Video Games At The 2013 Vermont Arts Summit

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Front view of the Vermont State House (taken Sept. 23, 2004) – © 2004 Matthew Trump

Vermont Digital Arts is honored to have been invited to represent in the 2013 Vermont Arts Summit at the Vermont State House!

When: Saturday, October 26, 2013
Where: Vermont State House
Montpelier, VT

Elliott Mitchell, Vermont Digital Arts co-founder, will be speaking on the panel The Art of Great Digital Games:

Background art, character development, textures – each of these and many more forms of artistic output are essential to many of today’s most popular games. Narrative, music composition and sound design can drive some of the best in-game experiences. So why don’t video and mobile games have more credibility when it comes to art and arts-based learning? Hear from three developers of mobile games about the serious opportunities for creating and experiencing great art through personal devices. Through discussion we’ll explore ways classic studio skills can be augmented and deployed using mobile, hand-held, and PC computers. Moderated by Lars Hasselblad Torres.

Marguerite Dibble of Birnam Wood Games , Josh Buck of Champlain College , Daniel Moore of Toonuva Games and Lars Hasselblad Torres of The Vermont Office of the Creative Economy will be  joining with Elliott on stage to speak about video games in the arts.

If you are interested in making games in the State of Vermont then Register here!

Samsquanch at Unite 2013

Vermont Digital Arts is back from Unite 2013! What a conference!

Elliott Mitchell (founder of Vermont Digital Arts) presented on Successfully Avoiding Common Pathways to Heartbreak and Disasters in Your Art Pipeline last week at Unite. Due to popular demand, keep a posted on a series of upcoming mini-posts relating to Elliott’s talk.

Samsquanch Concept Sculpt for Unite 2013

Overall I feel my talk was well received by the audience at Unite 2013. The audience was an interesting mix of artists and developers with various levels of experience in Unity and art pipelines. I realized I only had time to cover a fraction of the content I thought was important so I just went with the flow and covered what I could in the allocated time. I’m looking forward to authoring a series of posts covering my talk and points beyond!

-Elliott Mitchell (Founder Vermont Digital Arts)

Elliott Mitchell Unite 2013 talk

Also we wanted to give a shout out to Anzovin Studio for the rigging and animation on Samsquanch with TSMG!

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More to come….

Concept Sculpt Of Samsquanch: Work In Progress Part 1

New internal projects are in development at Vermont Digital Arts! We have been working on some original game designs and concept art for a variety of platforms including the Oculus Rift, Steam and a host of emergent mobile devices to be developed in Unity.

Vermonster Concept Scuplts

Vermonster Concept Sculpts by Elliott Mitchell ( Vermont Digital Arts )

Above is a sneak peak at a character rather early on in the concept art phase for an upcoming IP we are developing. This sculpt of a hybrid yeti-ape creature is modeled in ZBrush and is currently a whopping 13 million polygons. Today we hope to refine the basic form a little more then retopologize the creature in 3D Coat before modeling fine details and painting textures. It’d be great to hand a low poly version of this creature to our partners on the rigging and animation team at Anzovin Studio ASAP. It’s essential to identify problem areas in the geometry as early as possible and allow the animators time to work.

Check back to see a series of posts on the creative and technical processes that drive our development.

Vermont Digital Arts at DevCon5

Tomorrow begins DevCon5 HTML5 conference in New York, New York.  Elliott Mitchell, founder of Vermont Digital Arts, will be speaking on Thursday about why he recommends developing games in Unity on the panel: The Game Developer’s Dilemma. The panel description is as follows:

Mobile/social gaming is exploding, with smaller teams and smaller budgets developer can reach new market segments. One of the critical questions every developer needs to ask is What would be the best choice HTML5 or something else? HTML5 holds the oft heard promise of write once run anywhere. Unity 3d is growing in leaps and bounds and seems to be the most common multiplatform development environment for cross platform games.

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Panel members include:

Alex Engel
Producer
Disruptor Beam

Elliott Mitchell
CEO & Founder
Vermont Digital Arts

Jonathan Myers
Creative Director
Reactive Studios

Monty Sharma
Director
MassDigi

Check out the rest of the DevCon5 conference speakers.

Hope to see you there!

Follow our Tweets from the event: @VTDigitalArts