Ahoy!

Well this is awkward.

If you were to glance down the page at the previous timestamps and wonder aloud "this guy created this blog over two years ago, barely posted in it, and then dropped off the face of the earth! I wonder if he's dead?" then I would completely understand your confusion. And despite appearances I haven't done that exactly. Here? Yes, I've been completely absent in this space. But there is another place you can go to check out my work that I have been keeping up-to-date.

www.devindigitalworks.com

I mainly wanted to post this since it's the link most readily returned by a Google search. For prospective employers, please go there to evaluate my work. Other people are welcome to check it out as well!

I will eventually find a use for this blog, possibly as a sketch dump or something. But anyone trying to view my professional work should follow that link.

Thanks!

MadWorld, Baby!

Hope everyone had a fun (yet responsible) St. Patrick's Day yesterday. A lot of people think St. Patrick's Day should be an official holiday, but I think we'd be better served by making the day after a holiday don't you? Hangover Day... has a nice ring to it.

As promised, this is the blog post where I chronicle my game-playing for the past month to all who care. Which is basically no one, but blogs are a vehicle for narcissistic tendencies to manifest themselves so cut me some slack! I'm just trying to live up to the stereotype.

Most of my game time has been on the DS, mainly for the convenience. After walking away from Final Fantasy IV (we had disagreements on how difficult the final boss of an RPG should be) I picked up Hotel Dusk Room 215. That was a really good game. Apparently I'm into graphic adventure games like this and Professor Layton (sort of) because they marry several awesome priorities, like an emphasis on storytelling, puzzle solving, and competent writing, into one interesting package. The story in Hotel Dusk is very noir, which is also a plus. The puzzles are pretty logical for the most part, all dealing with manipulating everyday objects that you come across to advance the story. You have to be pretty observant to figure out the solutions, and from time to time you'll hit a wall trying to figure out how to proceed. Also noteworthy are the questioning sequences, where the game requires you to correctly grill a suspect for answers to continue. Fail and the game ends. But above all, what's great about Hotel Dusk is that it respects your intelligence. It tells a sophisticated story and never patronizes you with obvious handholding. All of which is aces in my book.

Next up is Retro Game Challenge, also for the DS. Highly recommended. You kind of have to be nostalgic and appreciative of retro 8-bit style games to really "get" this game. It throws you back in time (literally) to the early 80's, where you are forced to complete challenges in fake classic games alongside the childhood version of the host of Game Center CX, a Japanese show. On the bottom screen, a younger version of you sits with the younger version of the host, Arino, while you physically swap cartridges and play games on a fake Famicom system. Periodically, Arino will buy new games and new issues of a fake in-game magazine with fake coverage of tricks and previews of upcoming game releases. The top screen is where you actually play these games. If it all sounds incredibly meta, it's because it is. That's the point though... it isn't just a game collection, but a concentrated nostalgia injection. The games on offer are all really good too, and run the gamut of genres from action, to shooting, to racing, and even role playing.

Lastly (for DS) is The World Ends With You, a strange action game with role playing tendencies. The setup is that your character, Neku, wakes up in an intersection in Shibuya and finds himself involved in a game between human players and what the game calls "Reapers" (I prefer the Japanese term "shinigami" but whatever). He's forced to team up with another human, Shiki, and together they have to survive seven days of the Reaper's game by completing challenges. This is a weird-ass game, let me tell you. I don't have an issue with the premise or anything like that, but it's quickly evident that the mechanics of playing the game are too damn complicated for their own good. Most of what you do is engage in combat with graffiti spirits come to life. Both you and your partner fight the same enemies at the same time: Shiki on the top screen, and Neku on the bottom. Neku equips magic pins that allow you to draw on the touch screen in different ways to set enemies on fire or shock them with electricity. You have to constantly be tapping and moving him around the arena. At the exact same time you need to be playing a matching game on the top screen to allow Shiki to attack enemies and store up symbols to activate co-operative moves. Oh, and there's this glowing green "puck" that jumps back and forth between them to signify momentum or something. And they share the same life bar. It's bewilderingly complex, though you have access to different levels of AI assistance for your partner. There's also a fashion system in the game where you have to buy clothes and wear appropriate brands dependent on what's trendy in a given area. These brands translate to stat bonuses and impairments. Once you're able to juggle all of these things, the underlying game is pretty simple in structure.

