#gamergreg

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Page long registration, ends in a Captcha -- sure. Submit. Catcha is more than 90 seconds old, here's a new one. Also, we cleared your chosen password, so reenter that. Oh, Actually, we have strict password guidelines, so please enter a different password. No, not that one. No, not that one either. Ok, that one. Hey, it's been 90 seconds, do it all over again. Haha, we switched the Captcha out on you, so reenter it.

WELCOME.

Are you kidding me? I needed to be connected to a VPN and get third party approval to get this account in the first place, WHY IS THERE SO MUCH SECURITY ON THIS?! All I'm doing is printing some copies!

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Making Fluid and Powerful Animations For Skullgirls

How do you get the clearest, most fluid animation in a 2D game and make it work with responsive gameplay? This talk from GDC 2014's Animation Bootcamp featur...

Apparently GDC (that's the Game Developer's Conference, for non-industry friends) has been posting videos from older talks; they've been flooding my Youtube recommendations lately. Like any talk, you need to take them one at a time. Some of them are great, and some of them just aren't.

This one is pretty great. Mariel Cartwright was the lead animator on Skullgirls, a kickstarted 2D fighting game that featured all hand-drawn animation. The end product was beautiful, and clearly a labor of love. At GDC she gave this talk discussing animation fundamentals as they relate to games. While the content is basic, it's a good reinforcement of how successful animations can be worked in very tight framespaces by relying on some very core principles.

Excellent material!

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So, there's assignment I give out in Imaging; it's a fun one where you find some black and white line art, and color it. (I teach a good technique for this, which reinforces using masks. Solid stuff.) Usually students choose art of a favorite character, and then it's a digital coloring book.

While grading it, though, I've noticed that some students use random colors (almost always primaries, or just colors that don't relate to the original image at all), some use new pallets (sometimes nice, sometimes not) and some students rigid adherence to the original color scheme.

I find that interesting, 'cause when teaching the technique, I deliberately use very different colors in each class and never the colors of the original character, but I think it's a matter of taste. What about you, friends? If you were coloring in a drawing of a character you knew, would you just use whatever colors were at hand? Something new? Or stay traditional?

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I will be honest. I did not consider how long it might take to format 2tb.

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Of all the gaming communities out there, I'm pretty sure that it's the Fighting Game Players who take the cake for being the most myopic and adverse to change. I've heard friends, pros and commentators make the same kinds of statements about their hobby, frequently defending the worst parts of it.

I just watched a video from a Youtube Channel called Core-A Gaming, called "Why Fighting Games Are Hard", discussing why Fighting Games have a reputation for being difficult to play. I was more or less on board, until about halfway, when the Host attacked Extra Credits, a good entry level Game Design Channel, for a video they had put out about solving these basic problems.

Extra Credits essentially explained that Fighting Games are hard to enjoy, because there is a massive skill requirement before players begin to experience the strategic elements of the genre; the games can be very mechanically rich, but most players never experience that richness because they aren't good enough at the game to appreciate it. No one will really argue that point, either, it's definitely true. Extra Credits suggests doing more in single player modes to teach new players about the mechanics of the game in piecemeal, like most games do these days. But Core-A rejected that idea.

Now that wouldn't mean anything on it's own, but they then followed this up with the idea that you can't learn from a single player mode, and that to get good, you need to fight lots of other players and lose until you stop sucking at the game, and that it's in overcoming how bad you are that you will really appreciate what being good is, and that being good at the right time could even make you famous -- at least, at the community level. (And that's not exactly saying much, since I know of precisely one "epic" moment in fighting games, and I do not know the names of the players involved, and I am hardly in the minority.)

What I heard from this reaction was that an experienced fighting game player didn't want to see new tools aimed at inexperienced players, because he didn't see value in them. And then he glorified a subculture that thrives on trash talk and crappy attitudes because of how great winning is when you "earn" it. This, of course, completely missing the fact that most people aren't interested in playing a game, losing at it endlessly, and hoping that they will stop losing at some undetermined point.

This is also part of a greater issue I've seen with competitive gaming at large. People who get in to a lot of competitive games don't play these games, they study them, they practice obsessively, and deconstruct them. People spend hundreds of hours crunching numbers and reading articles and watching replays for games -- not so that they can better appreciate it, but just so they can master the existing best strategies. Strategies that are most upset when the developers feel the need to change things for one reason or another, not because players have developed some new approach.

I'm not worried about this as a problem though, and fans of most competitive gaming forms know why. And that's because it's a self-solving issue. When your game is inaccessible to new players, you get fewer new players; your community doesn't grow and eventually stagnates. Fighting Gamers are one of the most defensive about change, despite the fact that they are also one of the most insular gaming communities.

Many other games that struggle with these issues have other hooks: League of Legends and DOTA 2 for example have a social aspect in team play, and have surprisingly well publicized competitions; Magic: The Gathering has a physical component in the cards, the Skinner Box esque collectability, and an active secondary market. Fighting Games have big tournaments like Evo, but I don't see many other vectors for retaining interest.

It's not like Street Fighter is going to go away or anything but I suspect without some new fighting game to shake things up, that the interest may decay beyond little more than a tiny, self sustaining niche.

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Seeing the phrase "white hue" in a Photoshop document makes me irrational, apparently.

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I have a tradition in my Digital Imaging class. First class for each section, I get the class to draw a self portrait in Photoshop. It's useful to just get them acclimatized to the software and gauge their skill level, plus reinforce submission procedures. Of course, I also join in, because it's something I can do quickly, and it makes the expectations clear and shows that they're reasonable. Here's the first portrait of the term!