 I make games. That is all you need to know for now. I have a few warnings. I am a non-linear thinker, I like to say. Some will say a messy thinker. In any case, I haven't found a presentation system that will allow me to do my stuff. So what I have brought is a series of PDFs and stuff and you will intimately see a file system and a desktop up here. So it will still be around. That's all part of the plan. And then I am trying to go through my stuff fast. I think I will have to drop something if time seems to be running out. But that can be dynamically done. So I hope we can take a speedy presentation. Again, I am Simon. I make games. That is all I will say for now because I think the subject is more important. And when doing a talk like Blender and Unity, staying versatile in games, I believe it is good form to actually define your terms first. And by the way, if any of you are familiar with the game Bullshit Bingo or Buzzword Bingo, now is the time to get out the boards because as you can read in the title, there are words here that sound kind of buzzwordy. I try to make sure when I use words like that that I actually mean something by them. But you be the judge for that, right? So Blender and Unity, staying versatile in games. Blender, I had to seriously reconfigure this talk after seeing what all the rest of the presenters were talking about and after talking to a lot of you out in the lobby. And I now believe that I cannot tell anyone here much about Blender that they don't know. So that thing I will not be defining. Unity, as some of you may know, it's a game engine and development environment that is very fast and exports to a lot of formats, no platforms. It is comparable to Blender on an object level, I would say. So you cannot model anything in Unity directly without weird add-ons that people believe it or not are making. You can put together a scene and do a hierarchy of objects that exist in a space. So in that sense it is kind of akin to a level editor. Actually you have the game view, the scene view and what in Blender would be called the outliner is the hierarchy window there. And then a library of assets that you drag in and place and do everything with and you can work with the settings over here. Yeah. This is from Unity's own marketing buzz where they claim that they have a 45% market share in the game engine space and that 3.3 million people are developers on Unity. I don't know how true that is but it is very popular, that much I know. The main reason why we at our company use Unity is actually this window here. It's a little dark so you may not be able to see what's going on. It's the build window and the important thing is down here on the left corner. These are all the platforms that you just click select and then you can export to that platform. And since we are a company that does mobile and console and web stuff it is very handy to have an engine that actually exports to all of those. So versatile, I'm just going to drop a dictionary definition here this from the Oxford dictionary able to adapt or be adapted to many different functions or activities, right? If you look up versatile in the Oxford dictionary in my opinion you could put that exact same definition if you looked up Blender software but yeah, that's the point. And then games and that's where I'm going to spend the meat of my talk defining this and I don't know how to do it except by example I think. So I'm going to show you a little bit about how and what we do at Knappner games and who I am, right? Let's see. I don't know about this resolution now. Okay, so first about me my name is Simon Milsen, I am an artist at a very small game studio Knappner games in Copenhagen small but growing I would say and as a part of a small team I get to do a lot of the art stuff in game production so it ranges from actually art directing and concepting to doing more technical stuff up to and including scripting and writing shaders, right? And in between we have all the actual building of 3D models or layout of menus and UX design and stuff so it's very stimulating to have so many roles and also weird perspective I think. Traditionally if you run into people who are from larger game companies they will have one very specific role and I get to do it all and I consider myself lucky but I don't think it's for everyone, right? I am educated from the Danish School of Design where I spend a lot of time thinking that I was going to do print graphics for a living, right? So I did stuff like this which are weird indie book covers and more weird indie book covers and posters and websites and political activism and experimental comics, right? And how I came to Glenda was via VJ which is sort of live improvised video to music so in 2004 when I started that all the good VJ programs were on Mac so I got myself a Mac and even though the school trained me on 3D Studio Macs I knew both because of the operating system and because of my distaste for software piracy that I couldn't really use that for anything so I looked around at Glenda in a much less usable state than it is today but I started hacking around with it and producing literally hundreds of experimental animation clips for use in that VJ situation. I also did this. I'm going to show a little snippet of this. This is a art installation slash game made with the composer Anders Montal who is a contemporary classical composer and we aim to teach people about contemporary classical music which some people would have a hard time understanding, right? So we made this game that is actually a little bit abusive towards people where they can get to compose their own serial music. Yeah. And the place like this here