Howard
Dec 5, 2007, 11:43 AM
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/titlesuitcase.jpg
Howard (http://www.astraware.com/company/team/index.php?name=howard): Our new Astraware Casino (http://www.astraware.com/casino) has been a project involving all of the Astraware team, and most of the staff. Alison (http://www.astraware.com/company/team/index.php?name=alison) and Mike (http://www.astraware.com/company/team/index.php?name=mike) both suggested having some kind of rewards system in the game, just like we had in Astraware Solitaire (http://www.astraware.com/all/solitaire) which has been really popular. Mike and I spent a lot of time working through ideas about how our "Trophy Room" feature might work in this game, and share some of our thoughts about what we did.
Mike: The original idea came from my thoughts about what we might do for a title screen as a model of a casino, with an open layout, corinthian columns with neon lights, all that kind of thing. I had an idea about a separate room with "stuff" that you might earn as rewards. That felt like a lot of detail for the title screen (we don't have as much space as I want!) so I was thinking about what else we could do.
Howard: And the rewards system from that?
Mike: A reaction to going from having all of the simple games to drawing it all together into something more coherent. We wanted it to really feel like you were inside something cool, with its own kind of charm. Having something that went across all the games was a thought there.
Howard: I'd originally avoided the idea from the start of the project, because I thought that just the "total money" aspect would suit that purpose. Plus, awards didn't seem to fit as well for Astraware Boardgames as they had for Astraware Solitaire, and I'd felt that Astraware Casino was a bit more like Boardgames in that respect.
Mike: Also, not to underestimate the value of kitsch. The graphics were really looking classy, and somehow we weren't conveying Alison's impressions of the reality that there's a blend of classy and kitsch in real casinos. Somehow adding in some rewards helped to bring it together.
Howard: So the first reward?
Mike: The first suggestion was to get some kind of a special chip you get for winning more. We thought of the idea of having more than just special chips that you could win.
Howard: That made me think of souvenirs you bring home - and before long we were discussing all kinds of random things you might bring home from a holiday at a casino.
Mike: We started off thinking of a hotel suite where you might have these, but that would be quite big to model, and hard to see the detail. The room would be very deep and so you'd struggle to see the detail of objects that were far away. That's always a problem to make work and believable, especially with lower resolutions.
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/sketchelvis.jpg
Howard: The idea of a suitcase - a container - was obvious as soon as Mike suggested that you'd have some objects on your hotel room bed. I thought that an open suitcase that you fill up with your prizes would be just like when you're packing to go home, and putting everything away.
From the idea of a suitcase to hold things, we soon started suggesting things to go in, and that's the point where having the Elvis figurine came about. We thought about having easter egg features attached to some of the prizes, like the Elvis might make a catchprase sound, the chips might make an appropriate rattle or jingle. We didn't do those in the end, but they might happen in the future.
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/elviswipcu.jpg
Mike: The Elvis was the first one I looked at... and was the most fun because he has the element of character. He was quite educational in terms of building him quickly in 3D Studio Max out of the basic primitives (shapes), but I wanted to be able to view from all kinds of different angles, so this was definitely the way to do it. Also when I use Max, I can put on pretty convincing textures and lighting, and then render out for the resolutions we need. There's always a bit of extra work to tidy up in Photoshop too, just to make it a bit easier on the eye. Elvis took quite some time, but after that the other models were a bit faster, each taking just a few hours to create.
Howard: I tried to sketch out my idea for how the suitcase ought to look, how full it should become and things like that, because the developers would want to know as soon as possible how many items there were going to be, and what to award the prizes for. My drawing skills aren't great, but Mike was able to take my couple of lines and quickly came up with a sketch that really carried the idea, as well as giving the idea to have it split into a number of positions where we could try to place the prizes.
Mike: I pretty much reproduced the idea - that's one of the main goals is to get from what's in Howard's head into something visible, where we can really nail it down and get down to some work. I knew we needed a base to start with, and once we had a sketch of the angle of the suitcase, I wanted a reference to work from. Bryan mentioned he had a couple of old battered leather suitcases with brass fittings - these were exactly what Howard had in mind. He brought those in and I got a few good digital camera shots to work from. I tidied up lots of it, but the pattern of the lining still remains in the game now. I had to piece together a lot of bits out of the close-ups, layering in photoshop and adjusting the angles, and drawing in some of the fine details. The final product is a bit neater and more regular than the real suitcases! It has a nice bit of hyper-reality, blending real and generated in quite a nice satisfying way. It helps to blend the drawn from the photographed work in the game together.
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/suitcase9_sketch.jpghttp://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/suitcasephotobuild.jpg
Howard: For the prizes we had quite a brainstorm session with a number of people involved. We had so many suggestions that the poor suitcase would burst if we included them all. All the time, Mike was sketching away ideas. Narrowing down the choices was hard - but we got a number that I'm really happy with.
