[Betelgeuze]

[Betelgeuze]

[koshime]

Good stuff matey. Would love to see more. these are good solid steps.

[Betelgeuze]

Thanks Kosh, thats very motivating to hear from someone you look up to! ^^

[Betelgeuze]

This is a concept of the main character of one of the game projects I'm working on in school. She's a 10-years-old deaf girl called Sara, who dreams about a world called Soundscape where she not only hears sound but also controles it by manipulating sound waves.

I didn't intend to make her look realistic, the contours of her face are slighty stylized, I mainly wanted her to look believable.
It's a fictional character, I used no references.


Feedback and constructive criticism is always welcome!

[Betelgeuze]

My first self portrait with a wacom

[Betelgeuze]

Replicating stuff (pictures and existing drawings) is going pretty good but my main frustration atm is that I have a hard time inventing my own stuff. I have a wild imagination but somehow I always have trouble getting it on paper.
So, I decided to make some fast thumbnails of characters. I'll probably be doing this more often from now on to practice and get some interesting shapes to play with.

Any tips?

[Betelgeuze]

[zAnta]

Amazing progress mate! Especially the portraits show really nice working with the values. Did you do them from life or with photo reference?

[Betelgeuze]

Thanks, In most cases I use charcoal drawings as a reference, ometimes its a normal photo

[Betelgeuze]

New try on my character Sara, in a new style (first time I try this)

Still WIP, trying some different hair-styles, feedback would be nice!

[Betelgeuze]

Since I have to do an internship in a game studio later this year I've decided to make a small portfolio, I found a good, free and easy-to-use portfolio system on DeviantArt.
Took me less than an hour to get a portfolio up, now thats nice! ^^

http://kevinhaelterman.daportfolio.com/

Still, Im not sure about the content. I want to show the best of my work so far and some of the things might be lacking, especially if I see what you guys make.
What do you guys think?

[Betelgeuze]

Maybe not real "art" related, more gamedesign related:

When the Playstation Portable got released in Europe in 2005, it was a couple of months behind on the release in the US. The US version of the PSP was hacked pretty fast, enabling PSP owners to run emulators and homebrew games on their PSP. The European version got released with a new firmware (firmware v2.00) where it was not possible to hack the system like the older versions in the US. To make the rest of the world download this new firmware too, they added a new feature to the PSP: a web browser (no flash support). So for most PSP owners outside Europe there was a dilemma: continue to use a hacked firmware to be able to play homebrew games or download the new firmware and get internet access with a web browser. Most stayed with the hacked version because there where already a lot of cool homebrew games and applications available.
In the months after the release of the European PSP hacking this new firmware was big news. You had hacking teams who tried everything; a lot of rumors where going around and in the end there were a lot of frustration too.

So one day I was reading an article about hacking the PSP and I started to wonder; instead of hacking the system, why not use it instead? For me the logic thing to look at was the web browser and that’s why I started thinking if it was possible to make a game in HTML that runs on the PSP web browser.
A basic adventure game looked like the most logic thing to make, but I really wanted to make something that didn’t feel like a glorified website. I wanted to make something that was nothing more than a couple of pages linked together but looked like a game and felt like a game.

I worked on an idea for 2 days and I was pretty happy with the result. It’s a game where you are inside a labyrinth and your goal is to escape. I tried to put as much in it as I could in 2 days ad here are some of the features:
- 2 complete levels
- intro and menu screen (credits, instructions)
- 2 difficulty settings
- complete freedom how you navigate through the labyrinth
- ending conditions with replay option
- basics of interaction with the environment (opening a door)

That’s all done by linking around 200html pages together (5mb) in a certain way, nothing more nothing less. The fun part is that it works on my PSP

What followed next was something I didn’t expect. I had posted this html game on the forums of the biggest Belgian game website Telenet Games (now 9lives.be) and one of the crew members of that website saw it and made it front-page news of the website
Other website started to pick this up and on one of them (pspupdates.com) it got downloaded 5000 times in the first day. That’s not something I expected from a crappy not-so-fun HTML games. I got mixed reactions; most ofcourse where disappointed when they tried it, others congratulated me on being the first to make a homebrew game for the firmware and actually "trying" to make something. There was even a guy who claimed my 'game' bricked his PSP xD

So for those who want to try it:



Escaper.rar


Why do I bring this up?

In a couple of weeks I'll have to start doing research related to games and gamedesign for school, and I have to write a paper about it.

I've been thinking a lot about what I could research, and as a student gamedesign I want to learn something about the basics of gamedesign and what exactly a game is. To do this I came back on this question I asked myself a couple of years ago; "Is it possible to make a game with HTML only?" No JavaScript, PHP, no flash, only basic HTML.
So why do I think this question is interesting? Because it makes you think about what a 'game' is exactly. It brings you back to the absolute basics of gamedesign by giving you a limited amount of things to work with, and it makes you think how you can make a game with something that’s not made for this at all. Most of all its important to have good "artwork" to make it looks like it's a game.

So in this paper I want to address a couple of questions:
How much input can a "player" give in a HTML based game? How complex can you make the "gameplay"? Are there any games to be found that only use HTML? In what fields is a html game usefull? What is a game exactly, and most impoirtantly what is "gameplay"? When working with limited resources how important is artwork to make something feel/look like a game.

[Betelgeuze]

a model from drawing classes (photoshop)

[DerMonkey]

niiice use of the speckle brush! and i really like the reflections arround the nose-eye area.. good use of brushes overall!