• Rebuild 3: Only 2 days to go and new $40k stretch goal added!

    The Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville Kickstarter campaign made its first stretch goal with no time to lose! I’ll be adding 3 extra faction, including the 1337cREw gamer faction who were so busy having a weekend lan party (do people still have those?) that they didn’t even notice zombies filling the streets outside. Here’s Dara, their leader:

    dara2_550

    And here’s Madison, a bit of a rebellious youth who joins The Pharmacists. Not for the drugs, not for the protection, but because he likes their style:

    rebuild3_madison_550

    Now there’s only 48-ish hours to go, but in a fit of crazed optimism I’ve added another $40k stretch goal: Relationships & Kids. Somewhere in all this killing-the-zombies, saving-humanity, rebuilding-civilization, people surely must be getting on with the daily friendships, feuds and flings that make life worth living.

    The basics are: the more time two survivors spend together, the more they’ll like one another. If something bad happens to a person (for example, they’re ripped to shreds by ravenous undead), their friends will be sad. If one of them is happy, they’ll give a happiness boost to their buds. And if two people really, really like eachother, and happen to be opposite genders, perhaps like magic a baby will appear!

    Kids will stay safe in the fort of course, we’re not going to send them out to crawl into those tight little spaces and scavenge everything their tiny fingers can grab until they’re at least 14. Maybe 13. It’s a tough world out there.

    Okay, on a less depressing note – here’s a sneak peak at one of Sara’s zombies, who she calls Cutter. I think he must have gotten into a face-biting match at some point, but I can’t quite tell if he lost or won.

    rebuild3_cutter_550

  • Rebuild 3: Sketches & a video tour of my office

    rebuild3_masaiThe Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville Kickstarter is ending in just a few days on Halloween!

    rebuild3_rufioI’ve been gearing up for the Alpha test which starts next month. This first build will only be available to backers at the $15 level and above, so you’ve only got a few days left to secure your spot if you haven’t already. After that you’ll still be able to preorder on the official site and get into the beta, which will start sometime next year. The game is due for release around May 2014.

    rebuild3_gustavSara Gross did some live character sketches on Twitch TV last week. It’s so much fun watching her bring Rebuild characters to life. I know they’re just concept art but I’m so thrilled, I want to use them as loading screens or something in the game.

    rebuild3_luddiesAbove is her Masai (nicknamed “Nipple Fist” by watchers) of the Granville Riffs, Young Rufio of St Micheal’s School for Boys, a few interpretations of infamous trader Gustav who also appeared in Rebuild 2, and some ideas for the Luddies. The Luddies are half hippie, half luddite, and make their own clothing out of hemp and goat wool. Sure there’s still plenty on the racks at the local mall, but hand sheared goat wool just feels better.

    UI_ResultsMeanwhile Adam’s been busy on the new buildings. Finally the last scraps of my old art (all the way from Rebuild 1) is being banished from the game, though he’s putting in references to some of it. He’s also taking fan suggestions to heart and re-evaluating the scariness of our zombies. It’s all a work in progress folks!

    People have been asking how I manage to write games while travelling. The key is we aren’t really “travelling” in the sense of running around doing tourist stuff all day. We just move to another country every 2-3 months and live there like the locals do. We really are in a remote island in Panama right now, which is beautiful and wild and, well, kind of boring, so I’m working long hours and getting a lot done. Colin filmed a little walk around tour of the property we’re staying on:

    We’re definitely ready to withstand the zombie apocalypse out here!

  • Rebuild 3: Developing the Art Style

    Hi everyone! I thought it might be fun to take a deeper look into Rebuild’s new art style and why we’ve made some of the decisions we’ve made so far. Just a quick heads up on who I am, My name’s Adam Meyer and I’m the lead artist on Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville (Being Kickstarted now!). So if you love what you’ve seen so far, then thanks! If you don’t? Then tough luck! Haha, seriously though, there have been some concerns raised about the new art direction and it not being as gritty or as realistic as Rebuild 2. Completely valid complaints, but why did we go this route? I’m glad you asked! Here are a few reasons why we went with the more cartoony look that we ultimately settled on. Caution, made up words ahead.

    1. Marketability: I know this one won’t be popular. But the truth is that to get this great game in even more hands, it needed to appeal to more casual users. Okay, now I got the tough one out of the way.

    2. Visibility: Because the game is going to be on mobile phones it ‘s extremely important that you can quickly recognize what you’re looking at. Characters, buildings and interface all needed to have enough exaggeration in them that they would be nice and clear with the limited screen space. Realistic stuff tends to kind of blend together when scaled down.

    3. Usability: At the end of the day, clean vector objects like this take up much less space than their raster cousins. So the game will download/install faster, and the graphics scale easily so they look just as good on different screen sizes.