There's much more, so you may want to take a brief break before we continue.

Next, I'd like to talk about Dead Space, which I finally got around to playing. Dead Space is an excellent game, expertly contructed and nearly flawless in execution. It perfects the type of third-person survival horror game I wish Resident Evil 5 could be, if for no other reason than the controls work perfectly. You can move while shooting! Imagine that! But the rest of the game is compellingly consistent, from the art style to the change up in gameplay (zero-G in a vacuum is fantastic), to the choice of making every HUD element an in-game solution so there's no way to pause the action. The story is decent but told extremely well, and the evidence of Event Horizon's influence on the game is obvious and ever-present. I only have a couple of complaints. The first is that many times the solution to a puzzle or course of action is less than clear, which leads to many frustrated deaths (since the game always penalizes failure with death). The second is concerning the sequences where you have to deal with an indestructible enemy. I've had to deal with this type of thing in other games, and I have always ALWAYS hated it. No more of this please.

Which brings us to MadWorld for the Wii. I just beat this yesterday, and in the course of doing so realized something I did not expect: this game is short. Really short. Like, I beat it in 3.5 hours short. So take that into consideration when making a purchase. But despite that it's a good game. The Sin City black-and-white cel-shading look works very well, and the violence on offer is satisfying. MadWorld earns every inch of its M rating. This includes all of the frequent F-bombs dropped by the characters and the glorious comentators (who single-handedly elevate this game to a must buy). It's not a serious game; everything about the violence is over-the-top in a thoroughly comedic way and so many elements, from the Black Baron demonstrations, to the mini-games, to the finishing moves, to the running commentary, are intentionally hilarious. The character designs are excellent as well. Over time the limitations of the combo system become apparent, as you'll be racking up points through the course of the game doing the same exact things (stab a man through the neck with a roadsign, pin his arms with a tire, then throw him into a spiked wall) but there are enough variations available within the timed stages to keep things fresh. The boss fights are spectacular. By far this has been the most fun I've had on my Wii since Super Mario Galaxy.

And now I've just started playing Resident Evil 5. It's too early yet to give a final verdict, but at first glance it seems a lot better off than I thought it would be, which is something. You definitely need to play it with a friend, though.

That's it! If you've made it to the end, massive props whoever you are. Thanks for tolerating this bit of self-indulgence. More to follow! In the meantime I should go do some sketches or something productive. Check this space for another update... eventually.

Daylight Saving is Making Me Nocturnal

Why hello there. It's been exactly a month to the day since the last time I posted an update. Fancy that! I have no excuse other than to say that I've been very busy. Busy playing a lot of games, to be quite honest. But I've done other things too! Productive things... like working on my portfolio and putting sample sheets together. Interviewing and applying for work. Collecting unemployment. And so forth.

I've also been attempting to keep up with doing artwork as well, although I made a tactical error while working at BottleRocket in that I did not invest any money into new computer hardware when I had a disposable income. That's biting me in the ass now, as my computer is at least four years old and incapable of running the latest version of Maya or whatever. Also, my tablet at home is still a shitty Graphire that I bought on the cheap long ago. So I haven't been able to do much 3d work lately.

But I have not been idle! I have turned instead to crude implements like pencil and paper. Slumming it, really, as I imagine a caveman must have done. Here is the result:

Did this first set while watching Phantom of the Opera (the 2004 movie).

I believe these were done between matches of Street Fighter IV. You might recognize a couple loose interpretations of Chun Li... the figure between them is Vega.

Done while watching CSI. I kind of like how simple these are.