we see character selection and here we have Hank Marvin playing against Sturford Dude and they are generating this serial music in this Rindberg tradition, right? You get to do that for a while and then after a while you have this versus game where you try to deconstruct the composition again with a laser gun, right? Yeah. So that is what I would do if there were no economic constraints and no money to be made but I have to make a living also so I'd do that with, let's see in the following manner I get to, as I said, concept stuff and then specifically design stuff which is a bit more rigid in a traditional game art pipeline you would have to sort of make these plan drawings very precise and handed to someone else who would then model but I often get away with less and actually in the art department I have one colleague and we speak together so well but sometimes it's enough to just sort of discuss something for 30 seconds like that that thing you made two weeks back make it like that but read, right? and he will understand so we can skip a lot of this this is where it was actually, you know, necessary for something and then I get to build it up to and including rig characters these are for some old projects and as you can see sometimes the concepts themselves actually enter into the model and get used in weird ways and get projected, yeah I think now is the time to try and go to Unity I don't know how it will function oh wow, it has detected that we are on a very small screen and therefore put me into game here for some reason let's see oh wow, thank you okay, so this is the spaceship that that you saw some drawings of here which features essentially in the current project we're making and this is how I work with it in Unity I should say that this is a test scene for various reasons this branch that I have here of the project doesn't run so it's not like real really what would go into the game but this is where I set up materials and weird effects which are these planes are currently not hooked up but they are going to help produce some glowy thing that we need to communicate what we're doing let's see next slide yeah, and then I also get to do 2D stuff whether it's like sort of weird background matte paintings like that building there or full UI design which takes more time that one should think but anyone who's worked with any kind of interface knows that let's see yeah, and then a very important part of what I do is sort of effects modeling this is a vertex painted thingy which looks kind of odd and boring right but yeah I'm gonna skip that but suffice it to say that this is this will turn into water in the game that is actually reactive to stuff that happens physically and can do wavy stuff all that is solved via the shader system in Unity and sometimes you want to communicate for instance I think here that that the blue channel is the in the vertex colors is the thing that tells the shader that this is a top surface so it should wave up and down yeah oh yeah, let's quickly have a look at the next one these are the tools I generally have open on my computer at any one time more or less and as you can see I'm not particularly ideological about open source software but this is a thing of necessity I have to be able to get stuff done relatively quickly so that is why I use proprietary software that I learned at school right one interesting thing is the substance designer I would recommend you look that up actually if you're into especially tiling textures in 3D work because that thing saved me from having to edit tiling textures in Photoshop which can be a pain by having a sort of graph editing system where every filter wraps around if anyone has tried to make a texture with some sort of blur on for instance and it's meant to be repeatable you know that you will get these weird edges from most 2D packages right let's see I think I'm just going to quit Unity since it doesn't like this solution very well I've lately been trying to actually just use Splendor directly from end to end for producing 3D assets and I realized this morning that I had to draw a diagram to sort of get across what the process is right now this is what I would do right I'll sculpt something until I'm happy with the shape then I will paint it but in order to paint it I have to unwrap right and once that is done I will have to reduce it to get the polygon count down to something Unity will take and then export it right and my small little point here would be that this would be the ideal situation that I would want paint sculpt in any order go back from painting to changing the shape slightly and then have one more or less export step that would reduce according to number I enter do all the UVs, bake the thing and yeah but that is maybe you know in a utopia that would be possible you know okay so quickly Knutknut Games is the company I work for and we make generally we make digitally mediated physical party games here's the team we are a lot of nationalities you see here Danes, Swedes, Macedonians we have gotten some Brits and Norwegians on the team since this so it's very international we are located in Copenhagen and here's one project that we made and that due to a publishing deal that fell through never got anywhere you look like this while you play so this is what I mean by physical party game this is a Kinect game where we map a character directly to an avatar on screen which is something that at that point at least had not been done right then we made spin the bottle Bumpy's party for which I wasn't the main character designer but where I worked on other graphic stuff where you look like this while playing or like this so I don't know if