Week 7 - Art Directors

The Art Director sets the standard that everyone on the project is working towards, and works closely with the Art Manager for the project they happen to be working on, as well as the recruiting team to build the best art team they can. Their main focus is to manage the team as a whole, making sure different branches of the project are working along the same lines as each other.

Art Directors are responsible for all of the artist within a project and work directly under the company and are often in close contact with the client for whichever project the team is working on.

In some ways I would say it's one of the most creative roles you could have, as you have to solidify the visions from all the different sections within the project into something tangible.

Obviously to become an Art Director you would need to have good organisation and management skills as well as an open and creative mind. Communication skills would be invaluable in this role, and although this is speculation on my part, I would say that an Art Director would have to be able to keep a cool head in any situation - it is a very powerful title to have and without a cool head a whole project could collapse around one arguement.

As for "How is art direction in Games similar to or different from Film, for example?" I will come back to this question.

Week 6, Gameplay.

"We used to spend so much of our time on game play and today's games seem to
put too much emphasis on graphics and sound. It's the game play that makes a
game fun, sometimes they forget that." ~Larry Kaplan

Game play is a fairly ambiguous term from what I've seen. It describes the whole game experience excluding other means of describing the game such as graphics and sound. It can mean the way in which a gamer can interact with other elements in the game, and how enjoyable the overall experience is/was as a result.

One of the games I find myself playing a lot is Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube. Although it is not my favourite game, I keep coming back to it and getting friends that have never played it to try it out. The storyline is fairly detailed, each new level takes the knowledge from the previous and adds to it. You build up a repetoire of spells and techniques to tackle each enemy, and moving through the game feels like an actual progression that you don’t always find in other games.

The graphics in Eternal Darkness is not what makes it so enjoyable to play, it is the gameplay that makes it stand out from other games - the introduction of a sanity meter that not only messes with your character’s mind, but also the gamer themself.

SPOILER: There is a list of conditions you might find during low sanity can be found at - http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/09/eternal-darkness-sequel-highly.html