Mike: It was good that everyone was throwing out ideas - I was just having a scribble when people had ideas and picking out those that stood out to me. Those sketches were never neat, just to give me a way to remember ideas of how I might go about things.
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/bowtie01.jpg
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/cufflinks01.jpg
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/snowglobe01.jpg
Howard: For some of the suggestions, it made sense to think about where they would go within the suitcase. I had an image of a couple of the items in particular places, like the Elvis standing up in a corner, and a bow-tie draped over the side. There was also the shirt...
Mike: This was probably the hardest to get right. Even though it was easy to picture, it had to go in the right place and have some of the smaller items overlapping it. To get it in some kind of scale we had to have some part of it hang outside the case, but something I didn't get right first time was the scale. I had too much of it hanging outside the case so it wasn't recognisable on every resolution, and we had to change it round. Without the context of the sleeves and collar, it looked more like a big red flowery beach towel. That's still OK for Hawaii, but not quite what we were thinking of!
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/sketchshirt.jpg
Howard: I tried to help out with the images, to try to get things explained wo that Mike knew what to aim for. I think my sketches were just enough to give Mike the right idea, but his 3 second sketches were much better than my 1 minute sketches! Ah, the benefit of practise!
Mike: They were good because they gave me just enough to see, and get the right reference for the angle and the types of detail. That's pretty much all I need. I'm much more a visual person, so it helps me much more to have sketches, especially to refer to later. I tend to forget when people list items, so having a sheet in my pad with lots of sketches was perfect.
Howard: Initially we thought of having all of the images drawn and coloured in Photoshop...
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/suitcase9_640640_for640s.jpg
Mike: In hindsight, it turned out to be faster in 3DS Max. It was a good opportunity for me to spend the time to learn how to use Max better, since it wasn't something needed for the in-game graphics. I was able to fix up mistakes more easily. Because they were being rendered, I didn't have a polygon limit, so I was pretty free to create the models in any way I wanted. The "hand drawn" images as placeholders didn't look in the right style, so switching all of them to modelled helped it to look more consistent too. I had the advantage that when something needed to be shown at a different angle, that was easy to do instead of spending hours redrawing. After they'd been rendered, I still touched them up with Photoshop in places, since it is a more powerful tool for getting the look just right.
Howard: We did come up with lots of prize ideas, more than we needed initially. There's a couple of items reserved for adding if we get to add some additional games in, after all, they'd need their own prizes too.
Continued...
Howard (http://www.astraware.com/company/team/index.php?name=howard): Our new Astraware Casino (http://www.astraware.com/casino) has been a project involving all of the Astraware team, and most of the staff. Alison (http://www.astraware.com/company/team/index.php?name=alison) and Mike (http://www.astraware.com/company/team/index.php?name=mike) both suggested having some kind of rewards system in the game, just like we had in Astraware Solitaire (http://www.astraware.com/all/solitaire) which has been really popular. Mike and I spent a lot of time working through ideas about how our "Trophy Room" feature might work in this game, and share some of our thoughts about what we did.
Mike: The original idea came from my thoughts about what we might do for a title screen as a model of a casino, with an open layout, corinthian columns with neon lights, all that kind of thing. I had an idea about a separate room with "stuff" that you might earn as rewards. That felt like a lot of detail for the title screen (we don't have as much space as I want!) so I was thinking about what else we could do.
Howard: And the rewards system from that?
Mike: A reaction to going from having all of the simple games to drawing it all together into something more coherent. We wanted it to really feel like you were inside something cool, with its own kind of charm. Having something that went across all the games was a thought there.
Howard: I'd originally avoided the idea from the start of the project, because I thought that just the "total money" aspect would suit that purpose. Plus, awards didn't seem to fit as well for Astraware Boardgames as they had for Astraware Solitaire, and I'd felt that Astraware Casino was a bit more like Boardgames in that respect.
Mike: Also, not to underestimate the value of kitsch. The graphics were really looking classy, and somehow we weren't conveying Alison's impressions of the reality that there's a blend of classy and kitsch in real casinos. Somehow adding in some rewards helped to bring it together.
Howard: So the first reward?
Mike: The first suggestion was to get some kind of a special chip you get for winning more. We thought of the idea of having more than just special chips that you could win.
Howard: That made me think of souvenirs you bring home - and before long we were discussing all kinds of random things you might bring home from a holiday at a casino.
Mike: We started off thinking of a hotel suite where you might have these, but that would be quite big to model, and hard to see the detail. The room would be very deep and so you'd struggle to see the detail of objects that were far away. That's always a problem to make work and believable, especially with lower resolutions.
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/sketchelvis.jpg
Howard: The idea of a suitcase - a container - was obvious as soon as Mike suggested that you'd have some objects on your hotel room bed. I thought that an open suitcase that you fill up with your prizes would be just like when you're packing to go home, and putting everything away.
