Posted by Daeity
On Friday, November 18, 2011
- Electronic Arts has just registered a couple new trademarks called "BLACKED OUT". It's a video game, but I have no idea what it's going to be about.
Moments later, two more Trademark registration came through. Another game called "SECRET ISLAND".
- It looks like Cameron Dayton has created a new online blog. Something to monitor closely in the beginning especially if he mentions anything Titan related. Right now, it just has all of the "hello world" blog template artifacts. I'm not expecting anything big to be revealed on the site, though.
- Apparently, we have an unofficial sister site in China now (http://daeity.blog.163.com/). The blog is translated as "Digital Harmony", so I don't know if it was a mistranslation from either side or if the name was just offensive and renamed. :) Basically, the blog owner is taking posts from here, translating them, and putting them up for Chinese readers. (163.com is owned by NetEase by the way.)
- On a Diablo 3 note, I've gotten a pretty good (new) quote from Jay Wilson regarding the comparison of Diablo 3 to gambling. :)
IGN: Charles Onyett on IGN's PC team lovingly calls Diablo III the greatest slot machine ever made. Would you say that's an accurate statement?
Jay Wilson: I certainly hope so.
The "Greatest Slot Machine Ever Made" article is here, where he's talking about the feelings experienced from massive loot drops and being able to sell them. He's basically describing the same psychological effect and endorphin rush experienced during gambling.
- For that Path of Exile account giveaway, I think the contest will be an information seeking quest. Not a puzzle, or anything like that, but rather you go out there and find out something new that I can post here. You can use those "Gaming Leaks" post to help guide you, investigate forums, Twitter, personal blogs, Facebook, etc.. basically something with interesting gaming related information that no one else knows about (looking for Blizzard related things mostly). Or, finding a new source of information that can't be searched on Google and is therefore overlooked by many. If you find something, you don't need to write an article or anything about it.. I'll do that myself (if it's something I don't already know), but you'll still get credit (plus the account) for finding the information. It won't be a 1 or 2 day thing either.. I figure you would need some time to hunt around. I'll talk more about it next week, but you might as well start looking around now and see what you can dig up.
- If you're looking for anything Titan related (or you're a Titan blog owner), you should add Pior Oberson to your list of Titan artists. He's the Senior 2D (Concept) 3D (Game) CHARACTER ARTIST for Titan, and you can see all of his other Character-specific art in his portfolio. The one thing that Titan will be big on is a variety of characters, and it seems there's more focus on "people" than "monsters".
His LinkedIn profile has him as a "2D and 3D character artist - traditional and digital art, lowpoly and highpoly" but it used to have "Concept and execution of highpoly sculpts and character models, realtime 3D characters, 2D character concept art" in relation to his specific job duties on the Next Gen MMO.
His resume has also undergone a few iterations:
Dec 2007 to present day - Blizzard Entertainment - Irvine CA.
2D 3D Character artist.
Nov. 2007 to present day - Blizzard Entertainment - Irvine CA.
Senior 2D 3D Character artist on a nextgen MMO title a.k.a. TITAN + additional art on WoW : WoTLK.
2007 to present day - Blizzard Entertainment - Irvine CA.
Senior Character artist on a NextGen MMO title.
So, you might want to pay close attention to his "highpoly sculpts" from 2007 and up.
There's also a "30 Minute Sketchclub" blog consisting of Josh Singh, Paul Richards, Vadim Bakhlychev, Marc Brunet, Gino Whitehall, Pior Oberson, etc. All employees who were working on Titan. :) There are sketches there that they made during the lunchtime when not working on Titan (as well as many more developed 3D art pieces built at work or at home.)
There's also Zach Baker, who was also on the Next Gen MMO team (he left Feb 2010). He has an article Looking Back at Blizzard. It doesn't provide anything useful or interesting though, but I figured it would throw it up here anyways. It's been sitting on the shelf for months, and I just never got around to posting it.
