To read what he had to say, head over to the Ten Ton Hammer website!
Studio
Zompocalyptic Playground
I’ve been super busy building our zompocalyptic playground — towns, forests, and farms; rivers, mountains, and valleys; main streets, back alleys, highways, train tracks, and side roads. Places to climb, places to hide, places to fortify and make a stand. There’s no limit to how much attention and polish there is to add, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
So when Emily came by and asked me to think about writing my intro, I wasn’t sure if I’d have the time to tackle it. Instead, I’d like to share some excerpts from my childhood journals with you.
Read on and you’ll see exactly why I love what I do…
The Closer
You find a wide range of personalities on the typical game development team. There are the grizzled veterans who’ve seen it all, know how to solve just about any problem, and view bold ideas with a healthy dose of skepticism. There are the youthful idealists, often fresh out of school and giddy to be working in their first game gig, who challenge traditional boundaries with strange ideas. Most of those ideas are completely infeasible, of course, peppered with the occasional brilliant idea that builds empires.
A healthy team has a good mix of these personalities, but the rarest and most valuable people on the team are often those who can balance these extremes and just figure out how to get awesome things done on time. These are the “closers” — the quiet ninjas of game development, and without them, you don’t ship games.
James McMillan is a closer.
The Finding
With struggle, resistance and clarity, The Finding is a welcomed breeze encompassing a plethora of auditory drenching that sinks into the subconscious and continues to inspire.
To check out what else Igloo had to say, head over here. You can also listen to samples of the tracks on the n5MD website. For more up-to-date news (and a behind-the-scenes look at how the album was produced), like dreissk on Facebook.
Congrats, Kevin! We’re proud of you! 🙂
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!