Rohan Plummer

May 13 2011

Painting With Doug: Environments

Hey again, Zed Heads! Since you guys liked my zombie head tutorial, I decided to do another one for you. This time, we’ll look at building a quick environment using photos and some digital tomfoolery.

For the game we’re making, cranking out environments at a fast pace is a must. While I’d love to hand paint and craft each image, this technique takes much longer and adds very little to the finished product. That’s where photos come in — they give me the basics of a real place, and let me fill in the rest of the details that the team needs to build out the world. These pieces are still fun to create, and it’s sometimes surprising how much goes into a simple photo manipulated landscape.

Let me show you!

Mar 10 2011

Painting With Doug: Zombie Heads

Hey Zed Heads — Doug here! The other day I decided to crank out a quick zombie head. Since I get a fair amount of e-mails asking for tutorials, I figured I’d write down my steps and post them here for you guys to check out.

Enjoy!

Feb 16 2011

I Regret Nothing

Almost 14 years ago I did something crazy. I quit a good paying cushy university job as a research software engineer to fulfill a childhood dream.

When I was twelve, I loved my Atari 2600. I thought video games were the coolest thing ever. One day, I got a new game from a little start-up called Activision. They were doing something pretty “revolutionary” in those days. In the little booklet that came with the cartridge they had a head-shot of the developer who had made the game. This was an epiphany for me. People actually made video games for a living!

I knew immediately that I wanted to make games.

Sep 24 2010

They Actually Pay Me To Do This $%#@

I think it was second grade, but it might have been first. We had to stand in front of the class and talk about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wanted to be an artist. I had to do my report over. Art wasn’t a career I was told. Art was a hobby. Artists didn’t draw robots and spaceships, they painted landscapes. I went home devastated.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened; whether my Dad swung by the bookstore on the way home after talking to my Mom, or if it was the next day, but I distinctly remember him giving me The Art of the Empire Strikes Back while my Mom stood in my bedroom doorway. I redid my report…sort of. The paper was exactly the same, but now had the word “concept” in front of the word “artist.”

I would be a “concept artist.”

Sep 16 2010

You Make Fun By Having Fun

When I first started in the business (Jeez, is it really fifteen years?) making games really was, well, a lot of fun and games.

There were, of course, plenty of creative frustrations and long hours, but back in those primitive days game development was just like what you want in a game: adventure, exploration, and immediacy. When I look back at the kinds of stuff I did in the Wild West days of games — like the Mechs in MechCommander, the Ospreys in Half-Life, or the animations in Counter-Strike — I remember it almost the way you do a great gaming session: a lot of drama, laughing, cursing, and pushing yourself hard.

In a word, fun.