#howgamesaremade

[surefootingdev]

Table Flip Games goes University - our “educational” steps

Matt here again. Today am going to talk to you about our educational initiatives and especially our art brief with a local university that we ran last semester in fall 2016.

Here at Table Flip Games we have offered workshops and talks to schools, colleges, and Universities about the work we create. Since forming the company way back in 2014 (wow, that does feel like a long time ago). We have been involved with outreach from the very beginning of the company, partly because part of my job at that time with the University of Derby was to plan and deliver outreach activities to the local schools, college, and community, but also because we think it is important to educate about games and game creation (in a fun and engaging way :-) )

Fast forward to last summer (2016): I spent two weeks with our Character artist Molly Freeman visiting schools to try out our new character creation workshop. In the workshop, we give students the opportunity to come up with several designs for our character costume sets and then see how these costumes can become a reality.  By taking pencil-drawn designs, we show how these become textures that can be applied to our 3D modelled characters.  It was a big success and fun for everybody involved!

We’ve since iterated on this workshop such that it can be delivered to a wide range of ages and abilities: ranging from designing on paper to using our own Photoshop files for designing costumes.  We’ve even roped Tommy in on some occasions to then apply these costumes into Sure Footing and let students play the game using their own designs.

In my current teaching post, I run a module called “Introduction to Game Art”. This module is an introductory course to the 3D modelling software Maya and is delivered to first-year students when they first arrive at university in September.

There are three briefs over the course: The first is to create a piece of Ikea furniture and render in a small diorama. The second brief this year was to concept and modell a cyberpunk prop and the third brief is to work with a local indie company to create some sort of character assets for them.

Last year the students worked with Ghost Town Games to create characters using their art style based off their recent release Overcooked (if you haven’t played it - give it a try, it is so much fun!). So this year it was Table Flip Games’ turn. Tommy was all in until he realised that meant he needed to sit in the feedback sessions as well ;-)

I wanted the students to create cute characters based on the art style of Sure Footing. I left the brief intentionally quite open so the students could think up new characters that would fit into the Sure Footing Universe: this could be either playable characters or background characters we’d see wandering the market street. The only restrictions were that they had only 1000 polys to play with and could not exceed a texture size of 1024x1024.  These restrictions are largely based on our own workflow, as our emphasis is on working in a minimalist style that will ensure scalability to portable platforms. Other than that, the students could be as creative as they wanted as long as they kept the Sure Footing ‘style’: this largely meant avoiding spheres and cylindrical shapes - we don’t do round here in Computra!

Tommy and I did a mid term feedback session which showed some quite promising designs! One student showed us an alternative to Deletion Dave - a design we loved, even though it’s technically not a playable character or a shop vendor ;-)

Check out some of the cool work the students did!

Emily Prichard  Space Steve

Goncalo Dos Santos Deletion Dorothy  

Kateryna Bocharova Christmas Elf

This is just a taste of some of the work that was delivered and congratulations to all the students in the Intro to Game Art class for their hard work.

Like I said earlier, engaging with schools, colleges and the like is really important to us. It’s vital to be able to get an accurate representation of what video game development is like and give young people guidance on how to get started.

If all this talk about games and education and how we bring it together got you interested - drop me an Email to see what workshops, talks and briefs we can offer!