In other news, I’m very excited to be presenting at the 2016 Zbrush Summit alongside my coworker at BGS, Dennis Mejillones. It’s at the Gnomon School in LA in September, so if you’re going, be sure to say hi.

Fallout 4 shipped in November and that was pretty cool. Sadly I don’t really have the freedom to post a bunch of work I did for that game, but if you pick up the art book, a bunch of the stuff in there is mine.

It’s weird to post concept art as I only spend a small amount of my time on it. Most of the stuff I did for Fallout 4 was 3D, but it’s so modular and piecemeal that it’s hard to show. Feral Ghouls and Synths a couple of my characters, if that matters. I’m happy that Nick Valentine and Drinking Buddy have had a good reception.

Here are a couple of Commonwealth Residents from Fallout 4 that got posted along with the Art Book announcement:

Concept art for the Feral Ghouls:

And before we move into old stuff, here’s something completely different – a couple of pages from a story book I wrote/illustrated for my kids about their stuffed animals:

Getting into old stuff, here are some concepts for Skyrim DLC – Dawnguard and Dragonborn (2012):

And now, let’s venture into ancient history, when I still worked at Mythic 5+ years ago. There is some old Warhammer stuff, and a few things that are all over the map from when Mythic was trying to reinvent itself as a studio:

The reason a lot of movies are color graded Teal/Orange is because skin tones are in the orange range of hues. If you take everything that is not faces or in a similar color space to skin and push it in the opposite direction (complementary colors, natch), you get teal. Now, your eye is naturally drawn to look at the faces and not the unimportant scenery. Warm colors draw your eye more than cool.

This works for movies because the colorist can key the grading off the faces in every single shot. If the face is lit by blue skylight in this shot, that’s ok, just key the grade off the face. If the face is lit by warm incandescent light in this shot, that’s ok, just key the grade off the face.

This technique is tougher to do in games where the color grade just gets baked down to a single LUT for all lighting situations. That’s the answer to your question. Instead we usually go for a more general color grade – one more balanced, or one more warm and appealing (the brown look).

Another reason teal/orange works for movies is because the faces are almost always the most important thing in the composition. Faces are warm and warm colors draw the eye, thus teal/orange. In games we often care more about an entire character wearing a costume, or an inanimate object. Often in games we have a lot of dirt.

In movies, not every object in the background has been colored specifically to fit within a palette. In games you can texture everything to a specific palette (this is not always done in games, but it is possible). The teal thing is more necessary in movies to unify the palette of the scene. I really don’t care about the doors behind Iron man in the shot above, so make them all teal to blend in with everything.

When games do teal/orange, it’s more often an attempt to ape the aesthetic of a movie and elicit the same tone.

Why don’t we see more color variety in games? Why does it have to be just two colors (teal/orange) or one (brown)?

Lots of the games you reference go for an aesthetic of high detail. High detail is often targeted in AAA art direction as a shorthand for MOAR GRAPHICS – we have the best tech, the highest fidelity, the most future in our codes. Sometimes, this is actually true (Gears of War, Battlefield). Often, this is weak art direction.

Lots of these games also have high value contrast, like Saving Private Ryan, to give more of a ‘wartime’ feel. They are super explodey combat games, so this is appropriate.

If you have high detail and high value contrast, adding in a complex color palette would be a mistake.

It’s a matter of contrast. Artists use contrast to draw the eye. There are lots of forms of contrast:

– Value contrast (black and white)
– Color contrast (lots of different hues, strongly complementary colors up against each other)
– Edge contrast (lots of detail)
– Temporal contrast (any of the above over time)

If you have high contrast of all types across the whole scene, you have visual shit.

So, the games you see with more colors are usually the ones with less value contrast or less detail.

It’s hard to understate how important this idea is toward making good games. Game design is more about process than theory, much like John Carmack would say it’s more about execution than the initial idea, and much like how Steve Jobs said product design was more about process than the initial idea.

Getting the right pieces in place before you pass beyond the complexity wall is what makes the difference between a good game and a bad one.

You have a choice on what to spend that early time on. You can spend it on making a new graphics engine. You can spend it on prototyping a fresh and exciting new core loop. Or, you can spend it on animation systems and cameras for narrative storytelling. Fairly quickly, you will pass the complexity wall and that thing you chose to work on at the beginning will be the de facto defining element of your game.