    4. Consistency: One of the things Sarah expressed as a concern when starting this project was the lack of consistency in Rebuild 2. You had these realistic characters, title screen, and interface. But the map was filled with these very cartoony buildings. So above all, everything had to match. I also felt like there was a lot of humor in the game. Dark humor maybe, but humor non the less. So that was probably my main reason for developing the look the way I did. It just felt to me that it was the style that was most consistent with what Sarah was writing.

    5. Lovability? There are going to be hundreds of survivors in this game and every time you send one out to ransack the local All-Mart, we wanted you to fear for their lives. With this many characters you can imagine how they might all start looking the same if they were realistic. I mean most people have pretty similarly shaped heads.  (I’m not looking at you Jay Leno!) Anyway we didn’t want you to come down with a case of face blindness so we decided to make the characters more iconic so you not only would know who was who, but you’d care about them in the process.

    Now you know the reasons, let’s have some fun and compare apples to oranges. But first, a quick look at a few different rendering styles I tried out on the buildings.

    isometric building art styles

    Here we can see that while most of the game is more cartoony that Rebuild 2, the buildings actually will be grittier and more detailed. Dead bodies, cracks in the buildings, broken windows, and generally more post apocalyptic looking.

    Buildings

    This image really shows how we tried to find a balance in the new character designs. Somewhere between the first game’s stick figures and the second one’s realistic characters. Just for some nostalgic fun you can check out Sarah’s original post about the new art style for Rebuild 2. I noticed alot of the comments in there preferred the originals more cartoony style. Haha. So we’ve come full circle now.

    survivors compare

    Interface comparison. It’s hard to tell in this pic, but the interface blends much better with the map this time around.

    interface compare

    Even though we went a completely different artistic direction for the new game, I’m trying very hard to pull from the prior games. For example, the giant red moon and city in the background found it’s way into the new logo.

    title screen compare

    I hope you’ve enjoyed us pulling the curtain back on Rebuild’s new look. Thanks to everyone for your support!

  • Criticising the Critics

    Yesterday I started to read Tevis Thompson’s piece on Bioshock Infinite and Game Criticism Generally. And, like Tevis’ writing has done before, it made me angry so I tweeted some tweets:

    twitterCritics

    Most of which I stand by. But that middle tweet “Don’t listen to critics, they are trying to make you love what they love” reeks of bullshit to me now. What should we fellow human beings be doing about art if it is not bringing eachother an experience that we will love? Of course everyone should be evangelistic about things they love. That’s a wonderful thing to do.

    I do think that the world of painting and sculpture has been stolen from us by critics though, and here is why:

    fountainI love contemporary art, part of the joy of traveling is that we get to explore contemporary art galleries from Tokyo to Istanbul to Paris to Vancouver but this love of contemporary art has come despite the established art world. For generations and generations painting and sculture was seperated into high art and low art. Low art was pictures of puppy dogs and sunsets, mickey mouse and advertising. High art was often oils, eventually abstract, basically whatever hangs in a museum. The divide was boolean and at the extremes the gulf was great: The Mona Lisa is a masterwork of great value, mickey mouse is common and not very interesting. Duchamp tried to smash down this wall. Pop art took a fire-ax to it. But both ended up being terribly horribly co-opted. Replicas of Duchamp’s Fountain (the original is lost) are displayed in galleries and have value whereas the average toilet urinal is not and does not. So while people have smashed at the divide between high art and low art it still stands, solid and unwavering. Staring any common-man who walks into an art gallery straight in the eyeballs.

    monaLisaAnd this is the damage that the critical divide between “good” and “bad” art does, it stares you in the eyes whenever you walk into a gallery and tells you what you “should” like. What you can admit to liking without having someone more knowlegable than you chuckle at you. You can say you like the Mona Lisa for instance, and Mondrian and 17th century portraiture. Saying you like these will make the people around you nod their heads in a greement. No one will laugh at you, those are some acceptably high-art tastes. But does anyone who hasn’t studied art actually like those things? No. That’s why going to the art gallery is a chore and not a joy. Because the things that you are expected to like are only exciting to people who have poured their entire lives into art. Mondrian was incredibly exciting at the time but now his work has been co-opted and reshaped so much and so many times his original works are boring and stale. It is only if you are educated in what came before and after does the work become interesting so it is only interesting to people who have dedicated themselves to studying painting. Those are the people who decide what is good, who can defend their decisions, and the rest of the world looks to them to decide what to look at when they go to a gallery.

