Hello!
My title here at Arrowhead is that of “Producer”. Basically, one could say my job is keeping track of plans, talking to publishers, making sure commitments we make are delivered upon, and making sure the talented people here at Arrowhead Game Studios are motivated, happy, and badass.
My name is Axel Lindberg and I am going to use this opportunity for intra-web-tacular exposure to share with you, a list of three kick-ass books on the topics of human behavior and leadership…
You’ve probably seen hundreds of scenes in movies where the hero, the animal, or the monster does some really advanced manouver and pulls it off perfectly… almost too perfectly…
In some scenes you really see how the director took 80 shots of that scene to get it just right, but if it takes 80 shots to get it right, maybe it shouldn’t be just right, maybe the hero should have slipped, or fucked up that jump.
For instance, how often does a person stumble randomly in movies, or hit his head on a lamp or get distracted by something that wasn’t of interest to the plot of the movie? Not often… but these things happen all the time in real life.
It gets even more obvious in animated movies, where the chaos factor of our daily movement isn’t directed or thought about.
Working as an artist at a game studio often requires more from you than drawing a pretty picture or making sprites in Photoshop once in a while since a lot of games these days are in 3d.
For a lot of people, making 3d objects for games and films is pretty hard to wrap your head around and it is also very hard to explain to people how it works, as Rob wrote in a previous post about Visual effects for games. (So how do you paint smoke?)
With this post, I’m going to try and cover another part of game graphics and hopefully straighten out a few question marks around the modelling of a 3d object.
With a few steps and images, I will show you the making of this car!
Proper volume
So it’s my turn to post something nifty on the blog and as usual the preparations have been perfect. Initially I had an idea of writing something cool about a new tech or a fancy implementation (I’m a programmer after all) but then life happened and time ran short. So I’m going to write a bit about my main hobby interest (besides from hanging around Plattan), which is to make noise in a somewhat rhythmic pattern.
I often get the question; “What’s it like working at Arrowhead?”
Now I know that I can only talk about this from my own point of view as an artist, but I think that some of my coworkers would agree on the answer I have for that question.
The usual and very short answer would be “Awesome!”, “Great!” or “I love it!”. But that would not make much of a blog post so I’ll try to give a more in depth description below.
In October last year, me and Peter began having nightmares about the foundation which The Showdown Effect code was written upon. This all started when the authors of it had left the building and the one who could see through all the fog was shot in the crotch by our lead artist and we never saw him again… This gave us massive aneurisms when we began implementing hot join in The Showdown Effect.
During the gaps of rage and despair, we began thinking and discussing ways we would write our own foundation for future projects (assuming that we would still use the Bitsquid engine). We dreamt of structure and rules, nicely ordered messages, separated data and event replication, basically adopting fascism. During evenings and weekends we began hacking away, building our new hope; The Arrowhead Code Foundation.
It’s that situation again. I’m sat chatting to someone completely new, who doesn’t “get” video games and I have to explain to them what my job involves. It’s a bit better I think for environment or character artists, and perhaps even animators; but explaining how visual FX work, and what they are, is often a bit tricky.
Below is a slightly more in-depth description, as I’m assuming if you’re reading this post, you “get” video games. Hopefully by the end of it you won’t have that glassy-distant stare of someone who’s stopped listening about two words after I started speaking…
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I play a lot of games, probably more than anyone else in the office. One could say playing games is one of my biggest hobbies, and another would be cooking. Not the kind of cooking you see on TV when they make the perfect steak, or some advanced 50 stage piece of duck. No, I like “Experimental Cooking”, the kind of cooking where you try new things, play around with crazy combinations and explore how different tastes go together. One could probably learn all that I have discovered in a book, by no means am I the first to find these crazy combinations or weird techniques, but discovering them for myself gives me a sense of satisfaction. (I once discovered that Tabasco flavoured popcorn is probably the greatest thing in the world, only to find out that it was actually a thing, sort of.).
But time is tight and it’s often hard to find time for a proper meal if you want to get a few hours of gaming in during your evening. Therefore I have developed a few special recipes for proper food, done the easy way. And I will share one of them below.
MUD? What the hell is that? Some kind of game?? DON’T GO THERE!!!
I only like games where you can kick the shit out of people! Chivalry, Dark Messiah, Wolfenstein, Dark Souls, Duke Nuke’em 3D – in all these games, you have a certain kick-activation power. You can boot a guy down from a cliff, into a wall, or just ruin people’s shit. View full post…
MUD is an acronym for Multi User Dungeon, it’s essentially a text-based MMORPG. They’ve been around ever since the 80′s, first only at universities but when the interwebs spread in the 90′s it became available for most of us.
MUDs are heavily inspired by traditional pen-and-paper role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. The MMORPG Everquest (released 1999) drew a lot of inspiration from MUDs. I’m sure the evolution will continue when we’re all inside the Matrix, hacking down ogres and looting treasures.
There is a particular charm to text-based gaming, you use your imagination a lot like with books and you can essentially play it on anything that connects to the internet.
