The contamination between art and video games has allowed us to develop a new way of conceiving and creating visual works, in particular new digital tools have changed the way of working in the video game industry. It is therefore important to understand what technological tools artists have and will have at their disposal and how these digital chisels facilitate and facilitate the production of video games.
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“Currently there are different types of instruments. The first major revolution happened with game engines that made video game development accessible because they provided environments, which certainly had to be heavily customized, but which allowed developers faster access, without having to rebuild everything from scratch “. Speaking is Marco Mazzaglia Advisor and Video Game Evangelist in Synesthesia, employed in 34BigThings and Tiny Bull Studios, two important development studios based in Turin.
The game engines Unity 3d o Unreal they are valuable tools, widely used for the development of video games, interactive content, or 3D animations in real time.
Unreal Engine, for example, gave a small development studio like BlueTwelve the opportunity to make a very successful video game like Stray, but also large productions, one of all the TV series The Mandalorian at Disney.
“Then there are other products that are used and have a very low entry threshold such as The Ren’Py Visual Novel Enginewhich allows you to develop visual novels, used to make a game like Doki Doki Literature Club! Also Dreams, on PlayStation 4, by Media Mulecule. A real digital chisel able not only to model subjects and objects, but to give them life within a world in which the user / player, in a simple way, can decide their physics and animations. In this case it is a visual entertainment product that has an entry threshold for its use that is truly within everyone’s reach ”, concludes Mazzaglia.
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Alongside these tools there are also a series of new products, says Mazzaglia: “At the moment the most famous are Midjourney and Dall-E 2, flanked by another ten or so intelligence algorithms which, starting from a sentence, are able to generate more or less artistic images ”.
Using these technologies becomes increasingly simple, their democratization, say the most critics, can make the preparation of the creative completely superfluous: “Lowering the threshold is providing the opportunity to experiment, to understand if that is a possible way to develop your own creativity, your own idea. Then the transition from using a series of digital tools, such as game engines or visual novel generators, or other types of generators, to make a good video game … well I think the road ahead is still long”.
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The same goes for image generators, Mazzaglia continues: “To create an image, or a series of images that are truly impactful, perhaps to be used to present a video game project, a solid artistic preparation is required. Professionals who work in the game industry, with the constant introduction of new digital tools, have not stopped studying, indeed we can say that they study more to keep up to date ”.
Who knows if in the near future it will be imperfection, the dirty, visionary work, to have the added value, concludes Mazzaglia: “Imperfection is that mirror of the artist man who gives and will give character to his creations”.
The use of this set of digital chisels, in the near future, will further lower the production costs of video games, opening up possibilities not only for small development studios, but for individuals, says Mazzaglia: “These technologies will give the possibility of concentrating on intuition, on the idea and this will be a great advantage both in terms of time and resources to allocate ”.
As part of the Biennial Technology, Saturday 12 November at 6 pm at OGR Tech – OGR Torino, Mazzaglia with Davide Di Giannantonio PotenteTech Artist, 3D Artist and then 3D Supervisor, currently working in BLUR, a Studio specialized in Game Cinematics and VFX for important franchises such as Call of Duty, League of Legends, Love Death & Robots e Giacomo Giannella who, after a long career in Milestone, is now Artistic Director and founder of the Streamcolors digital art studio, specialized in real time software development for interactive installations, immersive rooms, metaverses, NFT and VR; they will confront each other in the meeting: Art and video games, the new digital chisels
To accompany this article, we asked a UX designer expert to create some videogame-inspired images with Dall · E 2.