t match what you had to work with, and compromises had to be made. Maybe you had to define your own system for particle effects, or had to fake deformations using sets of spring constraints. Either way it wasn’t what you initially wanted, but it worked for your end goals. Maybe you even got the chance to learn more on the subject matter in the process.

And I think, at least to me, that’s the moral of the process. I get an opportunity to learn more about my tasks by not having that perfect solution delivered to me. I get to experiment, learn about the strengths and weaknesses of other people’s work, and learn the implementations needed to do these things myself. It’s an application of problem solving skills. I’m not going to aim purposefully for inferior tools to have this experience, but if I have no choice, I’ll learn from the weaknesses of my tools. Perhaps I’ll be able to take something away to make a more informed analysis’ in the future on what tools I use.

So, over the winter break the UofT GDDC decided to do a little “Secret santa” with its members, where members would make games for other club members. I got Jacques Waller of the club and made a game based on his specified interests (cake, puppies, and soccer) and ended up with a quick little game known as cakedog. It was coded in the span of a couple of hours using the core engine from my previous GMD game, Scab, although it plays much differently from scab. I hope others enjoy playing it.

It was a fun experiment, especially when I decided to put myself on such a short time constraint for development of it, and makes me wonder about the viability of making personalized games on more massive scales, or whether games like Spore and LittleBigPlanet are already heading in such a direction with how they do user-created content.

Download Project: Protect Cake

Welcome to Stegersaurus.com. This site will host my various projects as well as this blog, but for now it’s a bit empty. Hopefully there will be some more here soon once I get my project pages set up, or have something to rant about

Edit: Yes it’s true! You can now browse around and see some of the projects I’ve done!