Let's Make a Meetup!

Making a MKE Game Dev Meetup. Let’s make interactive pixie- dust together!

As you may or may not know, I’m really into the concept of video game development. I hope that’s relatively apparent on this site, considering I’ve tried to spatter the point around as obnoxiously as I can.

It’s why I went into design in the first place really. I intended on going to MIAD because I wanted to either get into animation (for feature films) eventually, or work on interactive storytelling platforms, i.e. video games. Somehow, along the way, I ended up designing other things, but that never kept me from making game-development my side-hustle and thing that has consumed many, many, many evenings over the last 8 years.

I love Milwaukee, but Milwaukee is lacking something crucial and important to me: a real Game Development Studio. This has been true for a while. there’s a couple of small groups that have been working away at some smaller projects, but realistically, there is no video-game development business with a large revenue which currently resides in Milwaukee. And this, dear friends, makes me very sad.

It also makes me want to change things. Because it’s cruddy for people leaving school to HAVE TO choose a different avenue of employment,= if they want to stick around the city. That shouldn’t be the case. You shouldn’t HAVE TO alter your dreams just to stay close to such a thriving community as Milwaukee is. We have to change this.

I’m making the Goatman is Nigh… and I’m looking for other Unreal Engine 4 fans to talk to!

So, without further ado… I’m planning to make a Meetup coming soon. I realize with the current pandemic, this is annoyingly difficult, but at the same time it might work out better considering that getting onto a ZOOM chat requires less effort and overall commitment than carving out time to drive somewhere and find a physical place to discuss game-development. I’ll choose to be optimistic for now, and just hope that life returns to some degree of normalcy next year. Hopefully sooner than later.

Anyhow, I plan to sort of reveal just how far I’ve gotten with the two games I’ve been chugging away at for a while in the hopes of either:

A: Maybe showing folks something they’re interested in joining-in on. I’m at the stage where any help is welcome and I know there’s plenty of artists, musicians, writers, designers and programmers looking to work on a decent project.

B: Inspiring others to show off what THEY are working on, because it is simply AWESOME to see passionate people pouring their soul into creative things. We can help fuel each others projects and hopefully act as cheerleaders for one another, because everyone needs motivation! Especially now.

I’m not 100% sure how the format should completely work, however I’ll try to add some structure to it so that we can make the most of our time together. I know I’m serious about seeing my own projects through… I’ve put a TON of time into them and love them, through and through. And so my only ask is that if you join Fight-Clu…. errr… I mean MKE Game-Magic Meetup (or whatever it ends up being called), you bring your passion for working on awesome projects. It’s too easy to put down our passion projects when other things in life are eroding our free time, but I think as creatives its a necessity that we push for developing the dream ideas that we want to work on.

there’s a famous quote that’s dug at me for a long time now, and I think there’s a lot of truth to it:

“If you’re not building your own dreams, then you’ll inevitably going to end up building someone else’s.”

Yikes. I have no qualms about helping other people with their dreams or furthering someone’s business by collaborating and being part of a team… but we all owe it to ourselves to build our own dreams out too. Life’s too short not to.

Worked on this game for a LONG time… over 8 years now. But it’s getting pretty cool, so that’s a good sign. Demo very soon!

So, hit me up on the “about” section of this site or hit that little submit button below if you’re interested in joining the coalition. Thats’ a pretty cool name… coalition. Yeah… maybe I’ll use that. Anyway, more to come soon!!!!

Unreal Engine: A Designer's Best Friend

Yeah it’s creepy, but I do love the tech. It’s artist-friendly, way faster at rendering, and you can make it interactive fast.

Unreal Engine was first developed by Epic Games a long time ago. Well, it’s first generation was at least. It was actually an engine built for a game titled “Unreal”… so now you know where the name comes from. The game was a bit like Quake, but a slightly more modernized contemporary, and really started to push the gaming world toward more and more fantastic visuals.

Eventually, with a few blockbuster games under their belts, Epic design a game called Gears of War (which, is a pretty huge franchise that was eventually purchased by Microsoft), but the first Gears of War was also the debut of the Unreal Engine 3 technology.

That engine was… remarkable. It was a breakthrough in what was accomplish-able in real time graphics, running on the XBOX 360 hardware. It made every other game technically look like muddy sadness compared to what it could accomplish. It felt like a true next-generation engine that created deep shadows, ambient occlusion effects that provide a sense of volume to in-game assets, and shaders that reacted to the light in a more elegant matter than any other engine I’d seen to date, minus perhaps one contender: CryEngine from Crytek. But even so… Epics UE3 could arguably beat Cryengine for dark, moody interior scenes, and CERTAINLY was much more efficient, being able to produce a new standard of visuals on a console that wasn’t as powerful as the heavy PC power needed to run CryEngine.

So yeah… I’ve loved this engine forever. Epic, being some seriously gracious developers, also released a version of UE3 called UDK (the Unreal Development Kit) for indie developers who couldn’t afford the license to UE3… but had all the same features.

And then, in 2014… Epic released something even better. Although in the beginning it wasn’t quite as capable in some senses as its predecessor, Unreal Engine 4 was released to the mass of indie developers with a suite of artist-friendly tools like blueprints (a visual scripting system that connects nodes and parameters together via an interactive chart to build game functionality instead of code) and incredibly polished interface that was forgiving and accessible to people who want something that is beautiful to work with, and empowering to build interactive experiences and spaces and ideas with.

