I work on 3D models almost every day. Often I am creating new ones for 3D printing or game assets. Sometimes I am fixing up or prepping ones already created by someone else. I can say with some certainty that there is no right way to create a 3D model. There are techniques that suit certain situations but there is no fundamentally correct way to make a 3D model. None. This is when scores of people authoring hours of tutorials can tell me that I am wrong. They can point out all of the industry professionals that use process Y and how much better and faster and more efficient it is that process X. Complete Rubbish. There is no right way to create a 3D model. There are a lot of wrong ways, I have seen the results of many of them, but there is no right way. I’ve been at this for a long time. Maybe too long. The tools and techniques change, but the end result never really has. If you are creating a model with the intention of animating it there are certain requirements. If you are creating a model to be fed into a cnc system like a milling machine or 3d printer there are other requirements. If the model is for use in an interactive system with controls and physics like a game or simulation there are, again, different requirements. How you build the model, the tools you use, just doesn’t matter. If you are reading this, I didn’t write this for you. I wrote it for me. I just need to remind myself every once in awhile that the tools don’t matter. You can use all of them or none of them and the model that you end up with is the only thing that matters. 

Best Games - Centipede I usually try to steer clear of the classics. Those games that are universally loved. Pillars of the art form. Games like Pac-Man, The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania Symphony of the Night. It’s not that they aren’t up there on the list with the best games. It’s just that those games, the classics, have been discussed so often and dissected so thoroughly that there isn’t a lot of mystery left to them. The whys and hows of their lasting quality is fairly well understood by folks who study games. If I’m going to write about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of games that can be held up as properly wonderful, I may as well choose some that deserve a little extra attention. Centipede is an exception to the rule. Centipede is rightly credited as not only one of the best games of the 80’s but as one of the best videogames of all time. It’s fast, engaging, and beautiful. So why write about it? Why repeat what anyone who follows videogames has read many times before? There is a unique core to the design of Centipede that I don’t think gets talked or written about enough and it deserves praise. Centipede is all about the player. The usual factoids on the design of Centipede center around the choices of Dona Bailey, one of the first women programming arcade games during the formative years of the industry. The vibrant, shifting, pastel colour palette, and the fantastical garden setting are applauded. Centipede is noted for its universal appeal, attracting male and female players equally. Maybe the colors or the rollerball control play some part in the success of Centipede, but I think there is something much more fundamental at play here. Centipede is all about the player. Centipede is, like a lot of the games of its era, an evolution of Space Invaders. You sit at the bottom of the screen and shoot directly up at enemies cascading down. That is the challenge you must overcome. Here is the difference. In Space Invaders and most of the games like it when the enemies reach the bottom of the screen the game is over. You lose. There is a limited amount of time that you are able to play unless you actively assail the enemy. The enemies in Centipede can reach the bottom and they just turn around and start heading back up. Your player character has a limited band that it must stay in near the bottom of the screen but other than that your movement is unrestricted. You can move side to side, up and down, and even on smooth diagonals. Any way you can roll the ball controller, you can move. After it hits the bottom, the centipede will also stay in this band, moving back and forth and stepping up or down with each turn. You don’t have to shoot the centipede. You can dodge forever, never shooting, or you can choose to shoot the mushrooms scattered across the playfield. The game is very difficult and it becomes faster and more difficult as time wears on, but you don’t have to fight. You get to choose when and how you fight. As you play, there are enemies that add new mushrooms to the screen but you can decide which ones you would like to shoot and remove or leave where they are. You can mold the random playfield to your advantage. You decide. Where most of the Space Invaders derivatives test your ability to dismantle orderly columns of enemies before time runs out, Centipede presents chaos and variability that you get to decide how to deal with. You can organize the chaos into manageable groups and lines, or you can let the chaos expand and deal with the oncoming assault on a case by case basis. You can also choose not to shoot, waiting for precisely selected moments to attack. Centipede is one of the best games of all time, but it has less to do with the color palette and more to do with how it treat the player. Playing Centipede, you get to choose what happens next.

When I said that the story was finished before, I lied. I had always intended to have a sort of twilight zone style coda on the story. If you read the semi uplifting ending I had before, that was sort of a fake out. So here is a completed first/second/third draft. I promise next week will be something new.

