Welcome to Week Two. So how do we begin creating a video game world? Well, first of all, we will have to explore other medias. Looking into films, books, paintings, art, movement, your own backyard maybe, and you think that appeals to you that triggers something in your brain. It is really fundamental to look at other art practices when you start creating video games. You don't create from a void, obviously. Video games share many aspects of other arts. They offer a sythesis of multiple practices and they benefit from their various efforts. Although they quite dramatically different from cinema, literature, theater, comic books, they are drawing from all these practices. Then, artists always look at other artists. Fumito Ueda, for example, who is Japanese game designer, creator of Ico and Shadow of Colossus, started as a painter. He studied in a Japanese art school, and was really inspired by an Italian painter who was painting in between the 19th and 20th century, a Neo-Baroque surrealist artist, Giorgio de Chirico. If you look at the European and Japanese cover for Ico and some of de Chirico paintings, you will see immediately that the cover for Ico is a direct homage to de Chirico. And even though de Chirico is really influential for Fumito Ueda, Fumito Ueda also developed his own visual aesthetic, his own visual world, ambiance, and atmosphere. There's always constant appropriation and legacy, this artistic legacy, in term of video game content. Look at the ritual wave. The ritual look. The pixel art in the lo-fi. All these video games that are now contemporary - created with new video game engines - are now modern games, but with old school visual style, that we have actually defined because of limitation that we have now using visual purposes. Well, all this constant reappropriation in video games exists too in the video game format itself. Visual artists work in a broad variety of ways. Someone like Moebius, for example, a French comic book artist, who's a really famous comic book artist and painter, also works in the movie industry and became really influential in some really famous Hollywood movies in the 80s, as well as working in video games. So if you're an artist, and you look at other practices, it's also the case when you work, let's say as a comic book artist. You might also want to expand that and bring it to video game. And obviously the way you do it might be quite tricky. And that's where we're going. Another thing too that may be really important when you start defining your video game world You can look at dance, and other physical art. Sports, the way you move. Think about the sound too, how the game will sound, not just the music. Think about how the world must sound like. Birds in the trees, wind in the meadow, swords clanging, rockets flying. Think about the ambiance, the atmospheric sounds when you're actually just not doing anything in the game at all. The world is still living and moving and advancing maybe. That's the thing. That's the importance of materials, too. Think of textures, consistency. And everything you touch as a play aspect, play object. That's really important to stress that play aspect. Think about everything you can play with outside video games. Look in a real world. Look at all the textures and materials that are surrounding you. Think of that game. A recent game. Tear Away. Tear Away is all about this paper world. Everything in the game seems made of paper, and for a good reason, it's because everything made in that game was done in paper, in real life concrete paper. The fact that the developers made this, it translates perfectly in the game. You can feel that playful aspect of playing with paper when you play the game. All the game play characteristics and content and visual aspects of the game are transparent in that matter. Look at things that have very mundane, repetitive practices around you. Look at what triggers attention in your surroundings. Again, play with everything. Shuffle objects, properties and functions. Change the qualities, that is what video game design is all about in the end.
