Author Archives: A.H.

Project James – Playable Test Demo of a Hand-Drawn 3D Game

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Ok, I’ve had my fun with some blogging, now let’s talk about why I’ve called you all here tonight.

From my previous post, you know that the first major game by Dust Scratch Games will involve 2D hand-drawn characters in 3D space.  That’s right: a hand-drawn 3d game. This isn’t necessarily the first time such a game was made: the JRPG “Time and Eternity” for the PS3 is advertised as the first playable anime, for example. But that game had the animated sprites in a fixed position in front of the camera, giving the impression of a crude first-person game with cartoons pasted on the front. This, among other reasons, was cause to generally poor reviews. Other games that tried hand-drawn images in games were either beautiful 2D games, or suffered for similar reasons of limitations in 3D.

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What’s Wrong With The Gaming Industry?

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Yes, the games industry is in a bit of a rut.

“But Jasper,” you say, “we’re in the midst of a next-gen revolution! Shiny new consoles are being released that are 10-times as powerful as what we were using before! Some of the best games of the generation were released in the last year! Surely these are great times for the games industry, right?”

First off, don’t call me “Surely.” Second, yes the games we’ve gotten in the last few years have been fantastic. If you time-traveled back about a decade ago and showed them “Skyrim” or “Grand Theft Auto V,” they’d wet their pants. But remember that for every good game like these, there are several mediocre ones that somehow get on store shelves, but even those titles are slightly better in quality. And all of these games seem vaguely similar, despite being of different genres. I guess I’m saying after years of gaming, I just don’t feel excited like I used to.

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What’s Wrong With The Animation Industry?

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Yes, the animation industry is in a bit of a rut.

First off, let’s cover the basics. Animation is typically divided into three categories in film: traditional/cel-animation, computer assisted animation, and stop-motion animation.

Traditional animation is like those old Disney movies you remember. “Snow White,” “The Lion King,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Beauty and the Beast”, etc. These were hand-drawn: every frame (as many as 24 per second) had to be hand-made by a team of artists one by one.

Computer assisted animation is typically thought of as 3D animation, although 2D flash also counts (but I’m not counting traditional animation fixed in Photoshop or Post-Processing, as those still require an artist to create every frame). Here, animators don’t have to draw every single frame. Instead, animators draw keyframes as they normally would, but instead of an in-between artist finishing up extra frames for smoother animation, the computer automatically fills in the gaps for an ultra smooth clip. Animators can also use tools to fiddle with 3D models, and typically spend more time adding details and improving visuals. Therefore, it’s actually the easiest and cheapest of the three animation styles, despite the amount of knowledge and experience needed to use the computer software correctly, and that extra time can be afforded to making higher-quality work.

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Scary Halloween!

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During Devil’s Night, I was horrified to find my desktop computer’s hard drive was corrupted somehow, and my operating system wouldn’t load! Or restore! Or reinstall! Yikes! Not to mention, most of my work (including project files this site talks about) was on the thing!Happy Halloween!

Thankfully, after several hours of experimenting, I was able to give in and take out the hard drive, and backup the files onto another laptop. Thank goodness for external hard-drive readers, best $30 I ever spent. I didn’t get any sleep, but at least I’ll sleep well tonight… the night when hundreds of strangers will be knocking at my door asking for free candy… oh well.

To get you in the holiday spirit, here’s an old sketch that I happened to have on the barely usable hard drive. It was a simple art class assignment to sketch a human skeleton, but I looked outside the box and added a little style to make mine unique. Fitting to what Dust Scratch Games stands for, eh? Happy Halloween!

Foreshadowing…

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There haven’t been too many clues yet on what Dust Scratch Games actually does or what they’re working on… until now.

Check out our latest videos on YouTube: experimental footage of 2D characters in 3D space. It’s a hand-drawn 3D game. Cool, right? You gotta check out the videos to see what we’re talking about. These were done as part of a proposed research project in early 2013 (by the sole member of this site) using the Unity 3D game engine. The methods utilized here are similar to older fps (“first-person shooter”) games before 3D modeling was viable, but expanded for third-person gameplay and a freely-rotating camera, and with full HD visuals, of course. The result is completely different from any game that exists today, and is the closest we’ve come to having hand-drawn animation cut into the more popular game genres.

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