So, this is my first blog post outside of any specific assignment. In order to practise my writing, I will simply spew out some nonsense about the stuff that has been on my mind lately.
Whiteboxing
Recently, my first team finished our first real project. It didn’t turn out as well as I wanted it to be, but I learned a lot of things. One of those things was the realisation that whiteboxing isn’t something that comes naturally to everyone.
What is whiteboxing? Basically, it’s a process of creating a prototype with only simple shapes and the absence of colour. The person who is creating such a prototype uses the simple shapes for projecting their vision and ideas. But it is also useful if you don’t want to have any specifics about the thing you are prototyping. It leaves you with the freedom to imagine and swap details as you desire.
Why am I talking about this? Because learning and understanding the principle of whiteboxing is vitally important in creating the games. There is also a practical use of this. A white box is a signal for the team “I am a placeholder! There must be something here!”. A desire to have some kind of pictures, a placeholder art if you want to call it that way, is a treacherous thing. It can stay in the prototype for a long time and also send wrong signals about what should actually be in that place (talking from the experience I got during my first game production)
So train your imagination early on to see things where there is nothing but a white box. A white box can be anything you want it to be. As an example, here is an early prototype of Ori and the Blind Forest.
Black Mirror
I recently finished watching Black Mirror series and it was amazing. Here is a short description from Wiki:
Black Mirror is a British science fiction television anthology series created by Charlie Brooker and centred around dark and satirical themes that examine modern society, particularly with regard to the unanticipated consequences of new technologies.
So, I’m not gonna talk about social commentary, society and yada, yada, yada… I just want to admire the design choices of the world created in the series. The amount of thinking that was put into going deeper and deeper into the technological dystopia. And then into making it fit the TV-screen representation. Every episode amazed me in this regards. I definitely recommend watching this series, if you are looking for good execution on technical level, or some thought provoking statements.
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