Friday, September 25, 2009

Ringling and Arimaa

I'm now about a month into my sophomore year as a Game Art & Design major at Ringling College of Art and Design.

Computer Animation 1 is turning out particularly fun, even though the subject matter of our current modeling project is a boring little stress-relief penguin. I'm glad that he's seen better days; it gives me more opportunity to work on the textures. I'll have pictures up soon.

Game Design 1 is definitely interesting. We are currently working on wave after wave of "mechanic illustrations", where we take the game we chose at the beginning of the semester and, you guessed it, single-out and illustrate specific mechanics.

The game I chose was Arimaa, for several reasons: first, it intrigued me that the game was specifically designed to be extremely difficult for AI. Second, it requires an interesting version of strategy - it is impossible to think ahead very far (only 10 turns in Arimaa already warrants more possible games than there are atoms in the universe) so you are forced to think in abstract terms and goals.

Anyway, here's my first full-color render of Arimaa's Push mechanic (and this also doubles as my first tablet drawing ever! Woot!)


I have a feeling I'm gonna be learning a ton of animal anatomy over this semester.

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