- - -
THE MAKING OF LIGHTMACHINE
It must have been 1992-ish when I first started gaming. I remeber seeing the Sega Genesis at SEARS and being amazed at how good the game looked.
Not to mention the music. Damn.
It looked and sounded better than Super Mario Brothers.
Shit was crazy.
Since then, I have always wanted to make games. Hell, that's the reason why I went to art school, in order to become a 3D artist. In the end, that worked out well.
I got a job straight out of college and worked in my field. But that itch to create games never really went away.
What attracted me to game produciton was:
How the hell did they do that.
Going back to Sonic The Hedgehog, I remember seeing the water and trees sway in teh background. The clouds moved across the screen.
Shit!
I did come close a few times to joining a gaming studio. I made it to interview round three (of four) for NetherRealm. I had phone interviews with recruiters from Bungie.
Puta madre, I already had a verbal agreement with the guys over at State of Decay. They were just waiting on the funding to be made available.
That one would have been cool. It was as a level set dresser.
Oh, and I did get the green light as a tester for Guild Wars, but the current pay was not worth the almost two hour drive.
A few years back, probably 202-ish, I came up with the idea for LIGHTMACHINE. The idea was simple, cool games that one person could make on their own.
I could get help from my art buddies, but I decided for this ongoing project I would tackle everything on my own.
Not to be a jerk, but this way I can really get down and dirty, this would show me how far I can take a game project on my own.
Plus, this will rally make me remove the fat from any and all ideas that come my way.
As expected, I had previously set up the LIGHTMACHINE website. As this was a while ago, it turns out that the site broke due to a php update (you can see where this is going, I was shamelessly using a Content Management System).
As with this site, I decided to HTML the shit out of the LIGHTMACHINE site.
One thing that really got me going, was the fact that anything I would want to put down on the LIGHTMACHINE site, I have already done here.
This got me thinking about style. Not just the site style, but the entire LIGHTMACHINE style.
As such, I turned to an old favorite:
White backgrtound with dark gray text (#111111).
Minimal as fuck.
You ever seen The Cardigans album Gran Turismo?
There you go baby.
One thing I did want to do was make the entire identity anonymous. That is why I refer to the wording on the site as THE MACHINE and not ME or ROBERTO.
Just like my Resident Evil fansite, the idea is that anyone can be incharge of THE MACHINE.
Well, here we go.
I have had many false starts for LIGHTMACHINE in the past six-ish years. But here we are, I finally decided to do somehting about it.
As the project goes on, I will be adding more to the site and adding more elements to its style.
I can't add them yet since I have no original artwork ready.
Now that the site has been sorted out, I can now focus on re-learning 3D as the toolset I graduated under (Maya) is no longer available to me.
Well, here we go:
THE MACHINE IS ONLINE.
