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.

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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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