I’ve been drawing in the evening again as a good way to wind down from the brain rigors of game development all day.  Now don’t get me wrong–I have an absolute blast making games but doing anything that intense for so long can cook you by the end of the day and I need a way to stretch out a little mentally.

I think I’ve been getting pretty cooked because most of my time these past few weeks has been spent learning all about various performance optimizations and graphical rendering methods in an effort to get Flash to run better on the iPhone via CS5 Beta.  I’ve learned a virtual truckload of information though and it will help to improve my games both in the browser on older computers and on mobile devices for sure.  This is information I’ll be sharing in a different post at a later date though.

As another way to wind down I’ve also been watching a good bit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately as a few of my friends have been cranking through episode after episode–season after season.  I watched it back when it had originally aired but it has been fun to see it again years later.  The themes, scenes, and stories have rubbed off on my subconscious though and clearly inspired the above drawing from last night:

This drawing is from a week or two ago.  Just one of those drawings that is stream of conscious style.  You just let the pen flow and move and you try to figure out what you want to draw as you see it.  I find that is the kind of state I like to draw in when I am just trying to relax and day dream a little.

I like to use concept art as an alternative way to think up game design ideas.  Here is a quick illustration I came up with today for a game I am creating.

I have done a few illustrations for this game working through various game mechanics, styles, and ideas.

This is a useful creative tool for me to rapidly try out different concepts and see what they might look like before I even write a single line of code or start creating any game assets.

Creating concept art becomes a way I can immerse myself in the world and atmosphere of the game ahead of time because as I am drawing these illustrations I am imagining the various aspects of the gameplay occurring.  This can even include me making hand gestures and sound effects without me realizing it as I try out the game in my mind’s eye.  As embarrassing as that might sound for some people it has been something I’ve done unashamedly since I first started drawing as a child.  It makes the experience that much more involved and creatively useful for me.

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Just a little drawing I did tonight while I was taking a break from a game project I’m working on.

I’ve been drawing a lot of variant image styles and slice types to use with the new puzzle game I came up with last weekend during the mini LudumDare #7 friendly competition.  I’m trying to explore the potential space of the game mechanic I created since it seems fairly original so far from what I can tell. It was also pretty well received by most people who have played it so far.

As opposed to a lot of the other image puzzles out there this one seems more rare.  I have searched around and I have found jigsaw piece image puzzles, find the difference image puzzles, and spin the 3d object till it matches a silohette type puzzles.  I have not found any slice based image puzzles yet.  I would guess they are out there but who knows?  My searching has yielded nothing so far. Perhaps one reason they are not as popular are they take a lot of work.  For the current version of the puzzle I have to first draw an overall image in Photoshop.  Then I use four more layers to break that image down into different image slices that will eventually interlock to form the original image again.

I am currently exploring all the ways I can vary the styles of the art before moving onto more slices than four.  I have been listing possible image genres as well for helping to inspire various drawings.  So far I have listed things like food, animals, people, places, scenes, machines, and architecture. It is a lot of fun to create these sliced images and then see them come together as people play the puzzle.

Spent the weekend with a friend south of Boston.  Played a pen and paper game that he created that we may turn into a computer game.  The game has to do with cities.  I think driving through Boston and playing that game inspired the following drawing this evening.  I had fun drawing the whole thing with white on black for a change.

Here is a drawing I made of the shack I used to live in.  It was a cozy little cabin on a quiet lake that I helped to renovate in the summer of 2008.  It was only 400 square feet with no running water or bathroom.  That’s right, I had an outhouse.  In this drawing the outhouse is obscured by the shack, but it is back there have no fear!