From the idea of a suitcase to hold things, we soon started suggesting things to go in, and that's the point where having the Elvis figurine came about. We thought about having easter egg features attached to some of the prizes, like the Elvis might make a catchprase sound, the chips might make an appropriate rattle or jingle. We didn't do those in the end, but they might happen in the future.
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/elviswipcu.jpg
Mike: The Elvis was the first one I looked at... and was the most fun because he has the element of character. He was quite educational in terms of building him quickly in 3D Studio Max out of the basic primitives (shapes), but I wanted to be able to view from all kinds of different angles, so this was definitely the way to do it. Also when I use Max, I can put on pretty convincing textures and lighting, and then render out for the resolutions we need. There's always a bit of extra work to tidy up in Photoshop too, just to make it a bit easier on the eye. Elvis took quite some time, but after that the other models were a bit faster, each taking just a few hours to create.
Howard: I tried to sketch out my idea for how the suitcase ought to look, how full it should become and things like that, because the developers would want to know as soon as possible how many items there were going to be, and what to award the prizes for. My drawing skills aren't great, but Mike was able to take my couple of lines and quickly came up with a sketch that really carried the idea, as well as giving the idea to have it split into a number of positions where we could try to place the prizes.
Mike: I pretty much reproduced the idea - that's one of the main goals is to get from what's in Howard's head into something visible, where we can really nail it down and get down to some work. I knew we needed a base to start with, and once we had a sketch of the angle of the suitcase, I wanted a reference to work from. Bryan mentioned he had a couple of old battered leather suitcases with brass fittings - these were exactly what Howard had in mind. He brought those in and I got a few good digital camera shots to work from. I tidied up lots of it, but the pattern of the lining still remains in the game now. I had to piece together a lot of bits out of the close-ups, layering in photoshop and adjusting the angles, and drawing in some of the fine details. The final product is a bit neater and more regular than the real suitcases! It has a nice bit of hyper-reality, blending real and generated in quite a nice satisfying way. It helps to blend the drawn from the photographed work in the game together.
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/suitcase9_sketch.jpghttp://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/suitcasephotobuild.jpg
Howard: For the prizes we had quite a brainstorm session with a number of people involved. We had so many suggestions that the poor suitcase would burst if we included them all. All the time, Mike was sketching away ideas. Narrowing down the choices was hard - but we got a number that I'm really happy with.
Mike: It was good that everyone was throwing out ideas - I was just having a scribble when people had ideas and picking out those that stood out to me. Those sketches were never neat, just to give me a way to remember ideas of how I might go about things.
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/bowtie01.jpg
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/cufflinks01.jpg
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/snowglobe01.jpg
Howard: For some of the suggestions, it made sense to think about where they would go within the suitcase. I had an image of a couple of the items in particular places, like the Elvis standing up in a corner, and a bow-tie draped over the side. There was also the shirt...
Mike: This was probably the hardest to get right. Even though it was easy to picture, it had to go in the right place and have some of the smaller items overlapping it. To get it in some kind of scale we had to have some part of it hang outside the case, but something I didn't get right first time was the scale. I had too much of it hanging outside the case so it wasn't recognisable on every resolution, and we had to change it round. Without the context of the sleeves and collar, it looked more like a big red flowery beach towel. That's still OK for Hawaii, but not quite what we were thinking of!
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/sketchshirt.jpg
Howard: I tried to help out with the images, to try to get things explained wo that Mike knew what to aim for. I think my sketches were just enough to give Mike the right idea, but his 3 second sketches were much better than my 1 minute sketches! Ah, the benefit of practise!
Mike: They were good because they gave me just enough to see, and get the right reference for the angle and the types of detail. That's pretty much all I need. I'm much more a visual person, so it helps me much more to have sketches, especially to refer to later. I tend to forget when people list items, so having a sheet in my pad with lots of sketches was perfect.
Howard: Initially we thought of having all of the images drawn and coloured in Photoshop...
http://www.astraware.com/images/blog/87/suitcase9_640640_for640s.jpg
Mike: In hindsight, it turned out to be faster in 3DS Max. It was a good opportunity for me to spend the time to learn how to use Max better, since it wasn't something needed for the in-game graphics. I was able to fix up mistakes more easily. Because they were being rendered, I didn't have a polygon limit, so I was pretty free to create the models in any way I wanted. The "hand drawn" images as placeholders didn't look in the right style, so switching all of them to modelled helped it to look more consistent too. I had the advantage that when something needed to be shown at a different angle, that was easy to do instead of spending hours redrawing. After they'd been rendered, I still touched them up with Photoshop in places, since it is a more powerful tool for getting the look just right.
Howard: We did come up with lots of prize ideas, more than we needed initially. There's a couple of items reserved for adding if we get to add some additional games in, after all, they'd need their own prizes too.
Continued...