Project Netsuke Art Blog

Somes example of the STORK engine

A dead Mouse in a square house part 1/2 I’m currently spending the most part of my life in the Project Netsuke along with Ali Motisi (blog link). We started working on a new game engine 6 months ago, during which I have been dreaming and thinking with Ali Motisi ( @alimotisi) a new way to “sculpt” a video game, to pull vertices, and to go through the looking glass. The main technical constraint were to use vectors, without any gradient or drawing any line, in order to create the universe of our game. At first, I felt like a dead mouse in a square house! Then, I started to explain Ali, the developer, what my dreaming tool for drawing vertices was. My first aim was to have in mind not the actual drawing task, but the tool itself, to try and imagine to use it, instead. To actually draw with that, in the end (trying to forget the usual Adobe way of thinking...) I really thought that, in order to create a new tool to make a new kind of video game, it was really important to forget about video games, at all. The drawing editor of my dreams had to be: - a tool which would allow me to draw the more natural way possible, ideally using all of my fingers; - a tool without anything that wasn’t useful; - a tool which would allow me to see the result of my drawing, live; - a tool which would use The Cloud so that I would have been able to work and share from everywhere; - a tool which would use the same device than the one the final game would be run on (in this case, the iPad); - a clever tool which would automatically make my drawings better; - a tool which would allow me to do what I wanted with my creations. We worked on different versions of the engine, going back and forth, trying to make it the closest possible to my dreams’ one. At the beginning, drawing with this tactile vectorial tool was like trying to paint with my feet... Working with a developer is not an easy task. The mental schemes are quite different, and it’s hard to explain art through functionalities. But after 6 months of development, I must say that the drawing engine we have created is really amazing, and... it really fit with my expectations! Using your fingers to draw vertices is kind of surprising and open up for you a new way of drawing! It was hard to manage, at the beginning. Using pure color polygons and pulling them and making them all fit well together is not an easy task. But after spending hours with it, I learned to model them instead of drawing them. I am able to use both the iPad and Dropbox and this is allowing me to work wherever I want! Also, creating the whole graphic with an iPad allows me to feel exactly what the player will feel. This tool is really amazing and organic. Now we put our best on the gameplay so that the final game will be as amazing as the tool is! Follow me (@sectordub) and Ali (@alimotisi) on Twitter!