The foundation of the Cerny method was that, for action adventure games, you should spend that golden development time  on the 3 C’s (camera, control, character). Mark formalized preproduction as a way for teams to stay outside the complexity wall until they had a good foundation based on those three elements. If you didn’t have a great “First Playable,” or “Vertical Slice,” you did not get greenlit and move on to production. Staying out of production meant staying on the cheap and flexible side of the complexity wall.

There are many studios who are repeatedly successful because they are good at focusing down on one thing early in development, one thing that is good to work on outside the complexity wall for their kind of game, like Bungie with its sandbox. I like to belive Bethesda Game Studios has this quality.

If you choose to focus poorly, you can end up stuck with a bad foundation, and then there’s no amount of time, money, or talent that can turn that project around incrementally. The inertial resistance to change beyond the complexity wall is too great. At the beginning of development your game is a small, nimble go-kart. Beyond the complexity wall, it’s a thousand ton train and you ain’t turning that thing around, even if you know it’s headed to shitville.

I’ve been on a few trains to shitville (not where I currently work), and it’s a terrifying, helpless situation.

If you scale up a team too soon, as is fairly common for teams up against a looming release date, you’ve taken a voluntary pass on the golden period outside the complexity wall.

Now, there is one way to tear down the complexity wall, and it’s relatively common thing to hear about from the best games ever made. Throw out the bathwater and start over. 

Yep, just toss it out. Reboot. Halo started out as a Mac RTS and ended up as a console FPS. Large portions of the original game were thrown out and started from scratch. Half Life was famously thrown out and started over, as was Half Life 2.

The sunk costs fallacy (and budget politics in big companies) might lead you to believe that throwing out the current version of the game is an expensive idea. It is surely daunting, but it’s the only way to regain that ability to change your game significantly. If the current game sucks, it’s often cheaper to throw it out and start over with a smaller team with a smaller burn rate.

Luckily, throwing out the whole game and starting over is not necessary if you choose the right things to focus on early in development. Most great games don’t need to get made twice before they are released once. Usually, there’s a proven previous game that gets sequeled or made greater (Mario 64, Battlefield 1942, Uncharted 2). Or, there’s a great initial prototype or mod to build on (most indie games, most Valve games).

The complexity wall is important to recognize because it’s the most common downfall of producer-driven development. The fallacy of the producer-as-creative-director is the idea that he can steer the big ship, make directorial decisions mid-development that direct the team back on course towards success. Producer-driven development is the hallmark of big publisher owned teams, and it’s why you don’t often see innovation there.

People think creativity is inherently lacking at the big companies. That’s not the case. Creative risks get taken all the time on big teams. The problem is when the creative idea gets adopted on a big team, it needs to be shepherded by a producer. Guess where that producer lives? Behind the complexity wall. No matter the level of selflessness or skill that producer has, she will have a epic challenge opening a hole in that complex game to fit in the creative idea.

The complexity wall is why we can’t have teams assemble on the fly like hollywood movies. It’s why a stable tech foundation works to a team’s advantage. It’s why you have to have your core loop understood before anything else, and it’s why you need to understand the tone of your game before you grow your team.

The complexity wall is why game design is more process than theory.

In 3 parts on YouTube:

I wish I hadn’t made my post on the future of the living room so huge, burying Valve on page 4. I suddenly have the desire to update the picture with a companion cube submarine emerging from the depths between the Apple and Google ships. Here’s why we should all take Valve seriously: They are insanely efficient at leveraging their small size.

Valve has the sharpest outlook on how a software/services platform should be run in the game industry. Despite being a small company at around 300 employees, Steam is dominant on the PC. Michael Abrash’s recent post illuminates how Valve is optimized around delivering maximum value per employee. Valve’s 300 is more directly effective than, say 300 of the people working on the next Xbox (efficiency #1).

They also fly the flag of open platforms and direct access to customers. They believe (as I do) that connecting developers to customers as seamlessly as possible will create the best experiences and ultimately the best platform. Oppressive certification is a waste and a platform hindrance. TF2 is a massively better business on Steam than it ever was on the 360. That direct connection creates an efficient platform, which requires less scale on Valve’s part (efficiency #2).

