Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - Innovation or just another generic Adventure?

Starbreeze Studios made the decision to try out something new and invented the term "One-Player-Co-Op" with their game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Did they succeed in doing so, though?

Only one of the many gorgeous locations in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Brothers is published by 505 Games and was released for the PC, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 at the third of September 2013. You can say it is an Adventure game, but it definitely is a unique game.

It is called a "One-Player-Co-Op"-Game because you play two characters at the same time on one controller, using the left half of it to control one and the other half to control the other. The riddles the player has to solve are easy at first but get gradually harder the more one progresses in the game, but do not become too hard to be fun. 

The story of the game is that of two brothers who go on a journey to a place where they can find medicine for their dying father. On their way, they need to solve several riddles and earn themselves the help of different fantastical creatures like trolls or giant birds. The way is dangerous and they will face death more than once.

Their story is touching through and through and one can see how much effort has been put into writing a great, emotional story. 

Graphically, the game is not the most impressive. Some of the textures are not well-made and several models could have been done better. Other than those two negatives, the environments are well-built, the atmosphere is spot-on most of the time and characters have a certain personality, which is not only because they were modeled well, but also because of how their animations are made. The art style in general is not the most unique, though. There are trolls, giant birds, giants, big wolfs that hunt the protagonists and other than that there are humans. 

To sum it up, the game is probably one of the most touching stories I have played in a very long time. The gameplay is something new and it is surprising how intuitive it gets after a short while of getting used to it. I definitely recommend the game to everyone and you can get it on steam for 13.99€ or your regional equivalent.

You can find the game's website here.

Art Fundamentals - A book that actually teaches

3DTotal Publishing has always been known for publishing high-quality, sometimes high-price, books for learning different things about digital painting, drawing and art in general, and they have been very successful at what they are doing.

The book's cover, showcasing many different paintings or drawings.

"Art Fundamentals" is one of their books for beginners that want to learn to draw and paint. It covers fundamental topics such as colors, light, composition, perspective and depth, anatomy and displaying emotions on a painting.  It's cover consists of a compilation of paintings and drawings that showcase what one could do when he or she masters the fundamentals of art.

Every page has at least two paintings or drawings as examples of the techniques that are covered and the pictures have a very high quality due to the paper being very thick and good to print on, also making it very hard to be ripped. Of course, the articles being written by game and film artists, the pictures also consist of mainly Fantasy and Sci-Fi pictures.

The many articles in these 272 pages are written by experienced artists from the game and music inudstries such as Gilles Beloeil or Andrei Riabovitchev. The authors all have a very informative writing style and they write their articles in a way that even those with no knowledge at all about art understand everything they explain. The language they all write in is English, because the book is aimed at an international audience and not one country in particular.

Being written only by experienced artists, the credibility of every article in this book is very high and the reader can trust in what they read and also apply it to paintings or drawings of their own, even while still reading it, because the techniques explained are not only easy to understand and apply to the things that are used as examples but also to every other painting or drawing.

All in all, the book is a good example of how to teach someone something they have not tried before without talking to them in person. Chronologically, it is put together very well, starting with a topic that connects to the next one almost seamlessly.  It is suited for everyone, from total beginners to experienced artists that want to find inspiration and refresh their knowledge about art in general.

You can buy it for 49.00$ or your regional equivalent here.

The MSI GE60 - Do Gaming Notebooks hold their promises?

Gaming Notebooks are a much-discussed subject these days, considering how many big manufacturers there are selling them; MSI is just one of a growing population of notebook companies.

This particular notebook, the MSI GE60, has an Intel Core I7 - 3630QM, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M with 2 Gigabytes of VRAM, 8 Gigabytes of RAM and a 15.6" Monitor, having a Resolution of 1920x1080. It has two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 slots.
When looking at it you can see the quality of the case is robust and when starting to work with it you can feel the quality of the components.

Copyright © 2013 Micro-Star Int'l Co., Ltd. All rights reserved

The Keyboard is manufactured by SteelSeries and feels comfortable even after typing for a long time. A negative aspect about it is the Enter-button, though. It's slim and long instead the usual big and high one, but after some time of getting used to it, that is not a problem either.


Above the keyboard, there are 6 buttons with different functions; turning it off, activating Turbo-Mode for gaming, turning the fan to maximum performance, deactivating the wireless functions, turning off the screen and opening the CD-Drive. They are implemented into the design nicely and can come in pretty handy.


Now, the speakers are not the best, lacking the bass and not having the highest maximum-volume, but their sound quality is great and they are definitely enough for gaming and listening to music, but using headphones is still highly recommended.

The machine's monitor has a good color-depth and can get very bright if needed and the high resolution makes sure that games and movies look on it.

Being a year old, the hardware in this machine is not the newest anymore, but it can still run most games at a decent frame rate if the Graphics settings are set up right, depending on the game of course.


Small issues with the keyboard, the speakers not being the best and the CD-Drive being manufactured poorly make up the only problems with this otherwise decent notebook. It is perfectly suited for working and moderately good at playing new games at an acceptable frame rate. For the price of 1089€ or your regional equivalent, this machine has a high performance-peak and there is very few negative aspects about it that might bother the user.

Here's a link to the manufacturer's website.

Busy days, busy nights

Good evening, good morning or good whatever time it is where you live!

