Download the game here! (Windows)

Phew! This weekend I participated in the Ludum Dare game development competition. It’s a competition where you have to create a game completely from scratch by yourself in a weekend. Or 48 hours to be exact, of which I used about a little over half. The competition was extremely demanding. Not only because there’s a ton of stuff that goes even into the simplest of games but because I’m not a very experienced programmer. When I’m programming, it totally feels like I could speak a foreign language but I only know the curse words. I can always get the point across but, for the most part, it’s not very elegant. Luckily my coding weapon of choice, LÖVE, proved to be a good one. It was very accessible for a novice programmer even though I had only installed the framework the day before!

Graphics and music, on the other hand, were pretty easy for me. Business as usual. It was fun doing all those little funky sprites and I even managed to make the music in less than an hour. Overall, I’m extremely pleased in the end product and I learned tons even though I hit a few walls during coding. There’s obviously a great number of flaws in a game like this but the only one that I have regrets of is the skill level. It’s bloody hard! Basically, EVERYTHING in the game kills you. I was aiming for Super Meat Boy or Trials HD style frustration/fun balance but I think the skill ramp is just too damn high and the deaths can be too unfair at times. If the walls would bounce you around when hitting them instead of killing you in a split second, it’d be much better. I tried to hack together pretty simple collisions for the level blocks but it didn’t work out really well so I just went with the simpler and more brutal model instead. Despite all this, the game CAN be fun if you just bear with it. Just be prepared to die a million times!

But hey! It’s a game! That I’ve manage to make completely by myself! In two days!! My previous game programming experience has been limited to one small prototype made in Processing that had maybe one tenth of “stuff” in it compared to this game so this has been a gigantic leap for me.

]]> http://peeba.gfxile.net/2011/08/21/dystopian-future-underground-city-a-game-i-made-this-weekend/feed/ 0 http://peeba.gfxile.net/2011/03/12/font-fun-time/ http://peeba.gfxile.net/2011/03/12/font-fun-time/#comments Sat, 12 Mar 2011 17:37:01 +0000 peeba http://peeba.gfxile.net/?p=754 Lately I’ve been dabbling a little bit with Fontstruct. It’s a nice browser application for building your own fonts by laying blocks on a grid and it’s a perfect match for people like me who might want to fool around a little bit with typefaces without committing to the craft entirely by buying FontLab and sacrificing a basket of fruits on the altar of Helvetica.

Here’s a couple gimmicky fonts I created. You can download & abuse them by visiting my Fontstruct profile.

People seemed to like the first dissection so why not write more? I couldn’t figure out an answer for that question not involving any worm holes and time traveling so I suppose I’m mandated to write another one. If you’re interested in the idea behind the series, go and read the preface to the first dissection although I think it’s safer that I repeat the disclaimer that these are the methods and ideas I happen to work with and these writings are not intended to be technical manuals on how to do stuff. Instead, think of these more like an in-depth “making of” documentary that you might watch solely for its entertainment purpose but where you still might discover something useful. There’s a some sort of primitive fascination in discovering how things are made. Some of the methodology I use I have learned from others and some I have discovered by myself. I believe that all experienced photographers have followed a similar path so pick the stuff that plays with your strengths or eliminates your weaknesses.

Photo Dissection

Intro

I believe I may have skimmed over the appeal of black & white photography a little bit too hastily in the first article. To expand on the topic, I chose this photo because I think it’ll illustrate my some of my points pretty nicely and in addition I can talk about composition some more:

It is a photo I took in 2006 in New York. The place is Central Park at the Great Lawn, facing south towards downtown. So let’s go and pick the picture apart!

On the field and picking the shot

I’m afraid there’s not that much to say about the exciting choices I had to make on the field this time or the hardships I had to suffer through to get the photo. One might say it was a walk in the park. But I won’t since it’s a terrible pun, even on a Youtube comments section -level. Anyways, there we were, walking in the park and BOOM, a field comes up, and BAM BAM, I take two photos.

Of these two, the topmost is more appealing to me. The one on the bottom doesn’t have that many interesting things to look at besides the Manhattan skyline. I usually am a fan of simplicity but this photo does need a little bit more to look at and maybe something that tells more of a story would be cool to have too. And those are provided in the other photo by the two characters clad in red in the corner along with the tree that frames the photo’s left edge.