Not just that… it opened the door everyone else to start thinking in different ways how to visualize their projects no matter what field you work within. Real time graphics, if you know how to really work with the tool called Unreal, were suddenly good-enough to rival the renders that we all hate waiting for. The lighting, the shadows, the material-responses and the complexity scale allowance had become fine-tuned enough to pass for something you could easily be proud of in presentations and it meant less time spent on tweaking shots to correctly capture your vision. Now that’s a tool worth having in your designer-tool box.

Yes, it does take a bit of design-mind-changing to understand what the tool is great for, but once you get lost in the possibilities, you’ll see how much it both enhances your work, and how much it can change your concept of how to PRESENT your work. That’s pretty nifty…. not a lot of things can make stuff faster and better AND are actually a ton of fun to learn at the same time.

I began using real-time-rendering techniques years ago with Unity while I worked for a company called DCI Marketing in Milwaukee. We were developing retail environments for a very expensive piece of technology called the CAVE in the Retail Experience Lab… a special suite where important clientele were taken to reveal to them how scientific measures could be implemented to make better decisions and forecasts for developing designs and implementing them in the retail marketplaces. The CAVE was for special projects… we’d place dealerships for Triumph Motorcycles or Cadillac Dealership designs or high-end retail experiences into Unity game engine, and have clients stand in a three-walled room. Projectors would suddenly bring the space to life, projecting full-bleed imagery onto the walls and floor, and the camera perspective of the projections would change according to the client’s head movements in the room.

This gave the illusion of actually being in the proposed retail design… but without the gigantic expenditure of building out a prototype store for them. And it gave me a first glimpse of how real-time tech was altering how design will be accomplished. Any designer who could figure out how to leverage real-time tech, or faster tools, or had an inkling of where things were headed has a huge advantage: if you can bring your ideas into reaity faster, you have more time to explore more ideas.

And that led me to start on the two games I’ve been developing for a while… The Goatman is Nigh and The Lost Pisces. Suddenly a designer who doesn’t know anything about coding, could be empowered to build a game, even if it was just by your lonesome at first.

But it also led me to use it on a day-to-day basis and explore where i could leverage the tech for my day-job. It really changed how I worked, and over the years I’ve been happy to share the technique with other designers on the teams I’ve worked with. One day I’d love to go back to MIAD (the place I went to school for a BFA) and teach a course about the use of real-time engines because I honestly think that it will be SO ESSENTIAL, SO SOON in the workplace that it really is something that needs to be taught to young designers while they’re still in school to give them an advantage when they graduate and need a job!

That said, I implement Unreal in almost everything I do. And now, with the announcement and sneak-peak of Unreal Engine 5 just around the corner… I feel like this might REALLY change design. Some of the features they’re teasing so far include the ability to stream-in high-rez geometry… like a tens of millions of polygons like you get from engineering CAD software or modeling-tools like Zbrush. And when I say “stream-in” I mean you’re no longer going through the insanely tedious effort of reducing models anymore… the geometry is literally the same geometry from the other software. Couple this with ray-tracing techniques and algorithms being finely tuned to work on probably the next -generation of GPUs from NVIDIA (the predecessor to the RTX series currently available) and we will see visuals that rival movie-quality imagery.

The next 2-4 years should be amazing in terms of leaps in graphics, and Unreal 5 will drive that. So, if you’re a designer, my suggestion is this: LEARN UNREAL NOW. Because you need to stay fresh, energetic, passionate and flexible. Real-time tech allows for this and it’s going to be your best friend too! So get learning!

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Interview with The Architect, Tarik Moody

“The Architect” of Milwaukee’s Tech + Arts Future is Somebody Worth Listening To

So I had an awesome opportunity to remotely speak with the guy in the photo above, Tarik Moody (a.k.a. “The Architect”), the Director of Digital Strategy over at 88.9 Radio Milwaukee a week or so ago about the game development progress on The Goatman is Nigh and The Lost Pisces.

I initially reached out to Tarik because a connection had suggested speaking with him about my concerns regarding how to move Milwaukee’s more adventurous creative endeavors forward. If you know me, you know I’ve been frustrated for a while now with how it seems difficult or daunting to push forward with creative projects or businesses here in Milwaukee. There’s some sort of force holding the city’s steering wheel, keeping the city’s job opportunities largely headed towards industry and conventional “widget” production.

That’s a bit of a broad statement I understand, and it’s not to say that there aren’t small groups and individuals dreaming big and trying to push beyond a glass-ceiling of sorts, but realistically it DOES seem tough to get creative projects and ideas off the ground with funding here. There aren’t a tremendous amount of grants or investment groups willing to take a chance on ideas… Wisconsin at one point DID have a series of tax-incentive programs in place under the leadership of Gov. Tommy Thompson, which attempted to encourage film-production and development and more “artsy” business to grow… but that disappeared about a decade ago.

The point is that art and design and film and game development and everything in between need more than simple words to support them… they need funding too. Or at least a series of mentor-ship and serious business-minded instruction on how to create art and design-based businesses that can thrive and improve our communities along the way.