We have an ending. Is it THE ending. Maybe, maybe not. I haven’t 100% decided. Let me know if you think there should be more. We called it the forest. It was only a few hundred trees along the riverbank. If you stood in just the right spot and looked at just the right angle you could see clear through them - from the stubble field on one side to the ripening durum across the river. Surrounding the forest for as far as you could see was mile upon mile of sun blasted, wind swept prairie. For us this was the forest. By 10 am, the baking heat would be unbearable. The trees might not have been much, but they stood thick enough to provide a little shade. Bing was riding his Kuwahara. Chrome silver with black accents in liquid smooth powder coat. I had a rust spotted CCM bmx frame adorned with a mish mash of parts pulled from dead bikes. Bing’s bike was the envy of all the local kids but I prefered my frankenstein bike. It could hit a jump in just the right way. A smooth launch, a little give on the landings. The Kuwahara had footpegs, better hand brakes, and a brand new chain, but it felt a little too unforgiving. Antagonistic. It confronted the ground rather than rolling over it. Also, Bing was always on it. The sun hadn’t really gotten going yet so the air was still a little cool. Wet streams drifted to the corners of my eyes as my feet spun the pedals. We didn’t talk but I could hear Bing breathing hard off to my left. We hadn’t really discussed it but we both knew where we were headed. Since late spring we had been building a jump in the forest. Greg Stevens had swiped a shovel from his garden shed and left it out there last summer. He had some plan for digging a WW1 trench and camping in it. His shovel caper resulted in a pit about two feet deep and four feet across. He couldn’t even lay in it without crunching up his legs. Greg decided not to bring the shovel back since his dad had blamed the neighbor and bought a new one. Now it was our primary jump construction tool, and the trench was our main excavation point. We would all take turns scooping up some dirt from the trench and adding to the jump. Over a couple of weeks, it had gone from a small bump crowning the edge of a natural ditch, to a loose kicker a couple feet high. We had ridden over the Jump dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but only the center had packed down properly. The rest of the jump was a pile of loose, soft dirt. Hitting it too fast or not dead center could end your run real quick. You might spin off to the side, dump the bike right there, or stop dead and go over the handlebars. Honestly it was hard to tell what might happen, except that it would probably be bad. We would bang on the jump with the shovel, or ride over it slowly, but without some rain to really tamp it down, it was just too scary to hit the jump properly, at full speed. I made it to the edge of the forest where our jump was under construction and locked up my brakes on the loose dirt. I leaned hard, kicking out my back tire, planting my inside foot and sliding to a tripod stop. Bing, right behind me, did the same, but maybe not with quite as much style. I gave the ramp a quick once over to see if any work had been done on it in the past couple of days. Swimming lessons had prevented me from making the ride to work on it but there were about five of us that regularly came out here who also knew where the shovel was stashed. From the landing slope all the way up to the crown the ramp was devastated. It was all deep gouges turning up the soft soil underneath. “If they are gonna ride on it, they should at least stomp it down” Bing griped between winded huffs. I silently agreed and made a sour face. Older kids had been coming out at night with BMXs and an 80cc dirt bike. The BMX tracks weren’t that noticeable but the dirt bike had left the ramp in an unusable state. They might as well have run a rototiller over it. I stepped off my bike and let it fall to the ground in disgust. I had been hoping to take a couple of slow runs and maybe catch a little air before doing any construction work. Bing shoved out his kickstand and stepped off. He rhythmically slammed his hightops into the soft earth while I fumed into the forest to retrieve the shovel.