Come to think of it, maybe I’ll have to take back the earlier “BAM BAM” since it might imply that I did not stop to think of the picture I was taking. I always have some ideas of the composition when I shoot a picture. In fact, I’ve found that I very rarely crop my photos afterwards since the composition I’ve framed behind the viewfinder on the field seems almost always to work best. Which reminded me that I dislike working with cameras that don’t have viewfinders to peer through. The viewfinder blocks you from seeing the rest of the world around the picture frame and lets you really concentrate on the composition and how it works and plays with the frames around it. It also helps keeping the camera more stable since you can keep your arms close to your body and you can even push the camera slightly against your face for an additional stability point.

Okay, back to the pictures in question. There’s a helpful guideline in landscape photography that I applied here: decide if you want to show more of the sky or the ground. Usually, but not always, having a composition where the sky and the ground take up equal space end up having very boring and awkwardly rigid compositions. Now this rule, like all other rules, have a million exceptions. For example, it might work nicely if there is some symmetry between the top and bottom halves of the photo, like for instance a tree sitting on the horizon, casting a shadow directly in front of it. I represent the school of thought where you got to know the rules before you break them. Admittedly, the choice was very easy for me to do here. The Manhattan skyline is a very important and dominant element in the scene and it needs some breathing space around it so it won’t feel cramped.

Composition can be an abstract topic at times. So what would be a better tool to analyze the composition than turning the photorealistic scene into something abstract! A lot of artists do it physically by squinting their eyes, reducing the view in front of them into a two dimensional canvas on which some entity or creature, probably of a malevolent origin, has painted an arrangement of vague shapes that have colors and value. I do pretty much the same thing but mentally. I reduce all the elements into simple shapes and try to appraise how the composition works. Here’s a visual representation I quickly whipped together of what is often going on in my head when trying to judge a composition:

With this kind of approach a number of things become more apparent that might have otherwise slipped under the radar. The city’s skyline is, as far as subject matter goes, the most central element of the picture but looking at this abstract composition it certainly does not seem to be entirely so. It probably is the first thing your eyes look at the picture but at some point they will gravitate towards the bottom left corner where the two characters are standing. But its not their shapes that are grabbing the attention. Instead, the gravity comes from how they are placed in connection to the other elements of the picture. They are the only shapes in the photo that cut the dominating horizon line so if your eyes travel along that line, that’s where they’ll end up. Also, if you are looking at the sky, you might end up following the tree on the left hand side towards the characters.

In other words, the characters are in the intersection of the largest dominating horizontal line and the largest dominating vertical line. The vertical line is less apparent since its shape is more vague and it twists and turns but it clearly travels vertically. Maybe the human mind also has a bias of identifying trees as vertical shapes too? Other things to note are how the two people to the right slightly balance off the two people on the left. Also that the red shirts along with the other points about the composition might just push the picture too far off balance to the left. But let’s get back to this issue in a minute.

The way you simplify scenes in your mind’s eye is probably very different from mine. You might want to try and look at the original photo now and form your own picture to see if there are any differences compared to mine. How detailed is your view? Is your treeline one fell swoop or is it a lumpy line? Do you picture in the clouds or do you regard the gradient in the grass? How do you see the people in the scene and is the tree on the foreground a solid part of the treeline in the back? Is the image in black and white? All of the answers are equally valid. What is important is that do you get some sort of useful data from this without thinking too hard so it’s applicable on the field so that your framing, shooting position, zoom or focus can be adjusted quickly while taking the pictures. I don’t go through the mental picture as analytically on the field as I just wrote, I merely take a gander and decide whether or not it makes for an appealing composition and then adjust if I realize some potential for improvement.

Processing the photo

I have to admit something. I often prefer black and white because it is easy. If we consider a b&w picture, it is essentially just values arranged on a canvas. That’s one dimension of data dropped on a two dimensional plane. As soon as you add hue and saturation on the picture, you’ll have to deal with an extra dimension of data. The arrangement of values have to work together individually but they also have to play along with the colors. As far as composition is regarded, they can easily make the picture less organized. And this picture is a fine example of colors messing it up somehow in my opinion. It’s fine that the composition gently draws the attention towards the two dudes in the corner but once we add in the red color of their shirts, they become too prominent. Red, being a complementary color of green, really pops out from the middle of the grass and the trees. It would probably have been great if there would have been a small blotch of red somewhere towards the right to ease the balance but the lone island of red is just too much to handle without upsetting composition too much. If the shirts were of a more stealthy color, the attention of the viewer would be drawn to the characters only after exploring the skyline and possibly other parts of the picture first instead of being violently grabbed by the crimson mafia and held hostage in the corner of the photo.