The point is that art and design and film and game development and everything in between need more than simple words to support them… they need funding too. Or at least a series of mentor-ship and serious business-minded instruction on how to create art and design-based businesses that can thrive and improve our communities along the way.

No one eats for free, everyone has families to support and rent to pay… even creatives. Just being passionate about projects isn’t enough to finish these projects… which then can turn into businesses with guidance… and can add to the tapestry of what Milwaukee is about. Madison, a city not too far from us, has done it… they have several game-development studios and have an economy reliant on tech-development. So can we…. Milwaukee is literally 1-hour away from Madison.

Beyond that though, Tarik is collecting stories from tech-loving folks around the city, and I think he’s up to something pretty cool… I support this guy 100% and honestly, I really hope what he’s doing changes something. He’s got the beginnings of something that I really believe could bring a new wave of creativity to our home, and anyone who has the chance to talk to him and spread the word or share visions of how to raise up the tech-centered creative force in Milwaukee and support jobs for these fields should do their best to get in touch with him!

We talked a bit about game-development and prospects of turning passion into something tangible here as well, and the discussion might even make its way on the air-waves in the coming weeks… if there’s anything valuable in what I had to say during the interview! More to come soon… but I look forward to talking to Tarik again and helping out however I can with his initiatives.

Listen to Tarik Moody’s Rythm Lab here:

https://radiomilwaukee.org/discover-music/category/rhythm-lab-radio/

And check out The Goatan is Nigh game I’m developing here:

https://thegoatmanisnigh.com/

Spooky fun exploring Old Wisconsin, in 1862.

Dissecting a Project For Fun

Breaking down an old favorite project: Facebook Gaming

Defeat sucks for sure. Loosing projects is generally lame, and no one likes to hear that a ridiculous amount of effort just went in the trash.

There’s probably a TON of reasons a project didn’t go through, and some of them are simply out of the creative’s hands: relationships between the contact and the Account Manager, the simple fact that sometimes projects are out to bid simply because it’s client policy (but they already know who they’re going with), or maybe Mars wasn’t inline with Venus on the Autumnal Equinox that year, and you were cursed from the outset of the project with no chance at all… your project-submission was written in the stars as a failed attempt at design-glory. Oh well.

Or maybe the design just wasn’t the right vibe, but sometimes there’s so little to go off-of with a n in-development or new product or brand that it’s really hard to hit the mark. As was probably the case for the ill-fated Facebook Gaming project I had the privilage of working on for the GDC event (the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco every year). This event was to mark the Facebook entry into live-streaming games, in a similar fassion as Twitch does… but with a WAY MORE targeted audience because, well… it’s Facebook and they know pretty much everything there is to know about you (if you post enough that is).

That said, even though we lost the project to another exhibit house, it remains one of my personal favorites. Not so much because of how the design was eventually crafted, but actually because of the thought that went into the space and the material choices and overall concept of building off of the gaming comunity’s inherent energetic vibe and passion for the worlds and characters and stories they explore. That was fun… really diving deep into the essence of the why people enjoy casting games and why people spend more time watching others play games than playing the game themselves (this is still a foreign notion to me… I’d much rather just play the game and enjoy the experience myself than live vicariously through someone else, but whatever… it’s still interesting!)

The overall goal was to introduce people at GDC and E3 to Facebook Gaming, which was to contend with Twitch by offering viewers the ability to connect with the personalities in the game-casting world (called creators… because they create video-game-coverage content… not because they actually create the games they’re playing) with a much more targeted scope than Twitch can, becaus Facebook may understand what games certain people are playing and what their likes and dislikes involves, including what demographics the audience is most likely to connect with. It makes sense, and if you love the world of gaming it might be worth your time to compare the two services and see which you like more.

From a design standpoint, the introduction of the new service meant something very complicated: introducing an off-shoot brand (so it contains whatever history or stigma the audience automatically chooses to attach to it) to an EXTREMELY sensitive crowd (gamers can notoriously be quick to judge), which is searching for a voice with a very well known existing competing service. That’s a super tall order.

And why it led to a lot of thoughtful elements in the design meant to distinctly oppose the established competition in emotion and feeling, while also making the brand true to its perceived nature. Facebook has always been about connecting friends and family… originally it was just about connecting College kids to other college kids, but of course that changed over time. And now its a repository ofideas and it offers the distinctive opportunity to chronicle a lifetime if users choose to post enough pictures and write enough meaningful moments of their life onto its servers. It’s admitedly a neat thing to watch pre-compiled video photo-albums of years gone-by and see howmy kids have grown, and so I can attest to the true power of facebook over time: it connects you with other people, but it also connects you to your past.

There’s a lot there to unwind, but I think when designing the project I meant for the space to be meaningful spot in whihc people passionate about games could connect and explore what they LOVE about games. Games have nevr really attained the level of recognized prestige as other art forms… but I would certainly say there’s an incredible amount of passion and true devotion to games that might eclipse people’s attachment to even their most favorite films. So it’s weird we don’t give games as much credit.

