PHOTOS: JAKE ELLIOTT'S GAME TALK

On February 27, 2019, Cardboard Computer co-founder Jake Elliott led a guided tour through the electronic tunnels and nocturnal highways of the magic realist adventure game. Kentucky Route Zero.

Elliott paid special attention to the little detours and dead-end tunnels for a journey into virtual caves. The audience was mesmerized.

NEWS: TAMAS KEMENCZY JOINS THE M.A. PROGRAM IN GAME DESIGN AT IULM UNIVERSITY

We are thrilled to announce that Tamas Kemenczy has joined the M.A. program in Game Design at IULM University. In the 2018-2019 academic year, Jake will teach GAME ART.

Tamas Kemenczy is co-founder and one-third of Cardboard Computer, an award-winning studio known for Kentucky Route Zero, where he does game design, visual art and graphics programming. His visual work on the game has received awards from both IGF and IndieCade, and has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, Victoria & Albert Museum, Museum of Pop Culture (EMP), and The Museum of the Moving Image. His visual art takes an art-historical approach, calling back to early video hardware and computer graphics efforts by artist-programmers. He has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied new media and art games. Read more about his work here.

GAME ART will guide students in developing the visual style for their games. An emphasis will be placed on a practical framework for individuals and small teams, with students approaching art direction and production as artist-programmers, moving laterally between all aspects of the pipeline, from research and outlining, to digital content creation, to shading and procedural graphics. As an introduction to this approach, the course will start with a brief survey of video and computer graphics history and look at how artists and programmers have creatively incorporated the features and limitations of their tools and hardware as parameters of a visual language, or how they have side-stepped them altogether. Students will learn valuable skills in creating authored content, such as using 3D CAD software for modeling, rigging and animation, and 2D software for texturing, typography and UI work. The DCC software we will be using in coursework, Blender and GIMP, are known for their prowess in scripting and students will learn to use these tools programmatically/procedurally as well. Shader programming will also be emphasized in coursework, to exemplify the various alternative and creative ways they can be used to develop a visual style and language beyond photorealism, which is already provided by Unity as a default.