Plants are a good staple model to put in any level. They can be dotted almost anywhere and add a bit of variety to a scene.

1. Start with a good old clay sausage. Make it the length of your desired plant. Taper the end by rolling it a bit more than the rest of your sausage. Repeat the process with smaller sausages of clay to make your branches.

2. Flatten out another chunk of clay to cut your leaves out of. This isn’t the only way to make leaves but I find it is the easiest way to make three pronged leaves . Cut your leaf shape into the clay, making sure you cut all the way through.

3. Peel your clay leaves out once they are cut. Add any vein detail you want using a knife.

4. You’ll be left with your flattened clay looking like this!

Finally, once you have a big bunch of leaves you can warm up the end of a leaf you want to stick to the plant between your fingers. Press that end on to a branch and the leaf should stay put. After you’ve stuck on all your leaves you should end up with a little tree/plant like this one. To add extra berries or flowers just roll up little balls of clay and stick them on to the branches.

This week I played Star Wars for the Japanese Famicom (apparently it’s a different game to the one that was released for the NES in the west). This Star Wars game was made by Namco and it’s pretty cool. One thing I like about it is the slightly green-tinted chrome finish on the cartridge. But mostly I like it because, like me, it has absolutely zero respect for the Star Wars franchise.

It starts out deceptively resembling Star Wars somewhat. You’re Luke Skywalker on that desert planet he lives on. You’re already a fully trained Jedi, which is completely wrong, but also good because honestly who could be bothered otherwise. It’s also lucky because all the other main characters have been kidnapped and you have to rescue them one by one. Yes, Namco knows that just because you’re making a Star Wars game doesn’t mean you have to follow the plot of Star Wars or anything. Just do what comes natural.

The first princess you have to rescue is R2-D2, who has been kidnapped by the Sand People. So off you side-scroll. The game plays kind of like Alex Kidd in Miracle World, which is okay by me. After a while, you have to fight against Darth Vader. And you’re thinking, "so soon?" - but no, that was just a trick to make you think you were playing a Star Wars game. Because Darth Vader immediately transforms into a giant scorpion boss, and you realise Namco were one step ahead once again, making the game they were going to make anyway if they hadn’t got the Star Wars license.

My trip to GDC earlier this year was accompanied by some personal ‘firsts’ – my first visit to the States, my first time attending a major game developers’ gathering and the first time that I met fellow indie game developer John Graham of Wolfire Games.

After returning from GDC, John and I kept in contact and after hinting that he would love it if I could make a clay model of one of his characters I agreed that I would give it a go.
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A lot of people in Tokyo have high incomes but small apartments. This means that they tend to throw out all kinds of great stuff once they no longer have room for it. It makes Tokyo a great city for people who like flea markets.

One of the best flea markets was the Jingu Gaien market, which ran in some form on most weekends (weather permitting) and was within easy walking distance of my apartment. On most saturday or sunday mornings I would take an hour to walk through the market and see what was on offer. And back in those days, before the whole retro game revival had really kicked off, I couldn’t fail but notice that one of the things on offer was old game consoles - and more importantly plenty of games to play on them.

Jingu Gaien Flea Market
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The best thing I ever read about art criticism was in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard. Like a lot of Vonnegut’s ideas, it takes a complicated subject and reduces it to something very simple and true. I don’t have the book with me and a cursory trawl of the internet failed to bring up the quote I wanted, but the gist of it is this: the painter in the novel was asked how a person might learn how to recognise a great painting. And he replied that the surest way was to have seen thousands and thousands of other paintings.

I think this is true of pretty much everything. Once you have experienced the best and the worst of something, as well as enough of the in-between to get a sense of what is bland or typical, then you have a pretty good basis for understanding and evaluating the quality of a given example. I don’t think I’d be able to identify a really great bottle of wine, for instance, because I’m not a big wine drinker and I certainly haven’t tried enough really good wine to compare it with. But with visual arts, music and film I feel like I have a much better sense of the bell-curve of quality that exists in the medium, as well as the history and timeline of progression.
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It has been a very long time since I did any serious clay work for Cletus Clay. Finally, after a couple of months of working on other areas I’m back to making strange little creations out of clay. Now that most of the main models have been created my attention has been turned to sprucing up (embellishing) the levels. I love doing this sort of thing because when I play games at home, it is often the little details in a level that make me happy.

Most of the incidentals are only itty bitty, things like flowers and seashells so once I’ve got the design figured out I move on pretty quickly to creating the basic structure of the model. Here are the steps to creating a sunflower; I’ve put a completed sunflower beside the one I was working on so you can see the finished result:

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Well, we have returned from the Game Developers Conference held in San Francisco. It was a fantastic week and pretty much every member of the team had their own mini adventure.

From left to right you have Anthony, me, Andy and Alex.

After the excitement generated by members of the Cletus Clay team meeting for the very first time we all settled into our cosy apartment and prepared for the most insane week of the year. We had our badges and stickers ready to attach to people and a mass of postcards for people to read.

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IGF Awards

Anthony and the team are getting excited about attending the Game Developers Conference next week and the up and coming Independent Games Festival awards. Before we head off Anthony gives an overview of whats running through his head in the days leading up to our big adventure.

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Boss of Clay

Last week we saw how Cletus Clay himself is constructed using clay. This week Anthony shows us how he creates his spaceships using some simple yet effective techniques and of course, yet more clay.

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Loveable

Ever wondered how Cletus jumps about? Anthony has been kind enough to guide us all through the process of creating the loveable hillbilly.

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