TCAF 2013 Show report
I was very inspired by reading Love Love Hill members Dirchansky and Kim’s heartfelt TCAF 2013 reports, so I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring. Warning: words.
Benjamin Rivers is the creator of the choose-your-own-horror game Home, coming soon to iOS. Patrick called him up, and they wouldn’t stop talking about horror games, movies, and everything in-between.
Check out this brief (~40 minutes long) and very fun chat I had with GiantBomb’s Patrick Klepek! We spoke about all things horror, and we go to some pretty weird places.
I am so close with this. I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to see Home work so well on these little devices.
I’ll be debuting this games-focused mini-comics collection at TCAF 2013. Twenty-four pages of games art, Batgirl and cuteness.
Come visit me at Table 151 this Saturday and Sunday (floor map here)!
And don’t miss the “Narrative Intersections” panel with Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, DoubleFine’s Scott C. and Udon’s Jim Zub (oh yeah—and yours truly!). Panel details are here.
Hope to see you this weekend!
Happy Star Wars Day! (We’re still not building a Death Star: http://wh.gov/Ptti)
#MayThe4thBeWithYou
You Get Out What You Put In
Last night I attended @IGDAToronto’s panel on edumacation, on whether or not formal schooling is the path to successful game… stuff. Panelists talked about game art, game development, and game design pretty indiscriminately, but it seemed “design” got the largest focus because it is the least concrete of the three. It was an interesting debate, but it was clearly five different panelists with two or three sets of opinions and two specific agendas. Debate almost devolved into the realm of pure semantics, but that (blessedly) went nowhere; we have all been down that road and I think the panelists knew that would not really help the audience. I listened through the panel, agreeing and disagreeing, and decided to compose my thoughts here.
Check out this excellent assessment of games education and what students need to do for themselves.
This is one page of a six-page comic I’ve ultimately decided to scrap. I created it in total opposition to my usual comic process, and in doing so proved how effective that original process usually is.
I struggled with this little story so much, I should have dumped in sooner. I really like this page, though, so I decided to share it.
Normally when I create a new comic, I have an multi-pass process. Each page gets affected by these steps:
- Write the script
- Draw thumbnail layouts of all pages
- Create blue-line layouts of the real pages (blocking)
- Pencil all pages
- Ink everything
- Scan and touch-up
- Add tone and/or digital colour
- Letter and layout in InDesign
For this little exercise, I just drew what came to me, and tried to figure out the general story later. Long story short: it didn’t work. The art was nice, but everything story-wise was forced and trite.
I didn’t make Snow by stumbling through it like this, that’s for sure. That strict process is crucial for focusing my time, energy and creative output. Lesson learned!