Is it over? No , of course not, but it is approaching proper short story length. Maybe 1000-1500 more words or so. We called it a forest. Really, it was a few hundred trees along the riverbank. Standing at just the right angle you could see clear through them. From the stubble field on one side to the ripening durum across the river. Surrounding the forest for as far as you could see was mile upon mile of sun blasted, wind swept prairie. A forest then, at least in contrast. By 10 am, the baking heat would be unbearable. The trees might not have been much, but they stood thick enough to provide a little shade. Bing was riding his Kuwahara. Chrome silver with black accents in liquid smooth powder coat. I had a rust spotted CCM bmx frame adorned with a mish mash of parts pulled from dead bikes. Bing’s bike was the envy of all the local kids, but I prefered my frankenstein bike. It could hit a jump in just the right way. A smooth launch, a little give on the landings. The Kuwahara had footpegs, better hand brakes, and a brand new chain, but it felt a little too unforgiving. Antagonistic. It confronted the ground rather than rolling over it. Also, Bing was always on it. The sun hadn’t really gotten going yet, so the air was still a little cool. Wet streams drifted to the corners of my eyes as my feet spun the pedals. We didn’t talk, but I could hear Bing breathing hard off to my left. We hadn’t really discussed it, but we both knew where we were headed. Since late spring we had been building a jump in the forest. Greg Stevens had swiped a shovel from his garden shed and left it out there last summer. He had some plan for digging a WW1 trench and camping in it. His shovel caper resulted in a pit about two feet deep and four feet across. He couldn’t even lay in it without crunching up his legs. Greg decided not to bring the shovel back since his dad had blamed the neighbor and bought a new one. Now it was our primary jump construction tool, and the trench was our main excavation point. We would all take turns scooping up some dirt from the trench and adding to the jump. Over a couple of weeks, it had gone from a small, bump crowning the edge of a natural ditch, to a loose kicker a couple feet high. We had ridden over the Jump dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but only the center had packed down properly. The edges were still loose enough to catch an errant wheel ending your your run really quick. You might spin off to the side, dump the bike right there, or stop dead and go over the handlebars. Honestly it was hard to tell what might happen, except that it would probably be bad. We would bang on the jump with the shovel, or ride over it slowly, but without some rain to really tamp it down, it was just too scary to hit the jump properly, at full speed. I made it to the edge of the forest where our jump was under construction and locked up my brakes on the loose dirt. I leaned hard, kicking out my back tire, planting my inside foot and sliding to a tripod stop. Bing, right behind me, did the same, but maybe not with quite as much style. I gave the ramp a quick once over to see if any work had been done on it in the past couple of days. Swimming lessons had prevented me from coming out and working on it, but there were about five of us that regularly came out here, and also knew where the shovel was stashed. All I saw were deep gouges running up the landing slope of the ramp, turning up all the soft soil underneath. “If they are gonna ride on it, they should at least stomp it down” Bing griped between winded huffs. I silently agreed and made a sour face. Older kids had been coming out at night with BMXs, and an 80cc dirt bike. The BMX tracks weren’t that noticeable, but the dirt bike had left the ramp in an unusable state. They might as well have run a rototiller over it. I stepped off my bike and let it fall to the ground in disgust. I had been hoping to take a couple of slow runs, maybe catch a little air, before doing any construction work. Bing shoved out his kickstand and stepped off. He started stamping his hightops into the soft earth while I fumed into the forest to retrieve the shovel.

It continues. A little at a time, I tap out this story. Maybe someday soon it will be finished, but that day isn’t today, so fair warning; this story is not finished, and if you hate cliffhangers, maybe skip this one.

Continuing what I was working on last week, I have posted the newest revision of this short story. There are some edits and improvements to the start, and another page or so of additional story. It still doesn’t have an ending. Actually it does, but I haven’t written all the stuff between what you see here and the last couple paragraphs, so leaving it hanging makes more dramatic sense. If you wanted to wait until I finish the whole thing to read it, that would probably be a good idea. I’ll just keep posting it this way until it’s all done, which should be in 1 or 2 weeks.

I was going to wait until this was entirely finished, but then I thought “hey, there are no rules here” so this is the first part of a first draft of a story. It doesn’t have a title yet. I’ll post up more parts as I write, edit, and rewrite them. Enjoy.

