Living Vicariously @kermels - Tumblr Blog

“Is This Healthy” is a comic that I made for an independent study in which I looked deeper into the idea of health, mental, physical, and emotional as it relates to myself.

This project was extremely personal and I thank any of you who take the time to read it

kaylargh

This speaks volumes

theartofanimation

Te Hu - Huteford http://www.huteford.com

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Jung Woonyoung - http://woonyoung.tumblr.com

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Akiya_kageichi - https://twitter.com/Akiya_kageichi

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Demizu Posuka - http://posuka.iinaa.net - https://twitter.com/DemizuPosuka

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Oberammergau | Germany (by Nacho Coca)

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New Surreal Oil Paintings That Subvert Vintage Vacation Photos and Historical Landscapes by Paco Pomet

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this is true love y’all (x) | follow @the-movemnt

micdotcom

😍😍😍

stankyleg-deactivated2918973

I love this!!!! 💖💖💖💖💖

tosquinha

askagamedev

I remember a while back, you wrote that game developers sometimes find it difficult to "turn off" the game developer side when they try to play games for fun, on the off chance that they do. So taking that into consideration, are there features that game developers look for or get excited about when they play games that the regular gamer either doesn't care about or wouldn't notice?

There’s usually two classes of features that I notice that regular gamers don’t - stuff that’s too technical in nature, or stuff that they lack the context to appreciate such as polish tasks that most teams would not prioritize. Here are a few recent examples of some of the things that I thought were impressive.

#1. Nathan Drake and the Storytelling Interruption

There’s a lot of polish in Uncharted 4, but the thing that stuck out most to me as something that most players would probably never notice. The jeep gameplay in itself was a marvel - it handled well, drove well, and they even put in tons of little flourishes like Drake looking over his shoulder when backing it up, the properly-working brake and reverse tail lights, the mud and wheel tracks, and so on. Each of these little details was quite impressive to me, but what really took the cake was this little thing that was almost a throwaway. During the chapter in Madagascar, we join Drake, his brother, and Sully in the jeep as they drive around looking for pirate treasure. During the scenario, the gang has conversations and tell stories in the jeep. Banter is a pretty ordinary thing, but what floored me was when I got out of the jeep to examine a point of interest on the map, and returned to it. Sully had been in the middle of a story about something, but I expected that the story thread was interrupted and I was inwardly lamenting the loss of the content… And then Drake said “So Sully, you were saying?”

And then Sully resumed his story. The engineers had to construct a companion ambient banter system, and they made it capable of recognizing that it had been interrupted, remembering where it had stopped, and then resuming where it had left off. Not to mention the additional assets required - voiced lines and such. And all of that for what would amount to, at most, a situation that would once or twice to a player who wouldn’t be paying attention to it anyway. I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, that’s some serious attention to polish”

#2. Anime for the sake of Anime

Guilty Gear Xrd’s move to 3D was already super impressive. Their visuals were an amazing blend between tech and art, producing what looked like hand-drawn anime, but with 3D models. In order to accomplish this, it required a lot of actual wizardry in the collaboration between the engineers and the artists - making it look the way it did required many of the character artists to hand-edit the normals on the textures in order to make them look right from the viewing angles. Further than that, the animators and the engineers took a 60 frames-per-second game and purposely chopped some of the frames out in order to make it look more like a 24 frames-per-second anime.

#3: Hearthstone’s User Experience

Many of you have probably played Hearthstone. It’s a fairly simple online collectible card game that has some of the most amazingly well-designed User Experience in existence. “Wait, what? Sure it feels good, but it didn’t seem that great to me,” you might say. If you look at it more carefully, however, the difference is clear. Nothing in that same space feels remotely as good as Hearthstone does. If you look at the way the game UI is designed, everything looks and behaves as if it were physically real. Most of the time UI doesn’t do that - it’s usually some kind of overlay with some kind of fancy animation or something, but it doesn’t feel real. It’s just sort of… there. But if you start examining Hearthstone’s UI, you’ll start seeing the details - the cards have shadows when you hold them up to pick one. You can see the opponent choosing cards from their hand. When a card is placed on the board, there’s a satisfying little flick and the motion follows several different levels of eye-pleasing arcs in motion. Maybe you noticed how the sound effects match up to the frame with the animations. You might not have noticed how there’s a little poof of dust, along with a small screen shake whenever a new card is placed, or how higher amounts of damage dealt by a minion has larger, heavier hitting sounds and causes additional screen shake. All of these details come together to form a really cohesive experience, and it makes the game feel real, even though it’s not a physical card game.

So yeah… these are a couple of examples of features I was really impressed by that I haven’t heard a lot of gamers talk about. Hopefully you can see why I found them impressive.

itscolossal

Handmade Floor Rugs in the Shape of Your Favorite Foods by SurfaceWerks

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Richard Anderson - http://www.flaptrapsart.com - http://flaptraps.tumblr.com - https://twitter.com/flaptraps - https://www.facebook.com/flaptrapsart/?ref=hl - https://www.instagram.com/flaptraps - http://flaptraps.blogspot.com.es

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kakotomirai - http://kakotomirai.net - https://twitter.com/kako_to_mirai - http://kakotomirai.deviantart.com

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Pascal Campion - http://pascalcampion.deviantart.com - https://www.facebook.com/pascalcampionart - https://twitter.com/pascalcampion - https://www.behance.net/pascalcampion - http://pascalcampion.tumblr.com