These are just three examples; I've actually been pretty good with sketching something on a near-daily basis. My buddy Adrian (props brutha!) has been keeping pace with me, and we've been meeting infrequently for sketching sessions... something that I hope will continue. At any rate it's keeping my production up, which in theory means I should have new material to post more frequently. At least, more frequently than once a month (no promises).

That's all for now. I'll need to make another entry soon about the games I've been playing, because there have been some pretty awesome games released recently and I feel the need to talk about them. But in the meantime, an endorsement: buy MadWorld. If you own a Wii, this is a game you must pick up.

Viva la Shantytown

Let me tell you about a little project called Splatterhouse and the ghetto where I made my home.

When I first got hired on to work at BottleRocket back in June 2007, we were only just starting to put together a prototype for Splatterhouse. If you're somehow unfamiliar with the IP, just do a quick search on Gametrailers or something and you'll figure out the gist of what it is.

Ready to continue? Cool. The prototype came together nicely and we were given the green light to begin development on the full game, which began later that fall. And almost immediately, I joined a team of three or so working on the first act of the fourth level... Shantytown.







Now, I DID work on other areas of the game (most of that work doesn't survive in its current form, sadly) but Shantytown became my personal responsibility. It was my albatross, in a way. The environment artists were spread pretty thin across the entire game, so each person was in charge of their own little thing. I got Shantytown.

Shantytown wasn't so much designed as it was assembled. There was never any concept art in the beginning, only style guides, and the level stub was a gray, linear corridor. After the initial month or two, the other people I was working with got moved off to other areas of the game, and it was up to me to take a handful of tiles and build a full-scale level with it. The dictates of the level design were constantly changing and evolving, so I had to be prepared to tear up completed sections and rebuild them on the fly. The whole level was probably rebuilt from scratch at least four or five times. That's how fucked the situation was.







Despite everything, I'm proud of what I was able to accomplish. In addition to assembling the level, I created about half of the smaller repeated shanties and a couple of the larger ones. I also made the majority of the incidental props and items that are continually reused, as well as nearly every unique (non-repeated) element or landmark in the level. But I don't deserve all of the credit. Several people contributed assets and textures (and from time to time, concept art) including Kip Carbone, Jason Touchman, Ed Magasino, Roberto Zavala, Dave Wilkins, and Jeff Merghart.

I lived in that bit of headspace for a year and a half. Now that I'm no longer on the project I'm a little sad to have lost that familiarity.

But only a little.

It's Been a Weird Week

Hello and welcome to the inaugural post of my own little slice of the blogosphere. If you're here, that most likely means you already know who I am, otherwise you probably wouldn't have found me. But if that's not the case, allow me to introduce myself: my name's Devin Larson, and I'm an artist. I work in video games, creating 3d artwork for environments. Or at least I did until a week ago.

I'm based out of San Diego, CA. The first thing you need to know about the development community in San Diego is that this whole recession thing pretty much killed off a lot of the diversity that used to exist here. Concrete Games shut down a while back, High Moon Studios lost about half its staff during the Activision/Vivendi merger last year (including my roommate, who is still looking for work), and a number of smaller studios had to close as well. I worked for BottleRocket Entertainment, which lost its one and only project last Friday when our publisher, Namco Bandai, pulled Splatterhouse from us. It seemed to come out of nowhere, although there were very clear issues on our end from a number of standpoints, none of which I think it politic to get into here. But suffice it to say, everyone knew something was going to happen, just not necessarily that the project was getting pulled at this late date.

So I'm out of a job at the moment. I've spent the last week gathering some assets from the project and taking screenshots, and I've followed up on a couple of job opportunities. This will be an ongoing process in the weeks ahead, which is one of the reasons I've finally caved and created this blog to post work on. However I think it should be said up front that I've never really embraced the "connected" lifestyle, so the likelihood is high that posting will be pretty infrequent. The plan is for this blog to be semi-professional in nature, so some of my day-to-day discoveries and personal obsessions will leak in as well. But all of that is forthcoming... I just wanted to get this introductory post out there.