David Hellman

Online magazine The Arc just posted their latest issue, which includes an interview with me. They introduce me as a “genius” but then I spend the interview talking about parrots that say bad words on YouTube. So there you go.

It’s a cool magazine! Last month they interviewed Ian Dallas of The Unfinished Swan. But games are just one section in their rather well-rounded collection of interests, which include film, music, cooking, travel, and more. If you like it, consider subscribing. It’s just a free e-mail list that informs you of new issues.

Lots more changes (click to enlarge). I’ve done a second pass over most of the surface, now. Below you can see the changes isolated from the original draft:

As a reminder, here’s what it looked like before all this:

In some areas, adding detail happens naturally or invisibly, but just as often, the increased detail disrupts whatever was making the image good in its earlier state. For example, the mountainous region on the left side changed a lot between the two versions. I couldn’t just add detail to the rough, because it wasn’t a framework to build on; it was more like a rhythmic notation. I tried to sustain that rhythm while doing a new painting to replace the one disappearing beneath it. Sometimes, though, the rhythm doesn’t translate, and I just have to come up with something different.

Every so often I’ll mess around with the settings to prevent my understanding of an image to cement too much before it’s finished. In this version, I adjusted the Hue by +15 and the Saturation by +20. Even though I like slightly weird colors, somehow this just immediately looks so much more “right.” But sudden changes can dazzle the senses and confuse judgment. A change like this is a pretty significant disruption; color relationships are not equal around the color wheel, so an across-the-board hue shift does not produce a structurally analogous revision. The dynamics change. What do you think of this version? I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet.

Here’s a close-up at 25% scale. I want this to be a lot more detailed, with smaller objects, houses and other things. In a thumbnail like the ones above, the image kind of looks done, but I want it to stand up to much closer scrutiny. You should be able to visit these places, discovering secrets as your eye roams.

The first thing I did after Friday’s draft was open up the good old Hue/Saturation panel and offset the hue about 40 points. That made the green fields yellow, the blue sea green, and the brownish mountains beet red. Kinda weird, but it made it all fresh to my eye again. Besides, it’s good to intercept one’s habits with a bit of chaos sometimes. (Click to enlarge.)

After just a little more painting, and lasso-assisted hue adjustments on specific areas, I was ready to pull the file into Corel Painter 11, where I planned to do the bulk of the work.

I’ve been meaning to learn Corel for a long time. It’s known for producing much more nuanced and convincing imitations of real-world media. I want these maps to look good printed out, potentially even at large sizes, so the fine-grain texture of the image will be important. (It mattered less in Braid, for example, because even the XBOX 360, with its awe-inspiring high definition power, has a forgiving level of pixellation. I drew all the Braid graphics at 2 times the size they would appear in the game, further ensuring through reduction that the unsightly fake-looking texture of Photoshop painting would not offend.)

Here is a detail of an area being worked over in Corel. (Click it for an actual 100% scale version). You can clearly see the difference between the big fuzzy Photoshop brush strokes on the left, and the Corel strokes on the right, which even simulate an impasto effect, with light appearing to reflect off the grooves laid by individual bristles. It’s a little bit odd looking, which might be inevitable, but keep in mind I’m just learning the ins-and-outs of the program.

Unfortunately, Corel is letting me down in some serious ways. First of all, it choked badly on this large file (12000 x 6000 pixels). Photoshop handles it just fine, but in Corel, every time I’d zoom in or out, I’d get the pinwheel thing (OS X’s way of saying “I’m doing everything I can at the moment”). I was even getting it while painting, every four minutes or so. Right in the middle of painting, suddenly my strokes would not be appearing, and then I’d notice the pinwheel spinning, and I’d just watch it spin for 20 seconds, until I was allowed to resume.

Other aspects of the interface are disappointing as well. It just seems like I have to wait a lot, for various things. I’ve recently been working with Adobe Premier and After Effects on some fairly intensive video stuff, but even when those programs were chewing on a lot, I didn’t have the responsiveness problems I’ve been having with Corel. The most baffling was the brush-selection menu, which when I clicked it, simply flickered open and closed again immediately. I tried just hovering over it, but that didn’t work. Then, sometimes I would click it and it would open and everything would be fine. It just seemed buggy.

But fundamentally, not being able to zoom in and out, or even draw continuously for five minutes with interruption, were deal-breakers. I want to learn how to use Corel effectively, but I realized that for this painting, at this stage of the process, it does not appear to be viable. Maybe later, when the map is more defined, I can break the image up into sections and work on them in Corel individually, before re-assembling them in Photoshop.

I am surprised, though, that a professional-grade tool like Corel Painter does not seem capable of handling large files. How are you supposed to create pieces to print?

Advice from Corel veterans would be very welcome!

Back in Photoshop, the work instantly went much faster. Just inventing these little spaces, deciding where the walls go, the shape of a plateau, etc., is so much fun. I realize looking at it now that it looks a little bit barren from one perspective, but I just like thinking about the spaces themselves. There’s already some kind of story happening here, in the relationships of various spaces to each other.

And here is the full image of the current draft. (Click to enlarge.)

It’s always fun for me to look back at drafts along the way to a finished product. I’ve written before about the sometimes winding processes of making Braid or A Lesson Is Learned, but I’ve never shared a work in progress like this. It’s mainly to keep me accountable, and keep me moving. Thank you for your comments and especially for the links to other maps in the same “genre.” They’ve been added to my collection. I need to know what else is out there — partly to be inspired, but more importantly, to ensure that this series eventually departs from anything that’s been done before.