I could very well just mute the saturation of the reds or turn them into another color in Photoshop but then there would really be nothing exciting in the colors, bringing me back to the point I presented in the first dissection that if the colors don’t add anything of value to the photo, I usually decide to get rid of them. So let’s do that:

Much better already but I think we could still do more to make the picture more exciting to look at. And herein lies the second point about why I often resort to use black and white. You can manipulate the values of a black and white image much further and much more easily than a color photo. If you decide to increase the contrast in a color photo, the colors can easily oversaturate and color noise from the digital camera sensor can be amplified to intolerable levels. It’s just much harder to produce a natural result if you want to go very far with manipulating the values. In this picture, the sky has clouds but they are almost burned through to nearly clear white. There’s no hope of recovering them with natural colors. But with black and white, I can apply a relatively harsh levels layer to pop up the contrast in them and mask it on the picture and still produce a tolerable result. I also fine tuned the composition by emphasizing the lower left corner by having an overlay layer with a radial gradient that is centered to the two dudes standing on the corner, thus arriving at the final result:

As a side note, if you are at this point sobbing that how perverted photography has become with the invention of Photoshop, I remind you that many of these things have been done for many decades in traditional dark rooms. For example, the striking brightness contrast of Ansel Adams’ landscape photography was largely gained through the techniques of dodging and burning to adjust the brightness selectively in the photo enlargement. Dodge and burn are still a part of Photoshop terminology along with a lot of other tools (possibly most interestingly unsharp mask) that have inherited their names and functionality from old school photography techniques. In fact, to keep my post processing tasteful, I often have the mental guideline where I avoid doing manipulations that would be impossible to replicate with a film camera and dark room.

Conclusion

Even though the photo is not among my best ones, I do like it a lot. It’s one of those photos that are fun to look at and let your eye wander around since there’s lots of nice details and textures on the foliage, buildings and the sky. But the people are what makes this stand apart from what could otherwise be a rather unremarkable touristy photo. The topic of the photo suddenly ceases to be the beautiful park with an almost theater set -like city backdrop and it turns out to be a photo about the people observing said vista. However simple, there is a story in the picture now. The symmetrical poses of the guys on the left and of the couple walking on the right are rewarding details for the viewers to observe. In essence, the topmost reason why I like this photo is because there’s lots to discover in a picture that at first appears to be just a snapshot of the Manhattan skyline. The somewhat unorthodox and imperfect composition that emphasizes the lower left corner manages to be functional and appeals to me personally.

Recently a coworker of mine has been getting back into photography and I’ve spent some time advising him and talking about how I approach photography. When I started breaking down the thought processes and some of the post processing methods I’ve used, I realized it might be worth sharing. In this introspective post, which hopefully turns into a series if enough people find this information valuable, I take one of my photos and explore the thought processes behind it, how I shot the photo “on the field” and what did I do to it afterwards and for what purposes. This is not meant to be a step-by-step guide or a definite best approach to photography: I just try to share my approach to photography which happens to be comfortable for me. It might not work for you at all but at least I hope it will make for some interesting reading and prove that taking good photos is not an entirely random process. Whenever it is irrelevant, I will steer clear from purely technical aspects of photography, especially the gear, since there already is too much technology-wankery going on in the Internet regarding cameras. I also have to elaborate why I think whatever picture I pick is a good photograph and I hope that it is understood that I don’t mean to gloat. That being said, all my views are entirely subjective and it’s cool if you disagree with me on any of the points I present. Photography is hard to judge objectively and in this sense it really isn’t any different from any other forms of art. Which actually might be a pretty valid definition of art, by the way, but let’s not open that can of worms right now. ;)

Since this is first of its kind, I’d love to hear if there’s any feedback regarding the content or presentation of the article! Or if there are any questions that I left unanswered in the text.

Photo Dissection

Intro

For this first issue of Photo Dissection I picked this photo of some elderly people I shot in Shinjuku, Tokyo in 2006 (I shot the photograph, not the people… Just so that we’re clear) mostly for the convenient factor that I used this photo as an example in one of our discussions with the previously mentioned coworker earlier this week. It’s been a while already but I can remember the situation and the process behind this photo pretty clearly:

Of course this is just the final photo I ended up with but there’s a lot of things that you might not realize just by looking at the end result and that process of how I ended up with the final picture is the core of this article. So let’s dive in and see how I ended up with whatever that thing is that I ended up with… is! I love ugly sentences!

