Be the New Renaissance Artist: Davinci = Art Design Engineering

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Be the New Renaissance Artist Davinci
ArtDesignEngineering
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Cyrus Lum
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Cyrus Lum

• 20 years of experience
• Game production, development, management, and
  investment roles
• Publishing independent development companies.

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Cyrus Lum

• Artist, Art Director, Programmer, Designer,
  Producer, Studio Director, Executive Director, VP
  of Digital Productions, Game Developer Owner, and
  Angel Investor/Advisor

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GameDev Guru

• I help grow game businesses using my expertise,
  experience industry contacts.
• And in some casesI help with funding.

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Multi-talent

• In this day and age of shrinking development
  teams, it is more important now than ever to have
  individuals on your development team who are
  multi-talented.

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Multi-talent

• This is because of efforts to cut dev costs in
  order to create products on platforms where
  business models are leaning toward free-to-play

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The Early Days

• Its a throw back to the early days of
  computer games when products were created by one
  or several individuals.

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Potential of Artists

• Of all of the disciplines, a person with an
  art background has the potential ability to also
  handle game design, programming, and production
  duties.

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The Talk

• I will discuss the methods that I used to
  develop from an artist to a game designer,
  programmer, producer and beyond.

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The Talk

• I will discuss a process that artists can use
  to learn how to program and eventually code in
  many different programming languages.

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The Talk

• I will discuss the iterative step process
  that I used for game design that can allow an
  artist to develop game design ideas in much the
  same way as art is developed in a traditional
  sense.

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The Talk

• Finally, I will discuss how to manage being an
  integrated artist/game designer/programmer and
  how this can be applied to rapid game prototyping
  and even to actual game production.

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Game Design

• The process steps of game design as applied to a
  commercial artist.
• Client specs
• Market/competitive analysis
• Initial design treatment
• Create user experience Mock-up screens
• Create user experience Demo
• Production plan

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Client Specs

• Overall, you want to understand the product to be
  created

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Client Specs

• What is the products purpose in the marketplace?
  Is it filling a hole?

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Client Specs

• Understand your clients needs

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Client Specs

• Understand the constraints creative, technical,
  production

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Client Specs

• Understand the value that the project can have to
  the market

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Client Specs

• Even if you are creating the game for yourself,
  your client is the market not you.
• Investigate and understand this market you
  still need customers to buy your game.

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Market Analysis

• Investigate what other similar products are
  already selling

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Market Analysis

• How well are they doing?

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Market Analysis

• Who are your biggest competitors?

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Initial Treatment

• Focus on game Core action

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Initial Treatment

• Make this easy for a player to do

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Initial Treatment

• Make this enjoyable for a player

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Initial Treatment

• Easy to Learn, but hard to Master

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Initial Treatment

• Overall, focus on the playground or the
  environment that the core action can be done in

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Environment

• Use the environment to promote the fun aspects
  of the core action

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Environment

• Design the environment to add challenge to the
  core action

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Environment

• Design the environment to inspire growth of new
  abilities in the core action

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Multi-player

• How can you play with friends?
• Competitive, Co-op

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UX Mock-up

• Mock-up the flow of User Experience of the game

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UX Mock-up

• Mock-up the User Interface Screens

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UX Mock-up

• Mock-up the game play screens

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UX Demo

• Create an animated/interactive demo of the flow
  of User Experience of the game

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UX Demo

• Focus on conveying how fun the user experience
  will be.
• (music game)

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Programming for Artists

• How I started learning how to program

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Programming for Artists

• Modding existing games just changing object
  characteristics

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Programming for Artists

• Use an existing engine/game that has game
  scripting capabilities

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Programming for Artists

• Add new weapon new art additional
  functionality to a base weapon

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Programming for Artists

• An example of weapon mods
• (southpark)

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Programming for Artists

• Add new vehicle - new art and additional
  functionality to a base vehicle

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Programming for Artists

• An Example Vehicle Mod
• (mechforce)

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Programming for Artists

• Add new character - new art and additional
  functionality to a base character

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Programming for Artists

• An example character mod
• (Turok2)

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Programming for Artists

• Find forums and message boards and sample code
  repositories to learn how to use and modify game
  code.

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Programming for Artists

• Learning programming by making a text editor is
  not fun or motivating

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Programming for Artists

• Learning programming in the context of a game is
  more exciting and motivating

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Programming for Artists

• See direct result of your new knowledge
  important to motivate you further

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Programming for Artists

• This was good because it kept me focused on
  learning specific programming skills

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Programming for Artists

• Next Started programming whole games by using
  existing game code as a base

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Programming for Artists

• I made a basketball game in Quake

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Programming for Artists

• Finally Program a game from scratch using an
  SDK

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Programming for Artists

• I used DirectX to create games
• (Railworld)

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Programming for Artists

• Today, there are many ways that artists can learn
  how to program.
• Flash Actionscript/Paper vision
• Unreal script
• Apple IOS
• OpenGL
• OGRE
• DirectX
• Torque Game Engine

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Programming for Artists

• Some links
• Flash
• http//www.actionscript.org/forums/index.php3
• http//forum.papervision3d.org/directX
• XNA/DirectX
• http//www.directxtutorial.com/
• http//www.bluerosegames.com/brg/xna101.aspx

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Programming for Artists

• Some links
• IOS
• http//www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum
• http//forums.macrumors.com/
• http//www.iphonesdkarticles.com/
• All Programming Languages
• http//stackoverflow.com/
• http//www.experts-exchange.com/

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UX Demo

• Iterate the demo dev with people outside the team
  blind play test

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UX Demo

• Qualify your game design is it fun? Do players
  get what to do?
• (blacksite iterate)

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UX Demo

• Use this data to discover and grow your game
  design
• (blacksite final)

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Production Plan

• With all of this data, you are now ready to
  create the production plan

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Scheduling

• About scheduling Never accept an estimate for a
  task over 1 week break this down

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Scheduling

• Identify steps of an art task process

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Scheduling

• Estimate a time for each step

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Scheduling

• Add all times to determine total duration.
  Propose solutions if duration is too long

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Ready for Production

• Once you add in the art and tech design
  documents, you are ready for production with a
  pre-production package that is game play
  qualified.

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Conclusions

• Putting it all together, an artist can create the
  original concept, create the art, program the
  demo, and layout the production plan for the
  project.

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Conclusions

• What you have now is an individual who is
  optimized to do Rapid prototyping

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Conclusions

• Its a skill that can allow the artist to create
  many different prototypes to the degree that
  upper management can make very informed
  decisions

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Conclusions

• because they can actually play the demo.

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Conclusions

• Apart from rapid prototyping, an artist has the
  definite ability to handle developing a
  pre-production package that can be handed off to
  a production team.

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Conclusions

• On top of that, because the artist has intimate
  knowledge about all of the disciplines, he can
  help to manage and interface the various team
  members of the production group.

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Conclusions

• and that should make everybody happy

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Thank you!

• Further Information.
• www.gamedev-guru.com
• clum_at_gamedev-guru.com