An open platform device doesn’t have to be as complex and monolithic as an Xbox or an iPad. The graphics hardware race is largely irrelevant on anything that’s not mobile these days. Valve is capable of taking PC components, putting them in a box, and using Steam as an OS* (efficiency #3).

An open platform device doesn’t need a huge launch with a massive marketing push. Forget retail. Valve is big on market experiments and I can see them putting out a Steam box in a bare-bones version 1.0. From there they will learn, iterate and scale up (if the market supports it). It’s an antithetical strategy for a hardware platform launch, but it’s gospel for a software platform launch (efficiency #4).

The thing about the next generation is, it’s going to be much more about software and services than hardware. Valve is in a great position to disrupt the big players purely by virtue of their dedication to open platforms. Not to mention, they understand the importance of a good controller to the living room experience, something I’m not sure even Apple gets, what with their undying devotion to the all-powerful touchscreen.

I once made the mistake of expecting Steam to take over and disrupt the PC market overnight. I was right in my predictions but utterly wrong on the time scale. If anyone can do this, it’s Valve. Just understand, it’s going to happen on Valve Time.

—-

* Most games currently on Steam use DirectX, which is part of Windows. Valve (including Gabe himself) are working on a Linux port of Steam – Why? There is probably a solution to the DirectX issue either by either launching their Steam Box without the DirectX titles, or by using a networked Windows PC (already running Steam) to render those games over the network back to the Steam Box.

So what’s the selling point? Certainly Sony can’t put out a $900 PS4 and expect anybody to buy it on the back of “MOAR GRAPHICS.”

Next Gen will be defined by the declining retail market more than anything else. MS/Apple/Sony understand that they are making a platform for digital content delivery, not just big AAA games, but also small XBLA games, free to play games, social games, but potentially more importantly: TV and Movies. A new way of interacting with your tv and games, that’s the selling point.

Apple is doing this which means MS and Sony need to strike preemptively or be disrupted. Believe it or not, there are lots of people that would happily never own another “game box” if their TV played Wii Sports and Just Dance. The PS2/Wii era market penetration is the realm of iTV.

I work on AAA games so please don’t remind me that AAA blockbusters aren’t going away. I know, I know. I like those games too. Yes, we will always have them and they will get more uber in the future. It’s great.

But that’s not the highest end of the market. The highest end is $100/month TV & Movie subscriptions that people currently pay to the likes of Comcast and Verizon. The highest end of the games market is not even Mondern Warfare 3’s Billion Dollars, it’s WoW’s Several Billion Dollars.

The next gen is about making and owning the living room software & services platform. Look at how well Apple and Google have done on the backs of iOS and Android. Everybody wants to do that in the living room. The competition is not between Xbox 720 and PS4, the competition is between:

– iTV
– Xbox Live
– PSN
– Google TV
– Steam (which is remarkably well positioned to be relevant in the living room)

Platforms. That is what matters and is what will define the next gen. The level of uncertainty around the future of those platforms is far more terrifying to me than “how much RAM will the box have?”

1. Iwata’s Keynote was about a crisis for Game Developers. My Translation: Nintendo is the one in crisis. Everybody on Facebook and iOS is doing just fine. Yet, Nintendo can’t follow up the blue ocean strategy of the Wii with another Wii – it’s a red ocean now with Kinect, Move on the motion control side and lots of new competitors (Smart TV, cloud gaming, iOS) coming on the cheap disruptive side. Still, they clearly recognize the problem and that’s the first step towards finding a way to make a Nintendo machine part of the future living room.
2. Google recognizes the fact that control and therefore UX is a big problem in the living room. Well Done! Then, they point to tablet and smartphone touchscreens as the solution. Oops! As I mentioned in the bigger article, touchscreens lack tactile feedback, and so they can’t be eyes-off controllers. I don’t think people want to give up on-the-big-screen UI’s and spend all of their time looking down instead of actually watching a show while they surf for something else. Plus, the larger market of apps (as a device selling point) is only enabled by a controller that can navigate on the big screen. Despite being first to market with the most fully featured Smart TV platform, Google is leaving the door open for somebody else to build the great controller experience. This puts Microsoft in a great position. A “Kinect TV” product (cheap, focused on great TV UX and an open app market) could be huge. That is, if Microsoft can bring themselves to put up an open app store.
3. With my favorite bit of news, Valve announced “Big Screen Mode” for Steam, which makes my longshot scenario of a Steam-enabled Boxee 2 much less of a longshot. Big Screen Mode also features a controller-enabled UI. Very soon you’ll be able to hook a cheap PC up to your TV, buy Modern Warfare 2 for less than it costs on any console and play nearly the exact same experience. Steam has more disruptive potential than anybody is giving them credit for. Already, Super Meat Boy, a game designed for controllers, sold more on Steam than Xbox Live Arcade. I tweeted Boxee telling them to hook up with Steam, so we’ll see if they can recognize their leverage to crush Google, Apple and Microsoft, and dominate the living room.