But Facebook Gaming is a piece of the larger puzzle I think that will continue to bind people together, and that’s why after the team and I went through all of the many goodies and moments and ideas you can find around the booth design, we wanted tocram this explosion of WHAT GAMES ARE and WHO GAMERS ARE into one space that felt as comfortable as home. So we did! And it’s messy, and it’s eclectic and it is NOT CAREFUL about how it portrays itself, because the awsome thing about game culture is that ANYONE IS WELCOME. Literally anyone. Pickup a controller, pop in a game, and explore at your own pace. And you too can fall in love with a story because theres a game for anyone out there! And any company venture that aims to strengthen those ties between the community members is something pretty compellig to your’s truly.

A space to broadcast to a comfortable crowd seated in an open lounge setting, cluttered with game consoles on make-shift pallet pedestals and flaked by glass-casting cubes covered in artwork and nostalgia from beloved game franchises filled the exhibit with a sense of energy. Behind the stage, a double deck structure held private meeting spaces where content creators oculd freely discuss their ideas and momentum with their audience to Facebook Gaming staff, and hopefully drive new initiatives on the platform. Below, a green-room offered comfy seating and a space for the tech staff to run the whole intricate opperation and drive a seamless production that anyone walking past oculd see through glass windows.

But the most important element, at least to me, remained largely obscured, even though it was right out in the open and very large. An L-shaped wall which supported the many monitor arrays and encapsulated the casting-cubes which surrounded the booth, were probably seen as a fairly utilitarian element. Like a cheap-way to build up something. And it would have been pretty cheap yes… but the real reason I placed it there wasn’t to skirt around budgets, but was actually because it represented something simple: building things. More exactly, it symbolized that the game comunity is far from complete… that games are something we cherish and love, and that this community was still being built… by ideas like Facebook Gaming.

Virtual Exhibits: A New Product Offering

When there’s no trade-shows to attend in-person… how can we visit from our desk?

While the world is looking at a lot of canceled trade-shows and conferences right now, the obvious question for a lot of trade-show companies is: where can we look for alternate revenue streams?

That’s a good question, considering the industry has completely flat-lined for months now in the US (Europe managed to begin to reopen trade-shows with fewer outbreak cases). And when you hear the disappointment from the crowds that usually attend the conferences, especially more tech-driven ones, the question becomes even more complicated, because with the deficit in conferences and trade-shows, a lot of would-be attendees have lost an import method of connecting with their industry and continuing dialogue that simply can’t be matched by phone-calls and emails alone. Many people are more or less working from the solitude of their home desks these days, and in response to this new fact-of-life,the conference-creators and exhibitors are looking to create familiar experiences that connect the audience in a similar fashion.

That said, the introduction of the “virtual trade-show” has entered into the collective consciousness of many professionals. If you haven’t received an email already from a trade-show your industry is affiliated with, announcing how “this year we’re going virtual!,” then keep checking your inbox… it’s bound to happen very soon.

So what does this mean? A virtual trade-show you can visit from your desk sounds… well… like it’s missing something. Namely the “fun” part. After-all, trade-shows and conferences are successful idea because they function off of three core concepts:

1: Get people in the same physical space, and they’re bound to talk to one another. It’s easy to ignore emails and phone calls… it’s difficult to ignore someone standing next to you, looking to connect.

2:Trade-shows get exhibitors to sign up because the crowd they are talking to is ultra targeted. You get to project your solution to their problems, onto an audience that actually wants to be there. It costs money or requires sponsorship to attend these things, so the people attending are REALLY the people you want to talk to.

3: Everyone likes a party. It’s that simple. Whether its bumping into old colleagues and friends, wacky late-night after parties, or the sheer scale of unconventional events tied to the trade-show, its an event to behold and a mini-vacation from work. That, and the conventions and trade-shows are usually held in fun cities with plenty to do, like Vegas, LA, and Orlando.

That’s a pretty daunting thing to tackle from the lonely window of computer’s monitor at home. In essence… there’s no way you’re realistically going to build a party that’s THAT fun to partake in from your laptop. Fortnite, the popular battle-royal game created by Epic, has attempted some virtual “concerts” and while, yes, it did have people attend, it is definitely not on par with… you know… an actual concert. Sorry. That’s just the truth. Sigh.

But… we can forgive the super-fun factor of events for now, and focus on unique strategies to make a DIFFERENT experience, not one that is a hollow shadow of the real thing. And we can do it by creating a somewhat familiar landscape for people to explore, so that it’s not just some lame-old email-mailer being sent out, or just a new landing page developed by marketing to promote a new product. No… we can do better.

We focus on the first two bullet points I laid out, and we try to do it with the knowledge gained from designing and building out physical spaces for real trade-show booths.

Firstly, we’re literally transplanting booth ideas, which purposely look like build-able booths into virtual experiences. The obvious question is “why make them “realistic,” when you can do anything you want in a virtual space? Simple put, it gives the attendees a space that is comfortable and doesn’t feel like a video game… it’s just easier to wrap your mind around something when you can put it into a context. Crazy designs are awesome (I’m the first to admit that) but for medical clientele and machinery companies it’s a terrifying idea to propose to their viewers something too out-there.

