S is for Sydney In 2015 I went to Australia to work as Senior Industrial Designer at BoldInc Brand Innovation. This is my Facebook posts of that period that were translated from Russian. 2 …
Originally written in Russian and published in March 2019. This is an English translation of that post. I've been slowly trying to figure out how my favourite game studio actually works — pulling together …
Attention, please! I got sick of making mistakes in my own calculations and built a thing. Oh my god, it's a calculator! 🤣 Now I need your help throwing brilliant ideas into the hat …
And more on the subject of releases. Today inKonbini was released — a game I gave a piece of my soul and six months of intensive work to. A random tweet of mine was …
The loudest ≠ the most profitable. My brain exploded the other day. I double-checked several times, read the last three years of reports (damn all that tedious paperwork), and worked out what's what. There's …
When you don't know how to approach making something — start with the minimum. The idea of expanding my skills through my own little games has been lodged in my head for a long …
In case you haven't heard, the noclip channel is right now releasing a five-part documentary on the development of Disco Elysium. Five episodes — foundation, building, writing, art, and one more to come about …
I often see courses teaching specific software: "Blender from Scratch," "Cinema 4D for Designers," and so on. As someone who's traveled a certain path in 3D graphics and worked in various capacities, I'd like …
In the context of modern neural nets I keep observing the "tough Siberian bloke" effect from the old joke. Ha, look, they don't know left from right on the road; ha, look, they get …
In Bluey, the closing chord of three seasons of a fairly interesting and varied life is the thirty-minute special, "The Sign." The whole third season builds towards it gradually; it's merely the trigger for …
Recently, someone knocked on my door offering to join a project as a volunteer "for now." I've seen plenty of teams like this and know the problems well enough — so I decided it's …
.It's a corridor connecting two parts of a life. A path strewn with ash, a narrow passage in which you can't straighten up, though at first you can't see the ceiling — black with …
I've finally formulated why Arcane resonated with me so much. It's a story about how one person's stubbornness and the creative thought "what if?" led to a huge volume of high-quality, beautiful work, which …
Imagine you get a brief to develop a concept for the "9th of May, our grandfathers fought" theme. A new look, so to speak — "a symbol of bright memory, without an emphasis on …
I'm fond of the old LucasArts adventure games, and two of them hold a special place in my heart: Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. A few years ago they got remasters from …
We had two seasons of Malyshariki, 75 episodes of Peppa Pig, five Disney features, half a flash drive of Tom and Jerry and a whole multitude of children's songs of every sort and colour, …
"Save the bees! Save the trees! Save the whales! Save the… snails!" The Australians, as ever. They observed that the population of small marine animals in Sydney Harbour had thinned out because the shoreline …
Setting At the start of 2024, the internet was actively churning with topics like "neural networks are killing artists," "machines will soon replace humans," and so on. There exists an institution of concept art—whether …
A find worthy of its own post. I was looking for references and stumbled on a site with scans of IKEA catalogues — from 1950 onwards, all of them. https://ikeamuseum.com/en/explore/ikea-catalogue If you ever wanted …
The most astonishing thing is that two years on, the hate speech about neural nets hasn't quietened down. Even though it's still hatred of a hammer. A tool is a tool. I couldn't put …
"You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank."— Fight Club, 1999 I. Over the past year I've seen a lot of underrated profiles. Concept artists with …
A lot of people "discovered" him via Antonov, who never hid the fact that he was quoting Woods. Sometimes boldly, sometimes lightly seasoned: HL2, Dishonored. On the first level there's the visual: bright, memorable …
In an ideal world I sit and work, nobody touches me, and then I die. Happy. The end. When the question is what to work on, there are plenty of answers, but "defining a …
I regularly hear the questions: "what quality should I post work in for a portfolio if it's a game-ready asset?" "Which textures should I show?" "How many polygons should a model have?" "Should I …
Time to talk about Laika. First, an excellent post-credits scene (no spoilers):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h7p0NckTKc So, there's a company in the US specialising in puppet animation — LAIKA Studios (named, yes, after the Soviet Laika). Its founder, …
A cup of coffee, a warm tartan blanket and a run of the journal Zodchiy from 1872 all the way to 1924, obviously. The journal is a treasure trove of references and interesting images. …
I was never a fan of the BioShock series, but the game wasn't really a sequel or a prequel — it was a completely separate work by game designer Ken Levine. As Schreier describes …
Forgive me for not writing long treatises. On the one hand I have a small daughter here, on the other there's some sort of circus with clients (who apparently no longer exist — the …
It feels like everything around me is shouting. When people are shouting, it's very hard to gather your thoughts and write anything coherent. I try not to comment on the political agenda — I've …
Imagine that they brought you a box. Plain, cardboard, unremarkable, like many others. The top is sealed with tape, on the sides there are small cutouts - handles. Think - what's in it? It …
I love browsing old photographs on Shorpy: high resolution, interesting subjects — take any of them, dig a little and you'll unwind something and turn up a story. Yesterday my eye caught on a …
Less talk, more doing. For myself I've worked out three "elephants" that any new undertaking stands on. First, stop being afraid. Second, be as un-lazy as possible. And third, shut the critic up. Point …
Look at our world: everything revolves around entertainment. The industry has swung so far that the only way to get people's attention on anything is to make a show out of it. Musk drew …
