Smile, please! - AMAZING RUSSIANS
My name is Vova (Vladimir). I was born and still living in Russia, in the beautiful city of Noginsk, in the Moscow region. I make cartoons, write music, discover something new for myself.
Your art has a very cool style. You're more of an artist than a game developer. Why did you want to try something new for yourself? What inspired you to study AR technology?
Since childhood, I love animation and video games, I have always wanted to do both. I started creating animations at school, but game development always scared me with programming languages, the amount of work, and the like. My university forced me to overcome my fear of developing games) We had a task to make an "interactive digital project" or something like that, and I chose Unity as my tool. I'm not looking for easy ways :( I had to delve into the principles of Sharp, Unity and a bunch of things with which I was unfamiliar in a month. My first builder on Unity was supposed to be a simple rhythm game built entirely on boxes with collisions. All the player had to do was click to points on timing and fill "combos" to be the best. After a while, it seemed to me that it was very boring and not very dynamic, after which the idea came to me to make a controller by the Player's head. This would make the game more dynamic and more interesting. Augmented reality has become the easiest and cheapest way out from the situation.
AR is still a primitive and crude technology. I ran into a bunch of problems during the development phase, which were either not solved at all, or were solved in a not very smart way, which I thought on my own.
YouTube AR guides in Unity are limited and describe just a simply creating a mask on the front-end :(
So you immediately decided to send your very first interactive media project to the A MAZE festival. Why did you choose this festival? How did you know about him?
Yes exactly. This is my first project) I often send my stuff somewhere, because it's better to try than not) My friends and mates took part in the festival, it seemed that I was on time and decided that I should try.
What festivals or competition programs have you participated in? Are there your victories and awards?
This year I won in Typomania and also passed the selection for the "Tired man" exhibition, which should be in this September.
What friends and mates also took part in A MAZE?
This year, none of my close friends took part, except that we are a little familiar with Leo, the author of SUNA: RED.
Do you often play video games in general? What genres do you like the most?
Sure! I fell in love with video games from the age of 5-6 and I like all sorts of hardcore such as souls-like, rogue-like, slashers, doom and quake games. Sometimes I get stuck into indie art projects and just "narrative-pleasant things"
What kind of indie projects can you highlight? And what is the "narrative-pleasant things"?)
There is a man in the videogame industry, Danya Ermakov (Mr. Pink, da_neel). About five years ago, he did a lot of interesting projects on gamejolt. Since that time, almost all games are still playable.
By narratively pleasant things, I mean some kind of games or projects with an unusual and creative presentation of the story. From such examples I remember Death Stranding (by Hideo Kojima), Bound (by Plastic), kamni and Miffhuff (by Mr. Pink, da_neel).
I really like content with atypical storytelling, where the story can be told through imagery, feelings or gameplay.
Why are gaming products that bring new thoughts and unique visuals left out?
Such games are not interesting to a mass audience. People love the replayability and shipping between bright and colorful characters. Often, unique gaming products set themselves the goal of transforming a feeling or event into gameplay or story, as I tried to do with "Smile, please", for example. Such a technique can cause a WOW effect to a player when he tries the product, but the game needs much more than a cool idea and narrative to catch the player's attention for a long time.
It seems to me that most of the projects on the A MAZE are just experiments, tech-demos and prototypes that can take for a while, if not for the evening, then for 10 minutes, for sure.
How much time do a person need to spend on games? 10 minutes? Hours? Weeks? Months?
More the better
Having tried developing a game with the Augmented Reality on yourself. Would you like to make a new game and become a game designer? Or is it better to stay as an executive artist and stay with a team?
I have a bunch of ideas for my own ten-minute games and I would probably die by happiness if one day I could bring them to life. In general, I am for any activity, so if an interesting project comes along, I am always ready to take part in it)
Who do you think media artists are? Do you consider yourself like that?
Media art – is our everything. It seems to me that any person who creates visual content for media these days is a media artist. And there are a lot of such people! And this is so cool!
Now art has no limits, like even 10-15 years ago. Minimalism, curved forms and any trash are also accepted with love.
If something is done crookedly – this is style. And these attitudes help people – to be heard.
Curved forms and any trash. It turns out that anyone who is not able to do beautifully and aesthetically is already considered an artist? If art is supposed to inspire, then how does "senseless trash" create spiritual uplift into beholder?
I like to divide art into "romantic" and "naive". Romantic is all about aesthetics. The artist takes his idea and epically reproduces it, as if adding hype.
And naive this is exactly what was once considered trash. It may be ridiculous, but there is a lot of honesty. And I love these things terribly. I envy people who can tell stories through such forms.
What drives naive Game Designers to be honest?
Wanting to be heard? I don't know, everything is situational here. But if he draws curved sprites as best he can, makes eye-catching icons for the game on a topic that is very important and interesting to him, what is this if not a cry from the heart?
The Lisa trilogy looks very repulsive, but there is such a wow in the plot, in the story
Are Video Games Art?
- Is the grass green? Yes, sure!
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