Perhaps Slightly Exaggerated

Monday, November 3 2008 - 1:32 AM
by: Tycho

Regardless of the hardware you play it on, the Mirror's Edge demo is a good time investment, provided you are able to retain your lunch.

I've been reading threads this weekend about supposed distinctions between the demos, which is why I introduced this post the way I did. People are always trying to gin up these Goddamned voodoo signifiers in multiplatform content, dangling naked over their systems like some mad haruspex. These creatures are at the ragged edge of my endurance, but they did allow me to use the word haruspex in casual conversation, and so all is forgiven. The next word I'm dying to throw in is "macropterous." If there are any plesiosaurs reading the site, please let me know.

Bill Harris of Dubious Quality posted a meditation on starting into Fallout 3 that might interest you. I've been rolling it around in my head, while there is still time for luxuries like contemplation.

After around twenty-five hours of play, I locked my jaws on Fallout's marquee "main quest" and took it to completion, a course of action I deeply regret. In a game that does what it can to leave you as wide a corridor as possible, it never occurred to me that it could just end after I fiddled with some Goddamned lever. Winning the game was more destructive, in real terms, than the global conflict that inaugurated the setting.

I spent a significant amount of time in Washington D.C. - one must - but the city proper is an incredibly dangerous warren, more dangerous even than Warren G, who is incredibly fucking dangerous. It's twisty and it's hard to know where you're going a lot of the time. For me, the freedom of the expanses to the North and East sold me on the new ownership. If I wasn't expecting Fallout Classic, as I suggested previously, what did I want? In general, I wanted enough points of agreement to say, "We can move forward from here." I got that. And then some.

Aaand, there's my Red Alert 3 download finished. It was fun to think about one thing for twenty consecutive minutes! I'm sure you can see yourselves out...?

(CW)TB out.

(instrumental)

Prince of Persia story book

Monday, November 3 2008 - 10:48 AM
by: Gabe

If you haven't been back there recently, UbiSoft has updated our Prince of Persia story book with a few more pages. I've probably gotten more comments on this project than any other one we've ever done. The majority of them are really positive too which makes me incredibly happy since I was trying something so radically different than what people expect from me. I had a few requests from other Photoshop users asking how I achieved some of the texture effects and I'm more than happy to help.

Here is a detail shot from one of the new pages so you can see what I'm talking about.

Before I go into all the details it's probably worth mentioning that I did record the making of one of the later pages for Ubi. I'm not sure when that will be going live but seeing that might also be helpful.

So I "paint" picture in PS using the brush tool set to airbrush mode with my pressure sensitivity on my Wacom jacked way up. What gives it the texture is literally a texture that I place on a separate layer above the painting. This layer is set to "overlay" which allows you to see through it to the image underneath. As far as what texture to use that's really up to you and I highly recommend playing around with all different kinds. There are lots of free texture sites on the web but it's also easy to go out and take your own photos of things like cement, peeling paint or some rusted metal. The important thing to remember is that the overlay mode will apply the color of the texture to the image below it as well. So if you have some cool red bricks and you lay them over your yellow image it will now be orange. If I want to keep my base color I simply convert the texture to greyscale first.

Hopefully that makes sense.

-Gabe out