"Welcome to the Art of The Game." Mark says as much to himself as anyone else. This is the christening post for this blog. First and foremost let me say that I hold the belief that games are a serious, sincere, complex art form and I am going to be discussing how this art form functions as a significant part of the world we live in. And it does.The attached image is a quick concept sketch I completed for a ShadowRun-esque adventure concept. The idea of your low rent, scummy landlord being orcish in his origins seemed to come very naturally, and twenty minutes later this Lazyboy luvin' character was penciled out. Twenty more minutes of Photoshopping and I had a portfolio example of my quickdraw conceptual work.
Starting a blog proper is an intimidating process for me.
It's not easy.
I've seen a lot of blogs go the wayside to other things, and my life is jam packed with other things.
I make games, I play games, I read, I like languages (learning Japanese is not blog-authoring-conducive), artistry of all sorts...
But, a blog is a necessity in today's game development market I hear over an over again. And when applying people want to see what you're made of. So be it. Aspiring for a career change from visual design to game design I start a blog and I do have a lot of relevant information, experience, and expertise to disseminate.
With knowledge of design, mechanics, art, scripting, business, marketing, and who knows what else, I understand games from many different kinds of perspective. I've been coming up with game concepts since I was eight, I've been programming games since I was ten, and I have been artistically conceptualizing since I was I don't know how old.
This blog is going to cover multiple aspects of game theory and how game's function in the market-place, what aspects of them make them succeed or fail. It's not always as simple as "it's a cool game" or "it's fun". And I say this knowing full well that in a lot of cases it is as simple as "It had about a billion dollars thrown at it", but we'll be sure to look at that as well in this blog.
Also, there will be times when I post some of my own design and achievements on the board. New to the game design field, I'm sure it will be a couple of years before I'm dropping triple A stuff on here, but for now, as a noobie, it is still mighty impressive (while I try not to brag, I am proud of some of the things I do, and I like sharing those things) and it says a lot saying this is where I'm starting at.
Well, there's the intro to Mark N. Barker and his new blog The Art of the Game.
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