In general, most people who are not gamers by nature, tend to be semi-discouraged by moving through virtual spaces, as they can be clunky to navigate if they aren’t familiar with gaming controllers. We’ve removed this barrier in favor of the old point-and-click adventure schema with “virtual touch-points” the attendee can jump to, and this helps quite a bit. Additionally, many of the simple “connectivity” brought by actually physically visiting people at a trade-show can be mimicked through live-casting representatives from would-be-exhibitor companies. Designating times where staff are easily accessible to virtual meetings creates similar opportunities for remote-attendees to talk one-on-one in an ad-hoc method that isn’t as committal or restrictive in scope as a per-scheduled meeting would be.

Finally, we can provide some sense of grandeur that is missed by not attending the show… and we can still say something exciting about the brand that the usual website can’t. Building a virtual event or exhibit still conveys a sense of “what could have been”… and that’s still something exciting to people. Everyone likes to see the “behind the scenes” footage, including the “concept” that never-was… so give them that.

Check out the images below this link to an example from Catalyst Exhibits (my day-job I’m a CD at) and see how we’ve been toiling away at our version of a “virtual event.” Enjoy!

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The Game I Actually Finished... For a Client

While I’ve got 2 passion project games I’ve been working on forever, I DID actually finish a game once upon a time… for Carbon Black!

I think a lot of people had fun playing with it at RSA Conference in 2018. I think… well, I hope.

Eh, who cares: it was really fun to make!

Anyway, I had a fantastic opportunity afforded to me by Catalyst Exhibits (where I Creative direct as a day-job), where I was able to apply years of working on Unreal Engine to building out a small playable game called “Carbon Fighter”… a two-player fighting game that was supposed to be 95% fun, and maybe 5% informative or educational.

Really, the goal of it was to be a marketing tool. Grab attendees attention fast with loud noises and explosive fighting action and maybe they’ll stick around for a bit to win a T-shirt and then EVENTUALLY listen to what the company offers in terms of tech and security solutions. Carbon Black was recently aquired by VMWare to the tune of a few billion (yep, I said billion) dollars, and while I know it’s a bold statement to make, I HAVE TO ASSUME the aquisition was MOSTLY due to my game-dev skills. ;)

The game was actually cranked out in a ridiculously small time frame too. From general concept to working version on the Showhall floor, it was about 10 weeks. Which is completely crazy. Luckily I had the help of an Unreal Blueprint genius, Michaell Backalars of Sprout Concepts (a local creative team I’ve known for a while) as I couldn’t have done it without him. But still… 0 weeks to build out even a simple game is nutzo.

The finished product though turned out pretty nicely, and it incorporated a lot of back and forth with the client to make sure that it was “feeling right” as we went along, and brought some of their key market-values to light in subtle but fun ways. Characters and level-environments were named after product features or at least hinted at them, and the game always emphasized a simple, recognizable concept: the battle between the hackers and the security-professionals is never ending.

How it sort of started… a screen grab from the original simple demo shown to Carbon Black, before we worked out style and characters it was a bit more cartoony.

HexBot. One of the “good guys” the player can select. A mish-mash of kit-bashed parts and pieces.

Which is why the idea of a “fighting game” made such an incredible amount of sense for this particular client. It checked a ton of boxes off:

1: The client wanted an exciting game that would draw people to their space fast

2: This genre of games is ULTRA accessible. Basically everyone has been to an arcade, and really fighting games are all about button-smashing anyway… you don’t necessarily need to have skills to have fun!

3: Head-to-head competition and leader-boards make it something you can enjoy playing with fellow employees you’re traveling with, OR you can easily meet new people you never would have talked to before!

4: It made people loosen up. There’s nothing worse than smashing attendees over the head with marketing jargon and overly-pushy sales techniques. You have to make people feel comfortable!

All this said, I think the thing was a success. It sort of gave two faces to the Carbon Black exhibit, and a tn of people were lighting up Twitter about it.

Most of all, I can’t thank the guys running Catalyst enough… not just for believing in me that I oculd pull it off, but that they dedicated a CD’s time to building and amazing experience. That was really cool of them. Can’t thank them enough!

VR for Translating Ideas... and Emotions

1: Ideas

VR moves the space, mood, and intractability being developed by the creator’s/designers mind, from the imagination and into a shared space that someone else can engage with. In simpler terms: you can start to share your imagination with other people, and that’s really helpful and really cool.

Like… really cool.

It’s hard to convey just HOW IMPRESSIVE a space will be, unless you can literally plop someone into your vision. VR for architectural and event visualization does that. It’s hard to explain just HOW WELL an industrial-design solution solves a problem, without puting an end-user into a scenario. VR solves for this too because you can build-out a scenario, and have someone nationalistically interact with it… testing for problems or verifying opportunities.

2.Emotions

VR can provide for some truly surprising moments… and therefor it has a certain novelty factor because it allows for a very different set of interaction scenarios to play out. You will definitely be drawn to characters and worlds and circumstances MORE, because you can more organically interact with it.

Unlike a game being experienced through a monitor, using controllers that traditionally are simply a set of button-based-inputs… VR asks the human to move and act like they naturally have learned to. Nothing more… and so it breaks barriers and simplifies the experience to make it more digestible and personal. And that plays with your emotions more effectively.

Alright so, this might be clear to VR and AR enthusiasts, but I think it’s sometimes difficult to really translate the concept to audiences who have never tried either of these technologies. The difference between watching a 3D movie (which is what most people are probably familiar with) and a full-on VR experience is as vast as the virtual-gap between talking about a dream, and being inside a dream.

