I stumbled across a website recently for one of my favourite
game series of all time.
Of course I'm talking about Crash Bandicoot, it was the
first 3D game I ever played, on the original PS1, and it's always stuck with me
till this very day.
I found a lot of the original concept work for the original PlayStation
games.
The games are bright and colourful, which is the typical
sort of games everyone played as a kid especially in the 90's. It has great
environments as well as character designs. Back in those days (mid 90's)
graphics were very limited, there's no bump and specular maps (and all that
fancy stuff as far as I'm aware) to be found in any of these games (though I think they should go
back and add them now just to see what they'd look like) it was pretty basic
modelling and texturing. The PS1 alongside the N64 back then where the main two
3D games consoles.
What I like is the concept works of these games though, they
are just neat, simple and straight to the point of what they wanted to try and create
within the games themselves.
Videos I've also found include interviews and the making of
the games themselves. The creators sort of explain how they changed the game
engine, instead of making Crash 1.5 (after the first game) and using the same
engine for new levels, they scraped the entire thing and made Crash 2 giving it
different game play, more level of detail using polygons on their models and
basically just expanding the game to fit more in.
They talk about how they were able to animate more things
such as the characters, using the polygons to gain better animations through
their being more space available, having someone texture and people voice
acting etc which they were unable to achieve in the last installment.
Even the racing is something totally different, they talk about how the level design is made
to suit the type of cart racing genre that it is, people are addicted to
finding secrets, shortcuts and how to gain the most height/hang time to make
you go faster.
The art work is great too because shows their intentions of
how they want to build these levels, what they want them to look like and some
of the obstacles/hazards that are in them. One thing that you have to remember
is that all games need difficultly factor and building just a plain boring
track with no hazards wouldn't make it that entertaining to play.
(posted this video before but there's more to talk about)
In Crash Bandicoot 3 they talked about how in previous Crash
games you could see polygons about 70 meters away from where the camera is and
the player is standing, in the new game you can see up to 700 meters which is a
huge improvement and shows how they've developed their game engines as each
game has progressed. When you game a game you are basically making a specific
type of engine that will play the game that you're attempting to create on the
chosen platform/platforms that's intended to be played for, in other words it's
a piece of software made for a machine to run in its own unique way. Talking
about things like perspective etc you can see things in the background of the
game that get bigger and bigger the more you move forward. For example the
castle they talk about, you can see this in the concept art itself.
When they are concepting the levels they start out with prep
sketches, much like we do in out Visual Design studies, they turn this into
line art by picking the best elements of their prep work.
By doing this you can start rendering the work, just the
same as we do with our digital work, you can apply textures, lighting, and use
a colour palette that works well within the environment itself and then turn
that into a day or night setting if you want.
Once you have all
this you can create an overhead view/orthographic view of the level design itself, and use the arrangement
of objects/assets and making the use of space and how much is around you when
playing to fill and populate the game levels. From this you can white box model
and test and interact with the levels making changes etc if need be before
applying the final textures to it.
Another interesting thing about the website I found is that
it tells you the medium of how the art/concept work was made, which I think is
kind of unique, almost all art works you look at don't come with a medium list.
Medium list:
(P&P) Pencil, pen and paper
(Maya) Alias | Wavefront Maya on SGI or NT
(PA) Alias | Wavefront PowerAnimator on SGI
(Acr) Acrylics Paints
(G) Gouache
(P) Painter on NT
(PS) Photoshop on NT, Mac or SGI
(NPS) Naughty Dog's Porprietary Renderer
(SGI) Game Backgrounds grabber from SGI version of Crash Bandicoot
(Oil) Oil Pa
Basically the keys to the symbols that appear next to the images.
Example:
(ND & P&P)
What I like is that it's just simple line work that they
start off with to create these environments and characters etc, they can use
the same drawing/silhouette to make many variations of the characters and
enemies. I did the same thing for my reef character in the first year.
They can then (when they are happy with it) take that to a
texture artist to render and get a final result which obviously again once
happy with it can be made in 3D and again textured and from there obviously
animation happens and coding etc.
One last thing they talk about it how animation and coding
is quite a complex thing to put together and only through persevering they were
able to put together some of the environments and effects that they thought
weren't possible to create on the PS1. Animation and programming isn't my area
but I do remember reading (can't find where) that the creators of the Crash
games did hack the PlayStation to make the graphics better, which is what makes
the game stand out more than any other at the time in my opinion. Which
possibly argues a point that better graphics make a better game, but I don't
believe that for one second. I think that it's the game play, the lovable
characters and the level design that makes it, the graphics (if they are good)
are just an added bonus, which kind of makes it the 'perfect game' almost. I've
talked enough and that is something I want to talk about in another entry.
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