It's been quite some time since my last post again. More than two weeks this time. Well, I guess it will keep being like that for the next few weeks or months, until I figure everything out and get a regular practice schedule.

The last two weeks have been really busy for me, mostly being at the university at daytime or using my free time to get things running smoothly in my life. The nights weren't amazing neither, having to do personal things until 3 to 4 A.M pretty much everyday. 

Well, with that being said, let's get to business!

A small rundown here: At university, we were put into groups to make our first game. We were assigned the game Bomberman. The assignment was to recreate a classic game in 3D. We had the idea of three maps: Space, Four Seasons and Candyland. Me and a friend of mine went for the Candyland map.

Now, as you all (probably) know, Bomberman has indestructible objects and destructible ones. In addition to that, we thought about putting some neat-looking assets into the game, which I made a Donut Box for. The Chocolate is the destructible object. It has 42 Polygons and has only one material on it. I used material ID's for the two different colours.

The Donut Box was a little more complicated. I had to UV-Unwrap and texture the whole thing by hand, which was really fun at the start, but just a hassle when I was already working on it for around two hours. It has 1212 Polygons and my work time on it was around 4 hours, with short breaks here and there. 

This doesn't look like it's too much, but it was all I could do in these last two weeks. I hope I can get to practice 3Ds Max more, but I can't promise anything right now.

I'm not gonna say anything about when the next post is going to come, but there's one thing: We got an assignment at university to write 3 Blog-Posts about different things. That's what I'm gonna say here, just wait and be (hopefully positively) surprised when they come!

Guess that's it from me for now! I wish you all a great day or night, whenever you're reading this.

See y'all later.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. - Edgar Degas

Back on track... again

A friendly hello to everyone reading my blog!

So I've been back from Amsterdam for quite a while now. I have to say those three days were amazing. The convention wasn't what I expected but it was an interesting experience for sure. I'm looking forward to next year's convention and I really hope that there will be more for us game artists to see than this time. So, let's get straight to business here.

I didn't quite get the chance to model anything so far. Until now, that is. We had our first shot at texturing today in class. That includes, of course, UV Mapping and applying textures. Today, I will show you the finished model and the UV Template I created to texture an assignment we got a week ago. The assignment was to model a simple street sign. Since I wanted to do something more creative I came up with the idea to do something more medieval, so to say. Instead of trying to explain it, I guess I'll just show you:

My work time on this model was around 3 hours with texturing and UV mapping. It was quite fun to do this, even though I had some problems like texturing the top part of the base, which still doesn't look anywhere acceptable for me but since I didn't know how to fix it I decided to just roll with it. Doing the UV layout was pretty fun too, considering I only just learned it today, like twelve hours ago. I had to remember quite a lot of stuff and made MANY mistakes. At the end I managed to do it though. 

Guess that's it from me for now again. I have to thank everyone who reads this blog so actively again. Pretty impressive to me, after just roughly one and a half month of posting in here. 

Alright, so I'll see you guys next time! 

Take care, y'all.

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” Pablo Picasso 

More Practice, more info on future Posts

Hello again, everyone

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who actively follows this blog after just one month of it being created. Getting all those E-Mails asking me where I've been and when I'm going to post something again sure is very motivating. 

Now, that being said, I won't promise anything along the lines of posting once a week again, but I'll try to keep it up most of the time since we now started to get assignments at University. Assignments about making 3D-Assets, that is. I think I'll have an easier time keeping regular posts up that way. 

Let's go straight to my practice then. This is what I modeled mostly out of my imagination with some references here and there:

Obviously, this is a fire hydrant. It has around 58,7 thousand polygons, thus being the highest-polycount-model I've done so far. And it's been a blast trying out different techniques.

The hardest part was definitely extruding those cylinders out of the base cylinder without using a boolean since those easily mess everything up. That part took me around an hour. After that it was just pretty much doing the same things I did with my earlier models, just being more careful this time so I don't mess up the flow of the edges around the mesh. 

Total work time on this model: 5,5 hours with breaks here and there.

I could have done it way faster, but I paid extra attention to the top and the bottom parts. Additionally, it's pretty late here in Germany right now so I wasn't at the peak of my concentration at all.

I'm pretty happy with my model as it stands, there's probably a lot of room for improvements and if anyone has any critique, feel free to comment and/or E-Mail me about it.

On another note, I'll be in Amsterdam at a convention this coming week so the next post might be in a week and a half again. Just to inform everyone about that.

Alright, so that's this "week"'s post, I hope you enjoyed reading it. I sure enjoyed modeling the hydrant and writing this post, that's for certain!

That's it from me, then. See y'all later, take care!

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic. - Oscar Wilde

Lack of Posts lately

Hello there, everyone!
I feel like I had to do this post just because I haven't been able to post anything lately. That's because I've been moving all my stuff to another flat, which took quite some time. Now that that's done, I'll be able to post more regularly in the coming weeks... I hope.
The reason why I even do this post after only three really productive ones is because I, for some reason, have already been getting E-Mails about my whereabouts and why I wasn't posting anything in the past few days. To be honest, I didn't think I'd get some active followers in the first month of actually creating this blog.  No lie, there's people that follow this blog actively. I, of course, am very glad that some people are interested in what I do, making this even more fun for me to post regularly.
Well, that was just a heads-up on my situation for those few followers I have.
Thanks for already following this blog at these early stages!
Have a great day and I'll see you guys later (I hope).