That explanation sounds confusing, but hear me out. When you put on a VR headset, it completely removes you from the world you physically exist within, and sort of like a horse with blinders on, it focuses your consciousness on this experience being projected towards your eyes. And with a one-to-one movement of what you’re physically experiencing in the real world you inhabit, married with the in-game camera running inside the game-engine, it truly creates an illusion of “being present” in this virtual space.

So why does that matter? Well honestly, I’m not a huge VR enthusiast myself…. it’s a challenging platform to develop content for: it’s a pain for sure to optimize things to run fast, and UI/UX is REALLY different challenge in VR where you want the experience to be a more natural interaction between the user and their perceived virtual space they’re in. These things, coupled with many limitations (the VR experience has to be simple enough to run very quickly, with almost no glitching or “lag” because it ruins the experience fast and makes people motion-sick very quickly), but I CAN attest to the magic it creates. And it can benefit both games AND design-development life-cycles in unique was.

I sort of straddle two worlds of interest. I’m never really happy with just one avenue of story telling, and so I’m a Creative Director and Designer by day… but then I’m a Game Developer by night, because I need the creative freedom that affords me. So I see the potential in VR and AR in two different lights…

For game/interactive experiences, VR offers something that can’t be rivaled in the usual keyboard-mouse/controller setup. It just can’t. You can argue with me all day, but honesty VR is a different experience alltogether and games developed for VR have a different creative “soul” to them because they can bring connectivity between the gamer and the game to a different level than otherwise.

Here’s a quick “for example” moment that acts as a simple illustration of VR’s subtle humanistic connection it can offer. Aside from just being a 3D experience you can nationalistically move your view withing (turn your head, and you can look wherever you want in the space… can’t get much more natural than that, right?), you can see in the image below that by using the two controllers in your hands (ergonomically developed to non-intrusively sit in your hands and pick up on the natural expansion and contraction of your fingers and palms), you can hold your hands outwards, towards the friendly “robot” that eagerly has its own hands outstretched towards you, the audience. It’s beckoning you to dance with it! And no, it’s not creepy like it sounds, it’s actually a really cool moment when you understand that grabbing its little virtual hands, it starts to bob and sway around, and its looking for the associated “bouncing” movements of your own hands from you ACTUALLY DANCING to react to and act happy.

It was sort of an “ah hah!” moment for me… where some clever game designer thought to get a virtual character in a virtual space to organically coerce you to become their dance-partner, and to let-loose and play with the virtual robot for a moment. That’s really different, and something I’ve never seen before. And for more examples of these subtle, but incredibly impactful “moments” that the tech can really surprise you with and grow empathy for the games’ characters, just check out the masterpiece ALYX from Valve software…. that one will blow your mind too. Anyway, check out the dancing robot partner below….

For design-development (and by this I mean architectural, product, spacial, event-concepting, etc.) it transports someone you’re trying to convey an imaginative idea to much more concisely than traditional methods Unlike a static image or even a pre-recorded 2-dimesnsional video “fly-through” of a space or a product or whatever else you’re trying to impose your creative vision of onto someone else unfamiliar with the imagery in your imagination, the VR experience allows them to explore. It’s that simple. Finally, someone can actually enter into a scenario or space or idea and you can very literally share the complete EXPERIENCE with them. That’s unique. That’s something really special.

When someone can explore and discover things for themselves, that’s when you can really connect with a client or other individuals you’re trying to provide a solution or vision to. While the argument of stylistic issues with a rendering or sketching style can always cause a level of confusion or a disconnect from the importance and grandeur or unique time-based impact you as a designer are suggesting, all of these things suddenly become possible in VR because you as a designer can bring people along on the “adventure.”

Playing with Pisces Game in VR… at least the visualized concept for what it would be. Submitted to Magic Lleap for approval a while ago.

And that’s pretty cool.

It will be interesting to see where it all goes. If VR can stick around for a while and not go the way of the dodo… or of 3D movies for that matter… and continue to find a market in the consumer electronics world, then there’s a lot of opportunity for the tech to continue to develop, and for content to become easier to produce-for. It still requires a beefy work-horse of a PC to run right now (but there’s hope for lighter-weight experiences within the wireless Oculus Quest to be sure), and the advent of Ray-traced Real-time Rendering like that enabled by the NVIDIA GTX series released 2 years ago, VR will inevitably become a dominant tool in the artist’s arsenal of creative weaponry!

My own exploration as of late has been to try and couple The Lost Pisces (I had the 3D assets and environments setup already, so it was easy enough) with some VR ideas. Not sure how FAR I’ll pursue it… like I said it’s not a simple translation of how you interact with the game from a standard controller UX to VR’s interaction abilities, but it was a fun exploration and who knows… if i finish the main game, I’d be super interested in playing wiht the smaller VR experience a bit more!

Sketches VS Renders

The magic of the sketch, and why it works better than pretty renders (most of the time).

Alright so, there’s always a debate about what works better to sell a project to a client.

A sketch?

Or a pretty render?

I personally think most of the time the sketch is the correct way to go, because it follows the design-process I was taught a long time ago at MIAD (well, not that long ago. 2005 isn’t really that far back.) The whole notion of design is that its problem-solving, but with an aesthetically-informed answer that can appeal to a consumer or audience better than a simple engineered-answer.