you begin to see a trend here then we made this one which is not a commercial game but an entrance in the VR Jam from last year which was sponsored by Oculus and which we won I think mainly because of the silly poster here it is a game where you get to look like this while playing and then you can enter any URL and hack a website inside the VR glasses like everyone imagined hacking to be in the 90s and just to top it off we also do other sorts of commercial projects this is a thing called Cloud Chamber Mystery which is a sort of young adult science fiction movie where you navigate at database to try and find clues to the mystery that is the center of the films and that thing is very web based and we build all this where you sort of travel along some nodes and try to uncover secrets and that is very typical I think because like this versatility again that we try to pursue different avenues of making money because there are some games we really feel strongly about that we want to make but in order to do that we have to take on commission projects and try new areas and one of the things that is great about Unity is that those projects allow us to build expertise for our own stuff let's see and as you can tell we are not kind of cutting edge or best in the world at one thing at our company and I don't think you actually have to be to make it I think Blender is also an example of having a broad set of competencies more strength in having again a broad set and being versatile enough to be used for a lot of things and we try to do the same with the studio so I see a parallel there and then we have a very strong opinion about trying to design around our weaknesses which also means there are things we cannot do and things we know are very expensive for instance all the character animation which is why we sometimes up to not have human-like characters in our game I will show you what we are currently working on in a minute and that thing is very that thing is very devoid of character and then maybe not I want to very quickly tell you about a thing that I also see a parallel with with Blender we also have a thing in Copenhagen called the Copenhagen Game Collective I am going to quickly skip the mission statement you can go to the website and get that but we make games where you get to look like this while playing so again here the trend but that organization is very explicitly set up as a non-profit where we do stuff that doesn't pay and can never be business so we have games where you need two brain scammers and seven move controllers and three Macintoshes to make it work and that's not really something that you can market later but we believe they are important to do and then we do game jams and summits and parties and even a play festival where street games are featured in the spring every year and again I see a parallel to the way the Blender Foundation and Institute are set up right the idea is that some activities will never generate money directly but the experimentation and the network that we get from it is worth so much and we at this point have a high enough profile that if people want to do something with games in Copenhagen they almost by default mail us first and we are very often able to help them because we have a huge network of not only professional game developers but amateurs students, communicators, academics people who are in and around this scene let's see what's the time I'm going to skip the art direction I'll just tell you briefly about what we're doing now we're doing something with this wonderful man who is Niklas Nüggling known as Niflas who makes games by himself that used to be his way of doing things he would get help but he would do the music, the art, the code the game design more or less himself and makes these wonderful platform games with thousands of levels of hidden meanings and yeah this is his latest game but he has been doing this for ten years and we were lucky enough to befriend him and reel him into a finally working on a team which happened to be Knopknock that we got him into and that is of course a challenge suddenly after ten years working on a team when you were used to being a lone wolf but it's generally going well and we're making a thing for the Wii U that is called affordable space adventures where to set up this trailer there's a fictional company that is the rent a wreck of space travel so if you want to go to space but have no money you would rent a spaceship from these guys and of course you get what you pay for and this is I think six months old trailer from when we announced the thing so a lot has happened since but this will show also a little of the main graphics that I work on for this game which is mainly about the environment so that's where we are I think I should mention as a by the way if you look at this screen of Niflis's screenshots what he does very well he's not extremely good at either graphics or sound maybe sound I would say or like he's not like Knopknock itself he's not an expert at one thing and then nothing else what he does very well is make a sort of aesthetic whole I would say like the whole screen has an atmosphere and an emotional impact in all of his games so if anything that's what we're trying to help him preserve in this weird little spaceship project and that is also why I cannot say that I'm an art director on that one because he's actually creatively leading that thing and I'm trying to only support what he's trying to do right yeah and having skipped the aesthetics come and ask me later this is the contact if you need anything I would if you want to know anything there's two URLs there on the top and on the bottom that's me thank you