Ryan Sumo's art blog
I’ve cooled down a little bit after my little Palit outburst and decided that the best antidote was to focus on work. As such, I have a collection of trees for you. These are for a map where the player will move into lands that are of varying temperatures or degrees of decay. There’s still an egg theme behind this though, and so I’ve painted them all to still hold the shape of an egg, even the dead trees (The dead trees may need a bit of work though).
So a few months ago I submitted a design for the Palit Frobot contest. Ondoy happened in between, and I never did manage to post my final design here. In rush of work both paid and volunteer I’d forgotten to check on Palit’s website to see if they’d chosen the finalists, until today. First off, let me inform the reader who does not have a close relationship with me that I’m not a proud man. I know my artwork is not the best, and I have learned to deal with being average when it comes to many things. But for fuck’s sake I know my entry is better than this, this and this. This one wasn’t even a frog! Palit, why do you bother writing down rules and regulations when you don’t even bother to enforce them? Where is the environmental awareness through the use of a frog’s anatomy and green coloured elements as well as the technological superiority using high-tech, industrial or futuristic design elements present in any of these images? I wouldn’t be so mad if I hadn’t actually put time and effort into researching for this piece, only to be outdone by a 6 year old with his first bamboo™ tablet.
Update: Thanks to willie, I also found out that one of the designs was a blatant ripoff of a Tekken character. I have notified Palit of this in a very petty email, which does not deserve to be reprinted.
I bought Osmos during the Steam sale a few days ago, and I must say it’s one of the best game-buying decisions I’ve made in my life. Not only is the game both beautiful and intuitively challenging, it’s also given me a new set of metaphors for life, which I’ll discuss a little bit in the next few posts.
In Osmos, you are an organism similar to a eukaryote, and you are traveling in an ecosystem swarming with other similar organisms. Your goal in each level is to become the dominant organism. To do that you must “eat” other organisms smaller than you, and repeat the process until you’re the largest multi-celled organism around. In order to eat the other organisms though, you have to catch them, and that brings us to our first life metaphor: propulsion.
Your organism can only move by expelling bits of itself in the opposite direction in which it wants to go. You could easily interpret this as a manifestation of Newton’s third law, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” or as a metaphor for the biological process of absorbing and releasing energy. That may very well be the what the game developers were getting at, but in my mind what I was seeing was the sacrificed “part” being a metaphor for everything that we’ve been forced to give up in order to move forward in our lives. How often have you been faced with the decision of staying put or moving forward? And in the moving forward, what part of yourself did you give up? In the course of my life, I’ve had to give up friends, relationships, even action figures, in order to move forward in life. Whether or not those sacrifices were worth it is open to debate, but I cannot deny that I wouldn’t be where I am and who I am right now if I hadn’t given up a few things in exchange for some propulsion.
I’m joining another mini-comp on gameartisans, one that’s particularly cool because there will be an end product, namely an iphone game. Profits from the game will go to maintenance costs of the site, which is a pretty cool way of helping out a site that’s really helped me grow as an artist these past few years. Obviously this isn’t sprited up yet, but I wanted to get the design down first before doing the sprites and animations. More on this soon!