In the usual design-pipeline, there’s an “input meeting” which is a download of all the information, heartaches, challenges and background that the client has to offer. This step paints a picture for the design-team, and creates the “problem” to solve for. From here, the team begins to talk, formulates plans and momentum based off of ideas shared via mood-boards, or rough sketches or even written explanations that describe an experience.

But when you have to actually provide some sort of echo back to the client… a tangible body of work that sometimes comes in the form of a pitch for a new client, and sometimes the form of a design-solutions deck for an existing client, then you run into a crossroads with how you present your amazing new ideas. You could either jump to trying to blow them away with a super pretty render that says “this is THE ANSWER!,” or you could use a series of sketches… which say something entirely different.

A sketch has some supernatural power to it, because it is a tangible image that can translate what’s in the designer’s head, to someone else who does not live in your head. It’s an actual, concrete image of something, so it’s more than just words or discussions about possibilities… it’s a real direction or suggestions.

BUT, unlike the render, it does something super cool: it leaves the door open. Done right, a sketchy-render can improve dialogue because ultimately it says that there is an actual idea in-the-works, but it’s open to interpretation AND because it’s open to interpretation, a client feels more comfortable adding their own two-cents to the idea. A sketch says, “here’s the beginning… where we go from here is going to be a collaboration.”

That’s really powerful when you think about it. Everybody, clients included, inherently want to put their fingerprint on a design. No matter what it is. The design itself could in theory be the absolute, 100% perfect answer to the clients’ problems, and they STILL will want to toy with the concept… because they’re human. Everybody has something to say, even if it’s just to validate that they have purpose within the design process. And that’s okay. Because if someone feels they can contribute to an idea or workflow, then they have invested a bit of themselves into the project.

Get someone to invest their own “being” into something, and they’re much more likely to push for the project to move forward… with the design you and your team are developing. And that’s a good thing. A really good thing!

The looseness of a sketch is infinitely more powerful than a render… because it’s left a lot to the team’s imagination, and in complete honesty: whatever is in our imaginations, is usually the ideal “thing.” We can become much more excited by ideas in our own imagination, than a rendering can ever suggest. No matter how polished, pristine, and perfect that render is.

So this is indeed why I push for a sketch-phase as much as possible, and like to leave the renders for the end. It yields better results, because you can take people on the journey with you, and that’s how you get the team moving in one direction, and get the most input from key decision makers.

I really wish I took the time to hand-sketch more, as it’s something I loved to do, but today within the exhibit-design world, projects can move EXTREMELY fast, and so it naturally feels like an exhaustive step to try and do things “the right way.” But I’ve actually found some success in condensing parts of the workload and double-dipping on the 3D-side of things.

With not a whole ton of extra time and effort, you can move pretty quickly in 3D to sloppily kit-bash things together, shoot your shots in a viewport from Maya or Blender, and then “stylize” the shots in Photoshop to give it the sketchy look. That way you’re not eating up too much time trying to get perspectives right… which is tough and costly for some design images (especially booths and architecture). Use the 3D work you can cobble together as an underlay, and draw over it to provide that sketchy feeling. It’s always amazing to see how clients respond to the “old way” of presenting… after-all, most of the ideas that led to the world today, were drawn on napkin sketches not that long ago

Cool Events in MKE

“We choose to… because they are hard”

Last year I had the very cool impromptu-opportunity one warm summer evening to head down towards the park across from MIAD called Catalano Park at the south end of the 3rd Ward (MIAD is The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design… where I went to school from 2001-2005) and check out an interesting traveling art-installation.

In case you hadn’t seen any of the news-coverage on the subject, there was a very large, inflatable moon that was internally lit, and hung from the boom of a large construction crane. It was levitated by thin dark cables that essentially disappeared into the darkness, making it seem as though the artificial moon was hanging directly above the crowds heads. It was a cool moment, and reading the “meaning” behind the installation brought a bit of insight into the short-lived event…

The artwork was part of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon-landing, and the year-long celebration was touring the US at the time. I think I liked it more than my kiddos did… they saw it as a giant balloon and were more excited by the fact that bedtime was delayed for that night.

The artwork was part of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon-landing, and the year-long celebration was touring the US at the time. I think I liked it more than my kiddos did… they saw it as a giant balloon and were more excited by the fact that bedtime was delayed for that night.

The artwork was part of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon-landing, and the year-long celebration was touring the US at the time. I think I liked it more than my kiddos did… they saw it as a giant balloon and were more excited by the fact that bedtime was delayed for that night.

But I think what excited me more than the simple idea of a floating mini-moon hovering above my head, and the live music being broadcast next door to an upbeat, happy crowd, was that Milwaukee had continued to introduce something special and unique to its history that evening. The city needs more of this… events built around ideas that will one-by-one alter perceptions of what wonders could be built. Fanciful things are essential to not just creatives, but the community as a whole. It’s these special, unique moments that I think kick the mind into a different type of thinking… and that’s how we expand.

Imagination is everywhere. And those who want to build something more out of the box need to connect… there’s power in numbers! We’re all under the same moon… and the only reason we sent astronauts there 50 years ago, was to prove that we could do something amazing… conventional or not. And it changed our world once we did it.

