Be the New Renaissance Artist: Davinci = Art+Design+Engineering

Cyrus Lum

20+ years of experience Game production, development, management, and investment roles Publishing & independent development companies. Cyrus Lum

Artist, Art Director, Programmer, Designer, Producer, Studio Director, Executive Director, VP of Digital Productions, Game Developer Owner, and Angel Investor/Advisor Cyrus Lum

I help grow game businesses using my expertise, experience & industry contacts. And in some cases…I help with funding. GameDev Guru

Multi-talent In this day and age of “shrinking” development teams, it is more important now than ever to have individuals on your development team who are “multi- talented”.

Multi-talent This is because of efforts to cut dev costs in order to create products on platforms where business models are leaning toward free-to-play

The Early Days It’s a throw back to the early days of computer games when products were created by one or several individuals.

Potential of Artists Of all of the disciplines, a person with an art background has the potential ability to also handle game design, programming, and production duties.

The Talk I will discuss the methods that I used to develop from an artist to a game designer, programmer, producer and beyond.

The Talk I will discuss a process that artists can use to learn how to program and eventually code in many different programming languages.

The Talk I will discuss the iterative “step” process that I used for game design that can allow an artist to develop game design ideas in much the same way as art is developed in a traditional sense.

The Talk Finally, I will discuss how to manage being an integrated artist/game designer/programmer and how this can be applied to rapid game prototyping and even to actual game production.

Game Design The process steps of game design as applied to a commercial artist. Client specs Market/competitive analysis Initial design treatment Create user experience Mock-up screens Create user experience Demo Production plan

Client Specs Overall, you want to understand the product to be created

Client Specs What is the product’s purpose in the marketplace? Is it filling a “hole”?

Client Specs Understand your client’s needs

Client Specs Understand the constraints – creative, technical, production

Client Specs Understand the value that the project can have to the market

Client Specs Even if you are creating the game for yourself, your client is the market – not you. Investigate and understand this market – you still need customers to buy your game.

Market Analysis Investigate what other similar products are already selling

Market Analysis How well are they doing?

Market Analysis Who are your biggest competitors?

Initial Treatment Focus on game “Core” action

Initial Treatment Make this easy for a player to do

Initial Treatment Make this enjoyable for a player

Initial Treatment “Easy to Learn, but hard to Master”

Initial Treatment Overall, focus on the “playground” or the environment that the “core action” can be done in

Environment Use the environment to promote the “fun” aspects of the core action

Environment Design the environment to add challenge to the core action

Environment Design the environment to inspire growth of new abilities in the core action

Multi-player How can you play with friends? Competitive, Co-op

UX Mock-up Mock-up the “flow” of User Experience of the game

UX Mock-up Mock-up the User Interface Screens

UX Mock-up Mock-up the game play screens

UX Demo Create an animated/interactive demo of the “flow” of User Experience of the game

UX Demo Focus on conveying how “fun” the user experience will be. (music game)

Programming for Artists How I started learning how to program

Programming for Artists Modding existing games – just changing object characteristics

Programming for Artists Use an existing engine/game – that has “game scripting” capabilities

Programming for Artists Add new weapon : new art & additional functionality to a base weapon

Programming for Artists An example of weapon mods (southpark)

Programming for Artists Add new vehicle - new art and additional functionality to a base vehicle

Programming for Artists An Example Vehicle Mod (mechforce)

Programming for Artists Add new character - new art and additional functionality to a base character

Programming for Artists An example character mod (Turok2)

Programming for Artists Find forums and message boards and sample code repositories to learn how to use and modify game code.

Programming for Artists Learning programming by making a “text editor” is not fun or motivating

Programming for Artists Learning programming in the context of a game is more exciting and motivating

Programming for Artists See direct result of your new knowledge – important to motivate you further

Programming for Artists This was good because it kept me focused on learning specific programming skills

Programming for Artists Next: Started programming whole games by using existing game code as a base

Programming for Artists I made a basketball game in Quake

Programming for Artists Finally – Program a game from scratch using an SDK:

Programming for Artists I used DirectX to create games (Railworld)

Programming for Artists Today, there are many ways that artists can learn how to program. Flash Actionscript/Paper vision Unreal script Apple IOS OpenGL OGRE DirectX Torque Game Engine

Programming for Artists Some links Flash XNA/DirectX x

Programming for Artists Some links IOS All Programming Languages

UX Demo Iterate the demo dev with people outside the team – blind play test

UX Demo Qualify your game design – is it fun? Do players “get” what to do? (blacksite iterate)

UX Demo Use this data to discover and grow your game design (blacksite final)

Production Plan With all of this data, you are now ready to create the production plan

Scheduling About scheduling: Never accept an estimate for a task over 1 week – break this down

Scheduling Identify steps of an art task process

Scheduling Estimate a time for each step

Scheduling Add all times to determine total duration. Propose solutions if duration is too long

Ready for Production Once you add in the art and tech design documents, you are ready for production with a pre- production package that is game play qualified.

Conclusions Putting it all together, an artist can create the original concept, create the art, program the demo, and layout the production plan for the project.

Conclusions What you have now is an individual who is optimized to do “Rapid prototyping”

Conclusions Its a skill that can allow the artist to create many different prototypes to the degree that upper management can make very informed decisions…

Conclusions …because they can actually play the demo.

Conclusions Apart from rapid prototyping, an artist has the definite ability to handle developing a pre- production package that can be handed off to a production team.

Conclusions On top of that, because the artist has intimate knowledge about all of the disciplines, he can help to manage and interface the various team members of the production group.

Conclusions …and that should make everybody happy

Further Information. Thank you!