Tuesday, 5 January 2010






 
Above are some pieces of concept art produced for Diablo 3, as a fan of the series it is hard for me to be too critical, but I will give it a go nonetheless.

To begin with I would like to give praise for the consistency of style even between artists, and also the fluid, suggestive nature of the brushstrokes. I am always surprised when I see concept art that is immaculately polished, to me that does not make any sense in production. The amount of time spent going in and rendering every single detail could be much better spent producing several concepts which suggest detail in places. Also when it comes to environment painting, I believe lighting and atmosphere are so much more key than painting in every nut and bolt. I feel the artwork presented here embodies that attitude and also gives it a sense of purpose.

On a more critical note I would say some of the pieces released are perhaps a little drab and lacking in vitality, and while the conveying of ideas is very strong, I think more exploration and experimentation would have "freshen" things up a little, however the release of this material is a marketing affair so maybe only pieces that conformed to the style were published.

BitKraft



This is an interesting website I came across, it features the multimedia work of Phillip Glofcheskie, mostly small examples of Actionscript. The games presented are not strictly tutorial/educational nor play centric but somewhere in between. It is an approach to game design that I find quite refreshing. Also what I found was that the "multimedia pieces" were very much integrated into the website through a stylistic cohesion. This is a fairly commonplace thing today in a lot of flash websites, yet it is interesting to note that the site was actually made 6 years ago. Overall I would say this website is a very good representation of what digital games are all about, a seamless partnership between aesthetics and technology.