On the Field

Here’s the four photos I took on the field in the span of 9 seconds:

What attracted me to take photos of this particular scene was the old man standing still, fiddling around with some papers and a cell phone, and the cool geometric background. BTW, that 9 seconds thing wasn’t my vivid memory talking, it’s from the metadata embedded in the picture files. Anyways, the photos are visibly taken in a hurry, the camera is kinda wobbling around from shot to shot and they are all a bit crooked but I had two elements of composition in mind when shooting the photos that are consistent in all the pictures: the old man on the left hand side and, to counterbalance him in the composition, the vertical wall on the foreground on the right hand side. Composition-wise there is of course a lot more going on in the final picture than just those two elements but I used them as the stationary anchors to pin down an otherwise hectic scene. When there’s a lot of stuff going on and the scene is constantly changing, it’s often good to try to find some very simple elements to hold on to and just shoot as many pictures as you can, only concentrating on those pinpoints and letting the rest of the scene live its life. Afterwards you can see if you get lucky. In this case, I think I got extremely lucky.

Picking the shot

When I later had uploaded the photos on my computer and I was checking out the photos, the third photo jumped immediately at me. I feel I was incredibly lucky with how the people happened to be placed in front of the background. The background is essentially divided into a grid and the people are in every other square. Each of them is under a light fixture on the ceiling. All of the people visible are dressed very much alike, facing the same direction. And the fact that the last person (or actually two people if you look closely!) is almost covered by the wall might sound like a bad thing initially, it actually seems to enhance the picture. To me, the photo almost reads like a series of comic panels. Too bad that the unprocessed photo is pretty uncomfortable to look at somehow. It feels like the photo is under a lot of tension. And it is! Let me explain…

Processing the photo

I love photos that look very geometric and graphical in a sense that there appears to be more order in the way things are laid out than there conceivably should be. Often man made things are very geometric, like the background here is, but when taking a photo of such a scene, the distortion of the lens and perspective do their best to instill some chaos to the photo. Generally, geometric grid-like compositions lead to a very static composition. Diagonal lines indicate a dynamic composition. In the unprocessed version, the uncomfortable combinations of these two factors leads to a composition that feels very restless: the sloppy diagonal lines try to lazily push the composition in motion but the rigid grid lines of the background hold it in place, creating the tense feeling. So the obvious solution to this problem is to fix the sloppiness of the lines and make them adhere more closely to an actual grid laid on top of the image:

Quite a difference, isn’t it? I only rotated the picture a bit to compensate the crooked camera and used Photoshop’s transform tools to mangle the image to get rid of the perspective distortion, just like someone might do on the field with a tilt and shift lens. Now the picture is geometric but much more relaxing to look at. Your eye can wander around the picture without feeling like it is being forcibly pulled to other directions by the crooked lines.

Since I often go for sort of a minimalistic look, I prefer to turn my pictures into black & white if the colors don’t contribute anything meaningful to the photograph. Here I thought they served only to distract the viewer so I made it monochrome. The other adjustments I did were some fairly basic tweaking of the contrast by using curves and levels and I also added a little bit of vignetting to make the composition to be a tiny bit more center oriented and to make the details pop out a bit more in the dark clothes. I think I’ll dig deeper into these aspects of post processing with some other photo of mine. I’m sure I have better examples for these simple techniques. To conclude, here’s the final photo once again:

Conclusion

This photo has slowly become one among my personal favorites. It’s not a spectacular scene or an epic landscape but the way the mundane narration unfolds on front of the comic panel background makes it feel there’s something more profound about the photo than was originally conceived. You could easily draw some parallels to the rhythm of modern life from there if you were to over analyze the photo even a tiny bit. Also the fact that if you only glance over the initially boring looking photo you’ll probably miss most of what’s going on regarding the characters and their placement on the background makes it so much more magical to me. Could it be that I’m the only one who sees the photo this way?

The theme of this year’s fast graphics compo was “you’re holding it wrong” and the time limit was 1h 30min as usual. There were surprisingly few iPhone puns. The conspiracy theorists might wonder if Nokia’s role as a sponsor of the party had an effect on the selection of the theme! Hmm!! ;)

Anyways. In fast graphics, I placed third with my picture called “herp derp” and my “Komrade Kong” in the graphics competition came in second. I think I was the most frequent visitor to the stage this year with my three appearances since Hedelmae’s wild demo placed second as well.

Both of the pictures were drawn in Photoshop. This time around I actually spent pretty much the entirety of the time allowed for the fast graphics compo and I’m pretty pleased with the picture myself. “Komrade Kong” didn’t take much time either. I think it probably took around 8 hours total, spread over two days. I first wanted to draw a King Kong -style gorilla rampaging in a city, throwing a tram and stuff but after a little bit of sketching I realized I wanted to draw a squid as well so I had no other option but to submerge the gorilla! That way I also got rid of the pesky time consuming perspective drawing of the town too. The idea of the military uniform and the cigar was given to me by a friend, no doubt inspired by the great fictional movie in the Simpsons called: “Hail to the Chimp”. Or “Apina Pressana” as the delightful translation goes.