That crazy, dream literally brought the “space-age,” and it was the simple statement “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” that gave us the world of today and tomorrow.

MDEV 2020: Game Development in Midwest

Madison’s game development convention had some amazing inspiration… what do I have to do to bring this to Milwaukee??? How to build a vision…

So, February 14th is a day… when… most people would be in the romantic mood. In case you forgot, that’s Valentine’s Day. But, being on a Thursday this year, my wife and I would have to wait until the weekend to drop the kiddos off with babysitting grandparents in order to actually have a decent enjoyable dinner conversation where we could actually talk without having to get up every 5 seconds to clean up spilled milk or refill milk or get a napkin or be interrupted by explosion and robot noises coming from my son who love Transformers more than anything on this Earthly plane.

With my Valentines Day officially “delayed” until the weekend, to allowed me to go to MDEV on the 14th this year… and it had some really cool presenters this year. The convention is actually pretty small… maybe 200-300 attendees, all with a shared passion for building games and other interactive projects.

Conventions are a really unique thing (and no, I’m not saying this just because I work on designing events and tradeshows and things like that), where there is something magical about all of these eager, optimistic, creative folks come together to just …. talk. And listen. And share.

That, in and of itself, is cool.

It can feel like you’re stuck on an island sometimes here in Wisconsin, when designing and developing a game or any other creative project. It’s not quite like the coasts… there’s not a massive amount of companies all eagerly hiring creatives to build out the next AAA game or film the next blockbuster, or crank away at some amazing startup inventing the next electric vehicle or AI simulation destined to eventually take overt the world and destroy us all. No… it’s a quieter creative landscape here, and in this wilderness it is a really good thing to find others huddled around the creative-camp fire at a base-camp like MDEV.

At this year’s MDEV (I’ve been to 2 out of 3 so far and I’d definitely go again) I had a few opportunities to connect with fellow indie game developers and there were some stories that stuck with me. But overall, I think the interesting connective thread between everyone was that they were confused about where to go… next.

It’s not particularly clear how to bring your vision from dream to playable-reality… especially if it’s a more complicated and experimental project. I suppose this is the point of conventions… that if more people can talk to one another, and form more connections, the better the chance that we can collectively figure out a path forward. For Madison, they seem to have a route that can bring up designers, artists, and game developers… BECAUSE THEY HAVE GAME STUDIOS. That’s crucial. They have a system that historically has given rise to other studios finding success in their more tech-focused climate, and as long as one studio can “prove” there’s a successful path to game-development in the area, there’s a “potential” that investors can somewhat-confidently congregate behind, a local talent pool to employ, and a University that is eager to place students in a field where there are jobs locally available.It’s an ecosystem that works for the most part, and is able to support itself.

It’s been a mystery to me over the past couple of years as to why Milwaukee hasn’t shared this tech-focused push to nurture interactive development projects and businesses. If we’re always “looking” for opportunities in new sectors to add to the local economy… we seem to be blind to a very large opportunity. It’s strange, but admittedly I feel like it’s sort of set a course for me to try to fix that… somehow! I don’t like hearing from students that graduate from Stout or MATC with a game-development degree that they plan to leave the Midwest in search of work after school because there’s no opportunities here…. that’s not good! That means we’re bleeding talent… that’s insane to let happen!

Anyway, one of the key amazing folks giving a presentation was somebody by the name of Steven Dinehart. He basically has my dream-job… he’s worked on developing technology-infused experiences for theme parks around the world, including the currently-under-construction Nintendo World for Universal Studios in Japan. The guy also worked on an interactive LARPing experience in Utah named Evermore Park, that connected these intricately woven narratives into an over-the-top themed magical world using technology to track the visitors experience and influence how their own personal adventure progresses amongst elaborately dressed actors who stay in-character no matter what. The ultimate RPG-lover’s experience pretty much.

That said, I learned a lot and met some good people and I think there’s some great opportunities to develop something new, locally. I started my game projects a long time ago (The Lost Pisces, and The Goatman is Nigh) because as a Creative Director with a passion for storytelling and an interest in how games could offer a more meaningful relationship between the audience and the story experienced, the best way forward for starting a game-development studio was to simply start building. I know its a cliche, “build it and they will come,” but that was honestly the best way I knew how to start a studio and hopefully it can act as the common seed for something larger in the future.

Time will tell I suppose. I’d love to create a meetup or mini convention here in Milwaukee because I KNOW I can’t be the only one interested in making some amazing interactive projects around here! If you’re a game developer in the area, love making unique experimental interactive projects, or want anything to do with building a team… we have to connect. We can’t stay on our own little islands… it’s too lonely and its hard to get anything done! If MDEV taught me anything, it’s that games and interactive stories are built by teams… and the only way to build teams is to actively search out and connect with other passionate folks!

In the meantime, check out Steven Dinehart’s experimental interactive theme-park project (the super cool speaker I was talking about above) here:

https://narrativedesigner.com/

https://giantlands.com/

Like I said, the guy is up to some really cool things from what he presented at MDEV and has worked on the virtual theme park called “the Void” (the guys who built out the “Secrets of the Empire” VR Experience at Disney Parks everyone talks about as a benchmark).