I’m sure there is a name for people like me. The people who don’t watch movies when they are new, don’t read books when they come out, don’t binge that show the first weekend, and don’t play games in the first month. I could blame it on having kids, but honestly, I was pretty far down this path before they came along. I just like to wait a little. I get excited by trailers and hype pieces like any fan. I search out interviews with creators, and eat up behind the scenes clips. I just don’t buy much, especially games, on the first day. I certainly have in the past. There were games that I bought at retail on launch day. I don’t feel like I really regret any of those purchases, but I know that it probably would have been better to wait. Games aren’t really like a lot of other artistic mediums. There is that quote attributed to da Vinci that goes “art is never finished, only abandoned”. What if your art was not only never finished, but you could dabble on the canvas months or years after it was sold and installed in the customers home. Imagine now that you could make those changes from, and too, anywhere in the world. That art now has the potential to never be finished. People could enjoy that art over and over again as new changes and additions are presented to them. They could even be encouraged to pay for that art again to see more of it. They could be persuaded to subscribe to that art, continually paying and continually receiving. This is where games have diverged from our historical understanding of art. Art as an object or experience that can be bought or sold. Frankly, we haven’t got a damn clue how to promote art like that. We don’t know how to advertise it. We don’t know how to market it. Does the big expensive launch even make sense anymore? I don’t think I’m a unique case. I think that more and more people are waiting and choosing the art they want to engage with when they want to engage with it. Not just when it becomes available. Not when the advertisements are out in full force. The rise of streaming and subscription services isn’t just due to availability. It’s the way people want their art delivered to them. On their own schedule. With games there is an even more practical reason for waiting. Games get better after the initial launch. Bugs get fixed. Features get added. Issues get resolved. This doesn’t happen with music or movies. There is no patch coming to The Beatles Revolver. That album came out, and other than being transferred to new delivery mediums, it remains unchanged. Video Games are sprawling software systems, and most of them currently can communicate over the Internet. They can be modified, and improved over time. This wasn’t always the case in the past, but that is the way it works now. The way that video games work has changed. The way the are advertised and sold should probably change with it. As someone who is endeavoring to make and sell games, maybe it would be best for me if people got revved up for new releases and bought them right when they are put on offer. Maybe that is the best way to make money. There is value in knowing when a ship has sailed. The big marketing push is near its end. Now would be a good time to explore the consistent low level hum. Marketing as gentle reminder. I’m a terrible salesman. I don’t really know how any of this is supposed to work, but I think that games can have a much longer life than they currently enjoy. I think, with my limited ability, extending that life is what I will try to do. Other people wait too. It’s not a matter of telling them to buy now, it’s more about reminding them your game exists when they are ready to make a purchase.

Best Games : 1000 Miglia : Great 1000 Miles Rally and World Rally Championship Design, at it’s best, solves problems. In the early 90s videogames had a lot of problems to solve, most of them technical. Drawing pixel to a screen quickly was tricky enough. Making those pixels look like anything more than digital mud was a rare success. Getting the images on screen to react to input in a satisfying way must have been some form of magic. So, in the early 90s, when faced with the problem of creating an intense rally racing game based on an italian test of human and automotive endurance that had not been run in decades, what do you do? The first thing you do is steal. Drawing a three dimensional track was unattainable on the computer hardware available. The physics routines capable of simulating a convincing car had not been written. Color palettes were limited and animation was limited. Add to that the restrictions of the JAMMA hardware standard that allow game circuit boards to be swapped between similar cabinets, meaning that you might be playing a racing game with buttons and a joystick. Creating a game that evokes the feeling of intense, edge of control racing seems like a tough design problem. Luckily a year previous, the game World Rally Championship was released by a competing studio. Maybe the makers of 1000 Miglia licensed the technology, or maybe they just plain old lifted every gameplay element of World Rally Championship. Whatever the case, they took an idea and ran with it. Both games solve the problem of presenting a slightly canted overhead view of a race by doing the opposite of what conventional wisdom would advise. Rather than pulling the view back to show more of the track, giving the player the opportunity to react to upcoming turns and obstacles, both of these games are very tightly focused on the car and the parts of the track immediately surrounding it. By pushing the view in rather than pulling back, the sense of speed and impending danger is intensified. Of course, restricting the players view of the track would be inexcusable in a racing game, if some other solution wasn’t presented. Both World Rally and 1000 Miglia will briefly flash curving arrows on the screen, like a rally co-driver shouting out upcoming turns and chicanes. Added to that, each leg of the race is only 60 seconds long. For one unblinking, white knuckle minute you have to pay precise attention to upcoming turns, and precisely navigate them, usually by sliding all over the place. What World Rally started 1000 Miglia polishes to a high sheen. Where there were muddy indistinct graphics, they are replaced by sharp, colorful, representations of italian streets and roads where cartoon blurs and speed lines enhance your sense of movement. In place of a generic rally car, 1000 Miglia offers an array of classic supercars from the 1930 to the 1950s. The stock engine noises of World Rally are gone, and instead you will hear the whine and grind of old gearboxes with less than precise tolerances. These cars belch fire and roar from unmuffled exhaust pipes. There is no expectation of traction or modern vehicle handling. Every car in this lineup is a squirrely death box pushed past its limits. This is the sort of fantasy that video games excel at. Maybe the control and mechanics design problems were solved by World Rally, but it what 1000 Miglia that also solved the presentation and immersion problems. Excellent design, from the bottom to the top.