DISCLAIMER: This is a speculative opinion piece based on public information. These opinions are my own and do not represent my employer.

The game industry is about to get flipped. The console in the living room has long been the king platform for games, but these days the living room is different. Only blockbusters like Call of Duty or breakout indies profit in the arms race of the AAA. The traditional games business as a whole is shrinking.

The old console cycle of simply iterating on graphics hardware is dead, and it’s never coming back. Nobody is sure what the next game box will look like. What’s more, Apple TV and GoogleTV are trying to bring some of the magic of Android, iOS, and the Web into the living room and are threatening to upend the PS3 and Xbox 360 in the process.

Game consoles are primed to be disrupted, and the next generation of Smart TV might just be the new champion.

Where We Stand

There is massive growth happening in the games industry on smartphones, Facebook, the Web, and Steam. That style of game product – digitally distributed, service oriented, focused on ongoing revenue – is bound for the living room.

When they get there, an app store will meet the realities of couches and big screen TVs and a very peculiar new box will be born. This new box will have a fancy controller, sort of like a game controller, and it will happen to play games, but it won’t be an Xbox or a Playstation.

It’s not just games that are in for a shakeup, there is a full on war brewing in the living room around access to video content. There are Smart TVs like those from Samsung, there’s Roku and Boxee, and the old giants like Comcast and Verizon are getting smarter about the services they offer. The Web and services like Hulu and Netflix are changing TV behavior forever.

Google and Apple that are the most interesting contenders because they are big and don’t keep content out like the game console manufacturers. In this respect they are open. What also makes them interesting is that games will be important part of their arsenal in this battle and that will pit them against Microsoft and Sony’s AAA firepower.

It certainly doesn’t look good for games in the short term – the traditional business is in decline. But, once the dust settles and the new living room app store reigns supreme, this new box could be incredible for the game industry. Read on for the full analysis:

Where We are Going

The current console cycle has passed it’s 5 year mark and is getting a little long in the tooth. Away from the living room, very interesting things have been happening around the App Store, Steam, Facebook, and the resulting indie games boom. Open development and frictionless downloading have proven to be fruitful.

To Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, an app store model is not attractive. The race to $1 apps terrifies them. Too bad for them that their current model won’t support growth.

A low-power app box that is sold for profit (the Apple model) will have a hundred times as much content as a high-power box sold at a loss (the likely PS4). The old game industry console will get trumped by a great set of services and a great user experience – an app store in the living room that works and makes app management effortless. The decline in the PC graphics card race means that the gap in graphics capabilities will be negligible. There will be very little reason for anyone, even gamers, to prefer a PS4 over what is coming.

The Smart TV Revolution will be like the Smartphone Revolution (but different)

You might think that cable providers are in the same position that the old phone carriers were in in the smartphone revolution. They are primed to be disrupted by great software, UX, and open market apps. But, the apps won’t be the same for Smart TV. Try this thought experiment: Item Sales (call it DLC, MTX, or in-app-purchase if you like) is a massive growth business model in games everywhere. What if TV had the same option?

• Watch a free HBO show and one-click sub to the rest of the season (then select an option for a special collectors DVD to be mailed to your house).
• Instantly pay NBC $5 to make this season of The Office ad-free and available for streaming when you are available.
• That TV ad for an iPod can be clicked, taking you to the Apple store right there on your TV.

