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Portal: Last Course Artwork

    

It's right about that time again, where I reveal the final results of one of the many projects that I'm working on during my stay at Jacksonville University.

Most people reading this post will have played through a game from Valve Software called "Portal". But for the rest of you here its a very well received puzzle game that secured universally high marks for its intriguing story, excellent puzzles, and funny dialogue. Portal won the 2007 game of the year award from a few different media outlets and is one of my personal favorites.

My task was to create a special edition boxset for Portal, and I had less than a month to do so. Not a lot of time for a lot of work.

 
Overview of the final product.
Click the image to view in full

The scope of the project was rather large for its time frame, luckily there were some pre-existing tools that fans had created (namely Photoshop brushes), but they were of average to poor quality overall and only proved useful in limited scenarios. In the end almost everything was recreated in Adobe Illustrator as a vector image and then colored in Photoshop. The color scheme chosen for this project was based completely off of the "companion cube", an ally in the players quest to make it to the end of the Aperture Science test chambers the puzzle take place in.

Multiple versions of the "Companion Cube" were created.
Click image to view full

Companion Cube "3D Render" version
Companion Cube "Papercraft" version
Companion Cube "Fuzzy Dice" version
Companion Cube "Fuzzy Cube" version

    ABOVE: The "sides" of the cube
Click each side to view full images

The actual physical product varies slightly from the target preview you see above, for one I don't have access to any materials besides what I can find at my local Michaels/Hobby Lobby. I did manage to grab some blurry camera shots of the physical version on my camera before turning it in.

  
Finalized physical product

As you can see the design varies slightly, for one the box itself is not 100% even on every side, as some concessions had to be made in order to have the lid be opened and closed. The sides of this cardboard cube were painted black in order to compensate for the small gaps created by the cardboard not being a true square. I painted the inside of the cube black and placed packing peanuts inside in order to keep everything safe. Before the project was due I was able to sneak in some extra functionality on the final physical product..

 
Greeting card style music chip
These can be purchased from bigdawgsgreetings.

The chip you see above is actually a small audio device that holds up to ten seconds of music/speech. I spent some time trimming Portals main radio theme (click to hear) down to the appropriate length and recorded it on this device. I then attached the audio player to the cube, so that whenever a person opens the box set that colorful chime will play.

    
 Physical shot of the PS3 cover and the soundtrack cover

   

Final version of the PS3 Case front cover
Click image to view in full

    The various versions of the PS3 Box art
Click image to view in full

PS3 Boxart "Midnight Black" version
PS3 Boxart "Fuzzy Dice Colors" version
PS3 Boxart "Fuzzy Dice Colors Alternate" version (Final)
PS3 Boxart "Tin Print" version

Moving on to the Playstation 3 box set you can see that I removed the contents from a game that I currently own in order to give this project a feeling of sincerity. The name "Portal: Last Course" is a riff on the Nvidia partnered demo of Portal Valve Software created titled "Portal: First Slice". This new name kept with the food convention for the games given subtitles while also giving potential customers of this box set a feeling that this is the ultimate version of Portal.

You might have noticed the name "Erik Wolpaw" on the front cover, he was the lead writer on Portal and is one the video game industries best writers (in my humble opinion of course). The dialogue he wrote for Portals script was the main driving force for many editors to give Portal the 2007 game of the year award. And for that I've personally awarded Erik with this small token of appreciation. The signature of course is a forgery, using simple handwritten font called "Maxine" found on Dafont.

The cover itself is based off of vgboxart.com's essence collection, which aims to simplify the box art used in games in hopes of creating professional looking pieces that help the viewer understand the importance of the product to its medium. In Portal's case its importance lies within its writing, short length, and small price tag.

 

What you see above is the insert card (where the instruction manual goes) and the back of the PS3 box art (what you see when you open the case through the plastic casing). Lastly we've got the art for the Blu-Ray disc, big thanks to the video game box art community for the various company logos and for the Playstation 3 Blu-Ray disc template.

Final images for jewel case vary slightly, but this (older) preview is pretty close
Click image to view in full

Jewel Case Front
Jewel Case Inside
Jewel Case Back & Sides
Audio CD Art

Now what you see above is the art for Portal's music CD jewel case and its corresponding art for the CD itself. The idea of the companion cube with a set of Sony headphones is something I've wanted to try for a long time. I originally tried that same concept on my first variation of Tri-Something, a spritecomic site I used to work on before I even knew what Photoshop was, those were the days! Back when recolored Megaman sprites were all you needed to start a spritecomic website...

Fall 2009 Artwork Showcase

Two more to go! I've been hard at work completing my final projects for Jacksonville University and I've decided to share with you guys my favorite pieces of art that I made this semester.

3D Modeling

He's Zero from the Game Boy Advance series Megaman Zero. Probably the hardest GBA games in existence, it is also one of my favorites from that generation.

Zero is the cream of the crop, the hardest most frustrating character I created this semester; and as you would expect he was also the most rewarding to finish. His entire body took roughly two weeks, while it took another two just for his head!

For you modelers out there, he's created with polygons (I used cylinders), and he's completely UV mapped (not texture mapped however, I used a combination of Lamberts and other stock Maya materials to give him the glow effects of his hair and the illusion of the head crystal being see-through.

Now I haven't gotten the opportunity to weight-paint or rig this character yet. If the opportunity arrises I'll complete those two tasks during the winter break.