    So people don’t go to the third floor of the Vancouver art gallery where the contemporary art is. They stay on the first floor where the Picassos hang. Never mind that you’ve seen those paintings a million times already, reproduced in ads and movies and magazines and online. Those are the high-status paintings and high-status in the art world is everything.

    whaleBut the stuff on the third floor is amazing! It’s got no history, you’ve never heard of the artist and you’re not sure if it’s even “art” or not but god damn, hanging from the ceiling is a whole whale skeleton made of lawn-chairs! How cool is that!? Lets be honest, anyone can appreciate a giant whale made of lawn-chairs. If that’s too shallow for you then over in the corner there’s work that talks about modern local issues in a way that you can understand without an art education (as long as you’re from BC). It’s a minor miracle this stuff is even here, the Vancouver gallery is particularly good at exhibiting local artists who do work that’s interesting to a crowd with no art-education. On the other hand the MOMA and the SFMOMA are particularly bad at it. They play to what you are supposed to like, artists that critics have all agreed are good and important. But these artists are talking straight over our heads because critics are bored by the stuff we like. That’s not surprising, they’ve spent their whole lives looking at paintings. I don’t think your average art historian would get The Stanley Parable just like I don’t get the Mona Lisa. Insisting that we have the same taste as someone who has spent their whole life engaged with a medium isn’t productive and it’s what keeps people out of art galleries.

    When I read pretty much anything Tevis writes I get mad because his writing oozes a certainty and an authority that I think is slowly building a wall between the Mona Lisa and Lawn-Chair Whales. But I was so wrong to call out all criticism as bad. Critics probably had something to do with getting Brian Jungen’s work into the gallery to begin with. Many games right now have a frightening relationship with race and gender and it’s incredibly valuable to have people pointing that out.

    Realistically games aren’t going to go the way of paintings and sculptures anyway, they are of too much populist interest. More likely we will fall into the casual snobbery of films and music where the wall exists but is more permeable. I just love that right now, among my friends, Angry Birds is a “good” game and so is The Stanley Parable. No one feels the need to call one inherintly “better” than the other. That discussion, along with “is it even a game” and “what is art” isn’t useful and doesn’t need to happen.

     

    p.s. I also think I have some insight into why players are horrible assholes to people who criticise games they like. In a disagreement between the casual enthusiast and the studied critic the enthusiast has almost no way to argue his point. Art is very hard to talk about. Why do I love the whale? I really have no idea, I can not express it in words. I think this helps explain why well written pieces that sharply criticise a popular game are met with angry invectives instead of anything constructive. These players want to express how much and why they love this piece of art but have no idea how to do that so they collapse into hurtful personal attacks in a horrible attempt to defend the thing they love. I studied film a little bit in university so I can express to you very clearly why the structural problems in Game of Thrones make it infuriating for me to watch. But what’s your comeback going to be if you haven’t? “Oh… I like it”. Being able to justify your position has an odd importance in our world, that’s why some art galleries have those rediculous little writeups filled with art-speak and high-minded ideas, because, “Holy shit, that looks cool!” is, for some reason, not enough for us.

    If you do need a greater reason to like the whale: “Brian Jungen’s sculpture ‘Shapeshifter’ makes a statement about cultural hybridity and institutional displays of marine life in aquariums and natural history museums. Jungen, who investigates the intersections and fluid boundaries between Aboriginal and Western cultures, asks us to consider the skeleton of a whale, not an anatomically accurate whale, but a composite influenced by the forms of chairs and by actual whale species. With his choice of material – the ubiquitous monoblock plastic chairs found in discount stores around the world – the artist explores the potential for communication inherent in mass-produced objects in the context of a global economy. Many societies are fascinated by whales and have endowed them with special significance. Aboriginal groups consider the whale to be an animal of great spiritual power, while whales in captivity are popular tourist attractions. The title “Shapeshifter” refers to the spiritual process of transformation from human to animal or vice versa.”

  • Rebuild 3: Announcing the soundtrack!

    I’m super stoked to announce I’ve just signed a licensing deal for the music for Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville! The game’s soundtrack will feature a full hour of music from Rupert Lally and Espen J. Jörgensen – aka No Studio. Here’s a teaser:

    Rupert, a Swiss/English electronic musician & sound designer, and Espen, a Norwegian electronic artist & filmmaker, have been collaborating for the past year and a half on a range of albums. From experimental circuit bending to ambient synthesizer noisescapes, their music has a kind of grungy post-apocalyptic feel to it that drew me in. The Gangs of Deadsville soundtrack will feature tracks from their whole discography including their upcoming final album This is Art:

    I met Espen during his collaboration with Bill Gould, who worked on the Rebuild 2 soundtrack. I wanted something similar for the new game, but with more intensity and rhythm. I’ve been listening to this music for the past month while programming and I think it’s a lot of fun and a great fit for the new game.

    The Kickstarter campaign is reaching its halfway point, and just got fully funded over the weekend. There are some new stretch goals we’re now trying to hit (seasons!!), and I’m going to entice backers to raise their pledges now by adding a $35 reward tier which includes the game’s 1 hour soundtrack. This will ship on November 4 when This is Art comes out.