If iPhones were the smartphone revolution, this is the true potential of Smart TV. Apps on Smart TV will be nothing like apps on smartphones. Apps on phones do things. When you’re out and about you need “an app for that” so you can get a thing done and move on. When you’re ass-deep in the couch you don’t want to do things, you want to be engaged in great content. Apps on Smart TV will be about making content convenient and social.

That may not sound as revolutionary as apps on smartphones, but when you consider the variety and complexity of content available in the living room (TV, News, Movies, DVR, Internet, Games), it becomes clear how much convenience and control actually matter. Smart TV services will be the difference in getting TV content owners to unclench and leap into the future where they will make more money.

There will need to be a standard of interaction – an iOS for the TV. This open standard will attract the best software, and the customers will follow, much like how apps sell iPhones. Apple and Google have the experience in OS building and app focus that can define a new standard of interaction with TVs.

But, wait a second, what do games even have to do with Apple TV or GoogleTV? Why don’t they just skip games all together? It’s possible they will, but if they manage to build a great user experience (UX) for Video, Apps, and their conflation in Smart TV, it will be a great user experience for games as well. The couch is an even better place for games than your phone or PC. Games will dominate living room app stores even more than they do on mobile and the web.

Next Page: The Winning Recipe

I’ve got a twitter account which will probably be rarely used, so you’ve got that alternative to the RSS. I’ll tweet out any new content that shows up here.

For posterity, here’s the previous site design. I liked the header and background, but I wanted something cleaner here, and I wanted a wide format so I can ditch the lightboxes.

The papercraft style treatment is ripped from a radial gradient tutorial I saw on the web, but I used it a differently for this logo.

The next one here is from a little hobby of mine. I keep a list of names for my super awesome game development studio that I’m going to start after I make my first billion. One name near the top is Überifica.

Based on Black Slabbath, the pixel-block nature of the Ü letterform will make a great icon. In the middle is my favorite color treatment, and the bottom is a little retro tribute to the demo scene.

On Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, one of the first things we did was work on the logo. We had to because the game had been announced before we ever started working on it. We did the logo so early on that the marketing team and executives couldn’t even be sure of the final name of the game. They knew that they wanted it to shorten to “WAR,” thus the “Age of Reckoning” bit. But, they weren’t positive that “Warhammer ONLINE: Age of Reckoning” wouldn’t become WOAoR, which is a really stupid name. So, the first logo I did was using this name:

There are two bits of work that survived to the end from this. First, I used the shield and hammer from the Warhammer rulebook to anchor the logo, after giving them a repaint. Second, I repainted the classic WARHAMMER logotype to lessen the color contrast and give it a more textured, tangible look. Here you can see a before and after:

Later on, when we saw that the marketing folks had done a “final” logo, we took it and did another polish paint pass on it. At this point they had decided to add “ONLINE” back in, so I repainted that bit as well as the “Age of Reckoning” text. Michael Phillippi did a final pass on the shield and hammer, as well as painting the awesome Chaos axe to go along with it. Thus, the final logo:

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Then watch the original of the clip I remade:

http://www.starwarsuncut.com/#/scene/428

And here is my version:

Star Wars Uncut – Scene 428 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.

This was so much fun to make. I did it in a few lunch hours, I didn’t stop to change something if it was crappy looking, and I worked as furiously fast as I could. It was probably 3-4 hours start to finish. I know it looks like crap, but that’s kind of the idea with Star Wars: Uncut – having fun and rediscovering your love of Star Wars.

Nick LaMartina here at Mythic did the audio, which I think makes the whole thing work.

UPDATE:

A second clip. This one was not as much fun as the first to make (and not as successful), but still good practice for embracing the spirit of prototypes. I’m hoping this “quick and dirty” spirit will spill over into my game dev. We often learn a lot more about what works and what doesn’t by doing. Once again, Nick went above and beyond with the audio.

Star Wars Uncut – Scene 206 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.

And an update:

We needed to do a ground up redesign of the UI in 6 months (it turned out to be more than 8). The UI for an MMO like WAR is a huge piece of the game, almost like an OS for the game. Beyond the HUD (which is very complex in itself) it has maps, chat, mail, a social network, maybe 50 windows total. . . basically everything you would find on Xbox Live and more.