It’s all about the cogs. All of the internal workings. These digital tools that I use must be considered, and employed from the inside out. Like building a table, though you see less of them, it’s most important that the legs are built correctly. The surface can be changed or embellished, but bad legs make for wobbly tables. As someone who is usually preoccupied with how an object in a game or video will ultimately look, having to worry more about the bones and the core construction can sometimes suck. That is, it sucks time away from simply focusing on the external aesthetics. I have heard or read many pieces of advice for artists. There are those who say that you should dedicate yourself completely to one aspect, one field, one avenue of study. If you would like to work on costume design, you shouldn’t distract yourself with the technicalities of animation. If you want to work on illustration, you shouldn’t delve into sculpting. When I receive digital objects or assets, as sometimes happens, created by folks who mainly focused on the external aesthetics, I see a lot of wobbly tables. An awful lot. These are items that obstinately defy improvement or modification. They often won’t even suit whatever purpose they were created for. Similar to a car built with the gas pedal nestled safely under the hood, but with an otherwise spotless interior. Game assets are deviously complex matryoshka dolls of digital information. Texture maps, normal maps, shaders, geometry, collision volumes, skin weights, skeletons, animations, local space, world space, and the reactive and interactive code that drives the whole shambling mess. Without at least a cursory understanding of each of these layers, that beautiful facade will have no place to hang. Start small, start simple, but don’t only focus on presentation. Work from the inside out. Work on the cogs. Well built cogs can wear many faces. 

I’m working on this customisable, action figure, type character. I did a few drawings, worked on a model, then did some more drawings to refine things that weren’t working. You know what, I could write about it, or I could just show you. Have a look here. This sped up video is probably about 50% of the way there. 

Best Games - World Heroes 2 Fighting games are intimidating. Four to six buttons, a dozen or more characters, different systems with split second windows of execution. The hardcore fighting game fan loves this stuff. Knowing how to do a launch a fireball or charge a flash kick is some sort of weird gamer secret handshake. As the years have gone on, each new game has catered to a ravenous audience that demands more secrets, more depth, greater complexity. World Heroes 2 is played with one joystick and Three buttons. Of those three buttons, you only really need to use two. This is the part where I could be expected to write about how approachable this game is. How, in a sea of complicated and intimidating fighting games, this one game is a great on ramp for someone trying to learn how to play fighting games. World Heroes 2 is not that game. It is as dense, nuanced and complex as any other fighting game, but it does all that with two buttons, and the occasional press of a third. World Heroes 2 holds its own in play style and mechanics against the Street Fighters, the Fatal Furies, the Samurai Showdowns, and the Mortal Kombats, but you only need to use two buttons. Not four, not five, not six. Two. Not only that, but World Heroes 2 introduced or refined mechanics not seen in most other fighting games. Throw reversals that predate Dead or Alive. A timed parry that came before Street Fighter 3. A deathmatch mode that has players competing in a tug of war type battle, sharing a single life bar between them. So far as I know, a feature exclusive to World Heroes 2. If World Heroes 2 is just as complicated and impenetrable as other fighting games, then what’s the big deal about it only using two buttons? World Heroes 2 cuts straight to the heart of fighting games. Fighting games are all about timing, spacing, and finding, or forcing, openings in your opponent’s guard. World Heroes 2 drops the finger gymnastics required by most fighting games, and focuses firmly on the real meat of the genre. Playing World Heroes 2 will make you better at fighting games. With the notable exception of DiveKick, I don’t know of any fighting game that is better focused and more aware of what it is. In it’s simplicity, hides the depth of a truly incredible game. One of the best games.