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Journey’s Enigmatic Character • Its Six Iterations
Journey‘s main character is on of its most iconic features. Creative director Jenova Chen explains how it came into existence. Why did Journey have faceless, non-speaking characters? “We wanted the...
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The Shape That Unified Mass Effect’s Look
What makes any Mass Effect-screenshot so instantly recognizable? Let me help you, use the slider on these images: (If you don’t see them, first click here, then here) It’s the arc. It’s everywhere, and...
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Maintaining A Feeling Of Momentum In SpeedRunners
SpeedRunners is a competitive platformer game on Steam and Xbox One. The game is to out-run your opponents, and a central theme of the controls and level design is to always keep up momentum! There are...
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Creating And Animating A Boss In Boss 101
In our upcoming game Boss 101 you can roll bosses, sure, but let’s talk about HOW they get in the game. A couple notes – we use GameMaker Studio (from YoYo games) and Spine (from Esoteric Software)....
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Making The Last of Us’ Iconic Giraffe Scene
Meeting the giraffe in The Last of Us is for many players the emotional peak in an already emotional journey. Concept Artist John Sweeney tells us how the iconic scene came about. “When Ellie kills...
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“To Die or Not to Die”–Death Animations in Guns, Gore & Cannoli
As you can see in the trailer above, there are obviously many enemies and weapons in Guns, Gore & Cannoli (Steam). Everybody who has ever played an action game knows that most of the games feature...
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Cleaning Up The Menu Space in SpeedRunners
If there’s anything I’m the best at, in our company, it’s avoiding work! SpeedRunners is an Early Access game that updates with new features, levels and options every couple weeks. Development priority...
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Designing A Believable Homemade Flamethrower For The Last of Us
Concept Artist Nick Gindraux was tasked with the design of a homemade flamethrower for protagonist Joel in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. Here is what he came up with. “I started working at Naughty Dog...
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Making Achievements: The Design and Art Process
While working on Boss 101 we’re always looking for things to add which increase the playability of the game for the player. Things like mini-games, quests and achievements are a few of the tried and...
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The Dream That Inspired The Nightmarish Graphics of The Intruder
Survival horror game The Intruder is intended to be an authored game and Roy Theunissen claims responsibility for everything that’s good and bad about it. So it’s fitting that a dream held the answer...
View ArticleKeeping 2D Herald afloat by adding 3D
Herald is an interactive period drama about colonialism with a heavy emphasis on storytelling and art. Bart Heijltjes, Creative Director at Wispfire, explains how adding 3D saved the production. “When...
View ArticleWhat A Difference A Hat Makes in Boss 101
Do you have something in your game you can expand on and give your player’s a better experience? Maybe it is a matter of simply taking what you have and making a small, value adding change. In the case...
View ArticleGenerating art: Turbocharge your workflow
What would a game that ran on a turbocharged Super Nintendo look like? We figured it would look like a blend of 16bit color palettes, smooth animations and modern techniques like motion blur and...
View ArticleHow Firewatch translated 2D concept art into a 3D open world
This Micro Mortem is based on the talk that Jane Ng’s, Lead Artist at Campo Santo, gave at GDC 2016 Graphic designer Olly Moss designed the striking 2D concept art for Firewatch. But how did the team...
View ArticleA mini-story about the Minit mosquito
Minit is a peculiar little adventure played sixty seconds at a time. It’s a collaboration between me (Kitty Calis), Jan Willem Nijman, Jukio Kallio & Dominik Johann. In an earlier interview I told...
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