Life Drawing

Practice with quick sketches and longer poses

Big Budget vs. Indie

Activision

A high end, big budget company; vastly differing from tale of tales in both style of games and commercial appeal. They churn out more games that appeal to a massive audience, the prime example of this being films that have been made into games; the film itself have taking the audience’s attention makes the game interpretation catch their eye by the association that they are already familiar of this; basically easy money.

I imagine that when it came to beta testing for their games it was to a very closed off select group of people; so it wouldn’t have reached a broad opinion on what would be most appealing for the audience, not just in aesthetic sense but the overall quality.

In terms of variety, Activision aren’t exactly adventurous compared to tale of tales, they stick to a safe zone and don’t stray too far. Whereas tale of tales has been very experimental with all of their games, not one has been all that similar to another. Which Is personally what I found most interesting about this company.

Big budget vs. indie

Tale of tales

A small indie company, consisting mostly of collaboration works to produce their games. Very arty, pretentious approach to their games; focusing on the overall style, an interesting concept of storyline and the goal in each game.

For example: The Path. This games appearance, the overall concept of it is a very macabre take on little red riding hood. There are seven sisters, who the player works their way through each of their version of the story; which is essentially, go to your grandmother’s house. However this goal isn’t as simple as the player perceives, just following the path grandma’s house winds you up with a game over; it involves exploration of the forest; more specifically, finding ‘your wolf’ before progressing to grandma’s house 

Compared to Silent Hill 3...

Spyro  compared to SH3

They wanted have a game in full 3D , but the primary focus is interaction with the animations.

Most difficult part was coming up with the concept of the game; what kind of game to do. Craig Stitt, Artist for insomniac games came up with the idea of the game having something to do with dragons; an appealing idea as they can be capable of so much and ‘and they’re cool’

Came up with having a panoramic 3D engine for the playstation 1, this took up a lot of effort considering this was for an early console. Alex Hastings (V.P. Software) was told specifically what to do for the idea, but went a completely different direction which is what the game ended up keeping. He needed to work on seven different renders for the environments, working on different levels of detail. And also created an engine where you could see more detail in closer view, and to be also to still see things in the distance; every transition they tried to do a fade or morph to make it so you didn’t notice this. The sky itself taking up well over 5,000 polygons, which was almost pushing the extent of the playstation back then.

Mini game, the free flying levels were purely down to how the player wanted to take it on to achieve the goal, collecting the objects.

They used the new dual shock controllers to  its extent too, when you charged into object the controllers would vibrate as if your feeling the recoil from the impact.

The soundtrack, Spyro’s voice: Carlos Alazraqui went through an array of different styles of voices just to pick out Spyro’s, from high nasal-y voice to a deeper cooler voice but was found to be too mean, were aiming for a more friendly voice; in the end found on in between the two.