For reference on this character I used the official Megaman Zero modeling sheet that I found while scurrying around on the internet...

I had to edit this sheet before using it as my reference, but here's the original.

The rest of my 3D modeling work is available on youtube, click here to view a playlist containing the models from this semester.

2D Typographical Art

Illustrator crashed roughly four times while making this image.

This semester I took a course in typographical art, meaning art that is creating solely with letterforms. This piece above is created solely with the letters "V" and "Y", its a fully tileable image that could be used in a wallpaper or as a Christmastime wrapping paper.

While fun, creating this piece was an excercise in fighting against the computers inherent need to crash whenever something CPU intensive was happening. This snowflake tile took roughly 300 objects to make, something that the iMacs that we use in the art labs at Jacksonville University were quick to remind me of.

Still this is my favorite piece of 2D art that I made in that class, As usual I've uploaded the rest of my artwork from that class onto Flickr. Click here to take a quick look.

Game Design For The Mentally Handicapped

Over the last few weeks I've been scouring the web looking for video games design theory based around the concept of designing for the mentally handicapped. Unfortunately my search has turned up empty, it would seem that the mentally handicapped are too small a demographic for any conventional companies to take notice, or that the restrictions on design would be too tough for a team to put the effort. It’s probably a mixture of both.

So why the sudden interest in a subject that seems largely unexplored with a high risk of failure? Turns out one of my computer science classes (project management [CS 365]) is looking for a project to work on for the Spring semester; originally we thought about making an Xbox Live Indie game (Our classroom computers are outfitted with XNA, which makes Indie game development streamlined), but that type of self-indulgent program wouldn't land us any community service credit hours, which are necessary for each student to achieve before graduation.

Now my professor has brought this new concept to the table; design a game for a group of mentally handicapped individuals with various IQ and physical disparities that range from kindergarten levels of intelligence to blindness and autism. Although we would be developing under the aforementioned restrictions we would have full control over everything else in the game design process (although obviously the team would have that anyway when designing an Indie game).

Personally I'm stoked to be working in any development environment, no matter what potential pitfalls there are, simply to practice my development skills. I am worried about the rest of my teammates however; according to my professor they have shown signs of disinterest in this project, and possibly even disdain. Now as any good producer knows running a ship filled with a crew that would rather stay onshore is a suicide mission. Which is why the development team and will be meeting in class tomorrow to discuss our individual feelings on the project and what course of action we should take.

I'll be playing the role of devil’s advocate in tomorrow’s proceedings, trying to open up the teams minds up to the possibilities available to us no matter what way they decide to push forward. Hopefully the team will come to an understanding regardless of our final decision.

Spearheading new website for JU as Project Lead

The start of each semester at Jacksonville University brings with it a unique set of opportunities to develop exciting applications and projects.

This semester I'll be working on the Jacksonville University Graywater Irrigation Initiative as the head of art and website development. Now of course this isn't my usual caveat of video game flavored production but its good practice for FIEA. The teamates that are working with me for this project will be a traditional 2D artist and one other web developer.

And of course I'll be putting my project management skills to good use keeping the team on track to hit our milestones, I might give Microsoft Project a chance for this one and set everything up through that.

Anyone that is in the business of developing websites can tell you that a project of this scope could be completed in just under two weeks with the proper conditions. But since I will only have one hour each week to meet personally with the project staff it's going to be a slow, controlled development cycle instead of the rapid development you would see with a scrum approach.

So for my next scheduled meeting I'll be presenting a basic outline for what needs to be accomplished, by when, how they can be achieved, and potential pitfalls. I'll also get started on some preliminary UI discussion with the other development staff, although I imagine most of the UI will be designed once we've established a proper icon and theme for the project.

More on it as it happens!

Scrum Certification comes to Jacksonville

Scrum flow chart

It's about time northern Florida recieved its very own Scrum master certification! This two day course will be taking place from October 12-13 in the University of Pheonix. It's unfortunant that the cost is so high, ($1,100 per person) since I would be totally stocked to recieve my certification this early into my education.

For those that aren't fluent in producer speak Scrum is a set of ideas on how to properly manage a teams time to stay the most productive. Since most projects have different aspects being developed simutaneously (Agile project management) instead of one step at a time (old-school waterfall approach) there are many opportunities for mistakes to occur when mismanaged. Scrum is a set of techniques that can be applied to any small team effort, where the task at hand is seperated into a sprint that will last two weeks and split again into smaller managable tasks that improve visibility and keep morale high. That coupled daily meetings and weekly retrospectives keep the team on task and on schedule.

I'm sure I'll be taking the Scrum certification sometime down the road, I wish I had the funding to take it this year though!

Anyone else thats interested can find more details through the Winnow Management homepage.

New Site Finished

Now I can finally take a well deserved break from staring at this computer screen, the Tri-Something website has been abandoned, and in its place is www.derrickbarra.com (The site your looking at now). Weeks ago I attempted to make a Blogger hosted website but I found SquareSpace's development system much easier to work with.

I developed this website to be fully compatible with Mobile Web Browsers (it adheres to the 480x320 resolution and uses mostly text. I might tinker with the background in the future but for now I'm satisfied!

Finished Star Trek Enterprise Model

Hey guys, I just finished up the original Star Trek Enterprise model that I've been working on in Maya, its fully rendered and uploaded to youtube, take a look!