But hey, the Yashica has a lovely ground glass viewfinder that is peered from above and boy does it look trippy. It’s even got these extra guide line helpers in case if you want to use 35mm film instead of the square aspect ratio medium format film. Lots of grime and dust has also polluted the mirror and the glass of the viewfinder. Awesome artifacts. So I built this TtV (“through the viewfinder”) rig on it from cereal box cardboard and some black duct tape to mount my digital camera above the viewfinder. With the help of a few close up filters and a 50mm lens I can now shoot through the viewfinder with relative ease and end up with digital images that ooze of analog sex. Hot.

Here’s a severed male head floating in space that I modeled… But hey, at least it’s not bald this time!

Check them out here:
subdivision02
subdivision03
(Java required)

Here’s a few images I created with a custom .pdf exporting versions of the programs:

I’ll leave it as an excercise for the reader to figure out which picture is which. Oh, and the theme in fast graphics was “over the edge” and time limit was 1h 30min. Talking of fast graphics, here’s another fast graphics thingy (3dsmax + photoshop) I did just for fun a while ago:

I’ve also been playing around with Processing quite a bit lately but in a more educated manner than previously with the help of an excellent book. If you’re a programming noob such as me, I can heartily recommend it. Anyways, maybe I’ll have something cool to show you soonish.

It’s an awesome place.

You can check out all the games where I’ve drawn in but I’ve picked some of my favorite pictures I’ve done this far here. Of course to get the full enjoyment, these should be viewed in context but I think these are kinda neat even as complete non sequiturs.

This took a bit over one hour in Photoshop.

This is a sketch of a poster of a movie me and a couple friends of mine have been dreaming about. The perfect amalgamation of finnish craplore and a few awesome movies. There’s of course Uuno and his pals, Härski Hartikainen and Sörsselssön, and his mighty challengers, Conan the Barbarian and T1000. Naturally, T1000 assumes the form of Uuno’s plough. Beheadings will occur. Maybe someday I’ll paint this picture further but we’ll see…

Ok, first the fast gfx entry. The theme of the compo this year was “size matters not” and there was 1,5h of time to complete the pic. And, surprisingly, there were only a few boobs and penises featured despite the theme.

I had a bit of a technical difficulty when I started making this piece. When I had managed to draw about two lines on the canvas in Photoshop, I managed to break my drinking glass. So the result was that I flooded my keyboard with coke and rum and shards of glass and spilled quite a bit of it on my display, Wacom, speakers, table and of course the rug on the floor too. After one roll of tissues for cleaning the mess up I had to install the cordless keyboard from my living room PC to this one because the cuba libre soaked keyboard refused to produce any letters and symbols. It settled for primitive “beeps” from the PC beeper and needed a bit of time to dry up. After two days, it is working again, however the keys on the lower left hand side of the keyboard are not springy anymore. The just sorta “gloop” their way up. But despite the wasted fifteen minutes, I’m quite happy with the picture myself.

Okay, onto the “regular” graphics entry. I started doing the picture the night before Assembly so I finished the painting process in five hours and five beers. So because I knew right from the beginning that I won’t have time to do anything awesome I decided to go way overboard with it and just have some fun. And fun I had. In fact, this was the most fun piece of graphics I’ve done in a long time, and even though most of the people won’t agree with me, I really liked the outcome. It certainly could’ve used a few more hours for more careful rendering of the lines and fixing the really messed up foreshortening on the arm holding the mace. And of course some more love for the shading. But anyways, somehow now I really feel inspired to do more surrealist and dadaist paintings. Hopefully the feeling lasts since at the moment I’m just too tired. So even though the picture might not be that awesome, the experience of drawing it certainly was.

Gameplaywise, this map is fairly simple. Three victory areas and no fancy terrain features besides difficult terrain (the squares marked with the little triangles). Although the map isn’t really entirely finished, I’m inclined to say it’s close enough. First of all, it completely lacks playtesting but since I have no easy (or more specifically, cheap) way to print this out, I think it’ll have to wait. And the second thing is that I still should check out that everything looks a-ok on 100% zoom and add some fancy detailing on the victory areas to make them stand out visually. But overall, I’m quite happy with this experiment.

Here’s a close-up shot that shows some of the detailing a bit closer:

If someone happens to own an A1 size color laserjet or printing press and is willing to make a print for cheap, drop me a line ;)

These are from last fall and they are shot with my Canon EOS 5D, using mainly the 24-105mm f/4 IS L IIRC but then again: who gives a damn anymore when you own a Holga?