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 [http://www.kongregate.com/games/Throwdown/animation-throwdown]. Frank Harmon, one of our senior artists on the team, talks about his artistic background and process while drawing Zoidberg from the show Fu

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 fee

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

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

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