It is my pleasure to announce that Black Shades, the intense first person shooter that David made many years ago is now available for download on the iPhone for only 99 cents. To download it from the app store click here! Now this action-packed classic can be at your fingertips, anytime anywhere. All the levels and weapons you remember from the original Black Shades are back in Black Shades iPhone.

As many of you already know, Black Shades was David's award-winning entry to the 2002 uDevGames contest. But how did this old classic end up on the iPhone you ask? Henry Kropf, yes the same Henry who helped David port the original Black Shades to windows and is setting up the multiplayer infrastructure for Overgrowth, had a vision at 3AM one morning. After a few short bursts of furious coding, and some new icons created by Aubrey, Black Shades iPhone (BSi) was born.

To view the awesome BSi launch page click here.

Continuing on my series, this week I'll talk about making concepts.

I mentioned the idea of working backwards through a design starting with what you want to accomplish. This is harder for some things than others. For example, with weapons or characters that are going to be a key part of the gameplay, it is important to keep in mind how each part will work with the gameplay systems while keeping everything else in mind too.

Lets say I want to make a new weapon. I want the weapon to fit in with the world and seem believable so I have to ask how does your character earn it in the game? How does it fit in the with the attacks and existing weapons? How was it made and who made it? I like to think about this kind of stuff all the time.

What if you get the weapon by beating a boss character? What if the weapon can break through other attacks, and the weapon can't be disarmed? It would probably be something heavy like a mace or a hammer.

Usually wolves in Overgrowth don't use weapons

Often I will draw only the most simple scribble before I start modeling something. Sometimes it is easier to work out the details in 3D, but for the sake of this blog post I made this sketch. I had the idea of a wolf slave forced to fight in the arena. Wolves refuse to use weapons or technology, but his dog captors send him to battle with his claws tied to a massive club because they find it amusing. It isn't hard to come up with these details once you have the game world fleshed out in your mind.

So looking at this design, we can see why the weapon can't be disarmed, and why it can break through attacks. We can see that the weapon is made from rope, wood and stone from a ruin-- all things you will have seen in the game. The weapon is primitive because it was probably made by the captors of the wolf instead of by an expert weapon smith for battle.

Different steps in drawing

Since concepts are usually drawn, I wanted to take a little bit of time to touch on the art and what tools I use. For years I have been using Photoshop and a tablet for my professional work. If you are learning you don't need anything more than a paper and pencil, but if you feel like you are ready to move on to digital art, having good tools is critical. Right now I am using Adobe Photoshop CS2 and a Wacom Cintiq 12WX for my tablet. I only got the Cintiq recently. before that I had a Wacom Intuos 2 that I bought used.

I could go through each step of what I do, but there are already great tutorials on the internet that explain it better than I can. Also, it is important to remember that you don't really have to draw anything if you already know all the details of what you want to make.

Next week I will start to make the 3D model to put in the game! What do you guys think of this concept?

If you're a professional game designer, it's essential to learn about the basics of every aspect of game development! Every discipline is important, but today I will focus on why it's helpful to understand visual artwork.

Concept Art

Having a working knowledge of 2D concept art can give you much higher-bandwidth communication with artists. For example, Aubrey is an awesome artist, but he can't read my mind; if he draws a character or object that is not compatible with the design I am thinking of, we need to be able to speak the same language in order to change the design and the character and bring them closer together. Sometimes I have ideas or suggestions that can be communicated more efficiently with simple sketches than with words. Here's an example of a 'greenline' drawing I did when Ian Wells was working on the old rabbit model.

Also, drawing reference images is an effective way to make sure that you have looked at and considered every part of the image in detail, which can help come up with ideas for parts of the game design. I was having trouble thinking of interesting ways to make the rabbit characters look different, so I sketched some rabbit faces to get a better idea of how they work:

Production Art

Whether you're making a 2D or 3D game, it's important to familiarize yourself with the artist's pipeline for creating game assets. That way you know what questions to answer. How many polygons should the model be? How big is the texture? Does it need normal maps? Is it seen from all angles? Without an understanding of which questions are important and how to answer them, it is not possible to ensure that the assets are created efficiently.

If you know how the assets are made, you can come up with rough estimates of how long each asset will take, and can more closely match your design's artistic needs to your art team's capabilities. This can help reduce the risk of going over-budget or hiring more artists than you need. Finally, if you understand how assets are usually made, you have the freedom to change the process to make it fit better with your own project.

At Swarthmore, I took a game development class in which we formed small groups and worked on very short game projects. In my group I volunteered to be the artist and sound designer in order to try and expand my skill set. Here is one of the low-poly characters I modeled and animated:

None of my artwork is good enough for real production, but I think it's good enough to allow me to communicate with artists, and to design games that use art assets efficiently! Those are the main reasons I can think of for why game designers should learn to draw. Please let me know if you can think of any other reasons!

Here is what is new in Overgrowth this week...

Please read our fancy FAQ.

As usual, we have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked some stuff, and implemented some new features. Aubrey has created even more art. We have included a number of new models and textures this week.

There is not a whole lot to show this week as Phillip has been hard at work on a lot of under the hood changes necessary for the upcoming animation editor. Combat is on the horizon. :)

Going through our svn code logs the past week, here are a few highlights:

- a few optimizations
- fixed some bugs
- better terrain heightmap simplification
- improved paintbrush tool (auto-places objects for easy plant placing)
- working on new editors
- group scaling improvements

We have been neglecting our fancy new Trac system a little, but it has been really useful. Please keep the reports coming! Also, feel free to submit feature requests in it as well (just make sure to mark them as enhancement).

Thanks as always for all the support! Especially Jo-Shadow who recently sent us a Subway gift card. ;)

Here are some new assets I have been working on. Rocks are surprisingly hard to get right. Small features like cracks or areas where the rock has sheared off have a lot of small details that are kind of tricky. I am planning on doing a few more rock sets, so I still have a chance to improve :)

Modeled after glacial erratics

The way I have organized the texture files, I can change or match the colors of the different rocks very easily. I haven't decided on exactly what colors and textures I would like to use in the final game yet. It depends a lot on the final look of each level, and also how we can use other technology to add details to the rocks. Things like controlled intersections, decals and detail maps will have a big effect on how I use the rocks in a level.

Angular rocks are very common so I made some

I wanted to make a set of statues for some level set-pieces. Level set-pieces are going to be critical for giving each level a unique feel as well as providing visual progression in the game. These are meant to look like they are carved out of existing rock formations.

These statues have had their faces smashed off

Hope you guys like these!