Spending months on optimization only to realize your game still feels slow can be pretty demoralizing. Try as you might, eventually you’ll reach a point where the technical solutions are simply too expensive to justify. What do you do then? Your game still feels slow and players won’t accept it. Luckily you have other options. Let’s talk about elevators Wait, what do elevators have to do with video games? Loads! Trust me, this’ll make sense. Solving the problem of perceived slowness can be tricky, but it helps to think of the problem as a perception issue. There’s a story called “The Elevator Problem” that I first read in a 37signals blog post. Apparently it’s been around for a while, so you may have heard of it. The short version goes like this: A building is receiving complaints that the elevator wait times are too long. They consult a variety of experts who recommend all sorts of expensive and invasive solutions. One suggests installing mirrors next to the elevator doors so people can use the

Unfortunately, we had some issues with the live stream, so the video is choppy, but it gets much better around the 10:15 mark. Please bear with us! This week we're posting a video from a live drawing session we had with one of our artists from our game Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards. Frank Harmon, one of our senior artists on the team, talks about his artistic background and process while drawing Zoidberg from the show Futurama. Frank elaborates on: His preference between Photoshop and Illustrator, and why he uses Illustrator for this project. How to line, color, and shadow a cartoon character like Zoidberg. What "pathfinding" is in Illustrator, and when it is useful. Frank does a self-portrait every year, and unveils a helpful trick in drawing oneself. Frank's advice: If you want your character to be memorable, or recognizable, try to present as much of their character as you can just through their silhouette. It really helps a lot to emotionally invest yourself into the character that you're drawing. It's essentially a self-portrait that

What is “art” and why do I care? I don’t have what you might call an “artistic flare” for writing these, so bear with me. Much of what is said here will be geared towards video games, but it still applies to other forms of art. In my work as Studio Art Director at Ultrabit, I often have to tell artists to change their art to fit the goals of our project. This task creates a level of anxiety and uncertainty for most artists. You’re taking them out of their comfort zone and possibly creating a feeling of being set up for failure. One of the things that artists face today is the uncertainty of whether their art is any good. Since art is subjective, this is even more of a concern. What appeals to some, may look crude to others. How many times have you seen art, whether it be in a gallery or hanging on someone’s wall, and said, “Eww, you call that art?” Artists are often torn by what they are passionate about creating,

One of the easiest ways to help inject some personality into your games is with the typefaces you choose. It’s also one of the easiest ways to either improve or damage the usability of your game. But with a little knowledge you’ll be able to choose the right typeface for you and your game. Stay tuned and see how! The basics you should know Typefaces are deceptively complex things, so let’s run through a few of the basics. First, here’s a look at the aspects of a font: Now, some of these are a bit more esoteric and only of real use when talking to typographers, but others are very important when choosing a typeface. One to take particular note of is the x-height, and I’ll go into its importance more in a later section. Also note the serif; this is what people are referring to when they are talking about sans serif, slab serif and serif typefaces. Examples of each of those can be seen below for comparison: One other piece of information that's

Are you building a next hit and need some help getting your characters feeling right? Many developers often face issues designing proportions of individual characters, and the relationship between these characters and the surrounding environment. Below is an approach you can take. Obviously, if your game doesn't have characters, this post may not be for you (but feel free to stick around, since this may help your next project). The same framework is not limited to humanoid characters and can be applied to anthropomorphic and inanimate objects. Step One: Let's find your tile size Finding the tile size is often a separate task done early in game development. It can be measured in the world units (inches, meters, etc.) or in pixels. If your game currently does not have a tiled grid, you can still create a quick greybox mock and use a tile size relationship for initial object alignment. In my examples I will be using an isometric grid, but the projection type doesn't matter. Questions to ask: What is the smallest object a player will interact with? Is

About a year ago, I gave a talk to a small group of mostly indie and small-studio game developers about how to incorporate the UI process into their games, and one of the pieces of advice I haphazardly slapped on an ending slide was, “Think like a player [when looking at the UI for your game].” Essentially, I was asking developers to remove themselves from the game that they had poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. To the surprise of probably no one, the first question I got was, “How do I do that?” So, how do you do it? Let's say you have a Store for your game, and it's really important because, well, it pays the bills. You want to find out if the button to the Store is easily found. But you had added the button months ago, have play-tested the game every day since then, and now can find it with your eyes closed. How do you go from being the person who knows this game the best, into someone who knows the least? There