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Archives: Mount Brainiac

12.18.2016

Several years ago I worked on a slew (gaggle, murder?) of games for Sifteo's now defunct cube platform, as mentioned in a previous post.

In 2010, Sifteo contracted me to work on an educational game: Mount Brainiac. Little did I know that it would end up on display in the Museum of Modern Art as part of the "Talk to Me" exhibit, a showcase that examined ways in which humans interact with machines.

The first generation cubes presented hardware limitations such as this palette:

As a result, I had to rely on optical mixing to achieve the colors not represented. Here's some of my favorite artwork from the project.

Cutscenes

Environments

Characters

Attack of the Fan Art

05.20.2016

For those of you who haven't played The Witcher 3, it entails exploring a fantasy world to collect cards for Gwent, a game-in-the-game that features dozens of beautiful illustrations and about thirty seconds of music.

The system relies on artificial scarcity to escalate the tension. For instance, I cannot find the Scorch card anywhere, yet every Tom, Dick, and Gunther has three of them in each deck.

As an added bonus, here's a speed paint I did while playing through Bioshock Infinite several years ago. Both drawings were crafted with PaintTool SAI, which is a fun escape when I tire of Photoshop's notorious brush lag.

I was surprised to learn that eating spaghetti from lavatory garbage bins restores health. I wonder how much those game designers drew from their personal experience.