The reason I enjoyed this gig was because I had the opportunity to come up with original features. One that made it into the game was the Open Party system. Players in WAR can see a list of groups sorted by distance, and just join up with them in one click. This makes playing WAR’s open RvR gameplay much simpler because you can find people nearby who are playing the way you want to play, be it fighting other players or fighting monsters.

I think there is a lot more we could have done with this system, and there are arguments to be made that it actually reduces community stickyness in the long term, but I think it’s a huge improvement over the old LFG standard, and a step in the right direction. This kind of functionality is a big interest of mine going forward – how do we take players playing cooperatively and help them form longer-term connections? Are open guilds the next logical step?

The process for building the new UI went like this:

Phase 1: HUD Sketching

My first step was to lay out the main HUD – the things you see on screen at all times. I sketched their shape and put them together in several “wireframe” layouts that looked like this:

These wireframes served several purposes:

• They were quick to make and remake
• The elements could be positioned in lots of different ways to see what worked and what didn’t (it’s in this phase that all MMO UI designers discover that there are a lot of good, undeniable reasons behind WoW’s UI layout, and despite all of our best efforts, unless our gameplay is fundamentally distinct, our UI’s will look somewhat similar).
• The wireframes could be shown to producers for approval. We didn’t get many change requests, but this buy-in bought us some armor for later on.

One goal of mine was to keep the UI seperated into chunks. Earlier iterations of our UI had looked like a more integrated “dashboard.” The modular approach gave us several benefits:

• We could build modability into the game. Instead of needing to download UI mods, users could move their UI around into whatever layout they wanted inside the game.
• One of these options could be to add tons of hotbars – one of the first things advanced MMO players want to do.
• We could start the game off with lots of things hidden (we are still getting this in). New players would see a very very simple UI, while elder players could show as much complexity as they liked.

My biggest challenge here was trying to keep all of our progress bars from competing visually. In most MMO’s you gain XP. In WAR we have XP, Renown, Influence, Victory Points, Morale, and some classes have a combat mechanic that fills up over time. . . yikes.

The other major challenge was groups. In WAR you will often find yourself in a Warband with 23 other players, which can look like this:

We made it look like that because it’s good to keep tabs on all of those people if you are playing in a highly organized Guild. It’s also good if you are a healer and you need to know if somebody is dying. But, most people don’t give a crap about all of that information, they just want to know how many people they are grouped with and if they are dead or not. I think we could have done better with this by keeping more clutter off the screen and offering the option to “show all.”

There is also something clunky with the quest tracker and all of the event announcements we do (things like achievements and “You Have Entered:” messages).

There’s way too much information presented for it to be interesting, but I’ve never been able to settle on a solution that works elegantly. I think there’s something to be found in news feeds, fading information over time, and separating the information by the icons we use in the main menu:

Phase 2: HUD Design

After settling on the wireframe layout, I worked my way around the screen texturing all of the individual elements and giving them detailed designs. By mocking up every possible state of the object I gained two valuable things. The mockups were both a detailed functional design and all of the art assets needed. I would put these mockups together into documents that we could give to programmers and to producer-types for final approval.

After we wrapped on the HUD, that same process rolled right into all of the windows. Here is a smattering of some of the mockups I did:

There were some interesting tasks that came up during all of this. I made a custom font for our player names, called Age of Reckoning.

I developed the style for our maps and a workflow that allowed us to cheat and complete 30+ of them very rapidly.

Here’s an early mockup that I’m also fond of, I think it captured a nice warhammer feel:

There was a metric assload of tiny icons to draw. There were probably 20 artists who pitched in on the various sorts of icons.

The UI touches all aspects of the game, so it was a great education in MMO game design. Everything from the second-to-second flow of combat in the action bars to the months-long metagame of the campaign was under our noses:

I had some other pet features that never made it in (we only had 6 months!), but I’ll restrain myself from posting them publicly. Ask me sometime about the quick commands ;)

That’s the overview of my role in the team as the hybrid designer/artist. There were a lot of fine programmers working with us, as well as Terro Veun, the other UI artist, and Carrie Gouskos, the UI lead. Given what we were up against, I am extremely proud of what we were able to accomplish.