(Topic ID: 94039)

Hobbit Artwork revealed!

By JoeJet

9 years ago


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  • 376 posts
  • 138 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 9 years ago by Geremy13
  • Topic is favorited by 7 Pinsiders

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11
#9 9 years ago

Well that's pretty disappointing. About what I expected when I saw the cabinet art though I suppose. Will look right at home next to LOTR I guess, two photoshopped up games, but the print quality will probably look better than Stern's at least.

The dwarves are the most disappointing part. Their floating heads look ridiculously bad, and the typography is cluttered and near illegible. The scale of the dragon is awkward too, I suppose if there's already a Smaug toy that it's not that important. See how double dragons look.

So much for Jack bringing back hand drawn art.

#15 9 years ago

Ugh, the more I look at this the more I don't like it.

So many awkward combinations of styles and scales and perspectives, it's really just not well executed I'm sorry to say. I'm sure the final product will look cool, and I'm still very curious to see it all, but this is just not a particularly well done playfield.

Luckily the worst part of it will be hopefully pretty hidden by the pops.

#23 9 years ago
Quoted from metallik:

I'm not opposed to something different, as long as it looks good.

I guess my point is this isn't something different, it's the same old PR collage, and it doesn't look good. IMHO of course, everyone is going to have a different feeling about it, and that's fine!

#57 9 years ago
Quoted from KingPinGames:

It is easy to sit back and criticize when you are not involved in the project.

I mean, okay? So what, only people who worked on it get an opinion? Come one now.

I'm sure the license stuff sucked, it usually does. I know exactly what it's like to work for a client and make a million changes based on their insane feedback. It's frustrating, and I have no doubt that happened here.

Thing is, this is my territory here, I'm a creative director, and if someone brought this to me I'd say "nice first try, now go do it again", with a lot of notes. Because it doesn't look good, and it wasn't well executed, and that's just how I feel about it.

I have no doubt that it will look better when all the playfield parts are on it, and the inserts are there, and the lightshow is going. But all I can judge is what I'm seeing in a vacuum, because that's what JJP chose to release.

I could break down a big list of notes like I would if I was directing this, but honestly I don't see the point, JJP isn't paying me to consult on this, they aren't going to change it based on what I think. I remain excited to see the whole thing, I'm just disappointed that the playfield and cabinet are turning out to be less than inspired. If that's the fault of the license then so be it, I'm not looking to make this personal with the artist. Maybe he's frustrated with how it ended up too, I don't know.

Keefer I know you didn't ask me, but to your point about Star Trek, it's a mixed bag. I think the bottom of Star Trek, where the 6 inserts are, is a joke. Amateur hour bevel and emboss that I can't believe Freres let slide like that. But the rest of the playfield is great, I vastly prefer its abstract tonal style over what's been presented here. If it had actors photoshopped all over it I'd be very disappointed, and if any of it looked as terrible as the barrels in the pops I'd be constantly annoyed when I looked at it to play. I hope that bald head is hidden by the pop mechanism!

#61 9 years ago
Quoted from Pinchroma:

I expect crickets to Keith's questions

You know I respect your work Alex. And I respect the hell out of Keefer too. This is a forum where we discuss our feelings about stuff and I'm being honest that as a Photoshop jockey myself this is not very good. It's technically competent from a pure pixel standpoint for the most part (expect the for the bad floating dwarf heads) but it's not well composed. Just like you'd criticize some sloppy ass 3 stage powder coat, and I've seen you rip on the home oven people. This is some home oven photoshoppery. It maybe is cool for people without the design experience or eye, just like a bad powdercoat might fool a casual glance. But you know what to look for and how they f-ed it up, and I look at this and see the same kinds of problems.

The game might still be awesome. And this is offensively bad or anything. It's just disappointing because I had high hopes that JJP was really going to up the game here, and this isn't it.

#90 9 years ago
Quoted from PinballRulez:

Oke Aurich, give us the list

Apparently the artist is a Pinsider, he's free to PM me if he cares at all what I think and I'd be happy to talk to him privately. I doubt he'd want to, I'm just some jerk in the forum to him most likely. But seriously, Jack isn't paying me and I'm not gonna take the time to write out a big list, because honestly it feels too much like work.

I think LOTR playfield art is ugly, AC/DC playfield art is ugly, you can have great games without great art. This could still be a stellar game. I guess I was just hoping for something more original than this. It feels phoned in. Maybe it was rushed and doing it and the LCD stuff at the same time was too much to do at once. Maybe the license stuff sucked and was full of design handcuffs. Hell, maybe it will improve with or without my feedback. Here's hoping.

I don't mean to be an ass, I just had high expectations that this was going to take the WOZ work to the next level with a theme I like a lot, and was just disappointed.

12
#91 9 years ago
Quoted from pinball_keefer:

Look at it this way... You have a GOLDEN opportunity to engage with someone who's pretty intimate with the project (and is WILLING to engage you!!), something that almost never happens in this industry, and you want to take the theft of services angle. That's fine if that's how you look at it, I can respect that. But if you want to engage, then this is your opportunity. Otherwise it's just noise and I'm wasting my time.

Fair enough! Okay, I'll at least try and give it some thought, contrary to what I just wrote above.

42
#109 9 years ago

So let's just take an example of an area to keep things simple for now, because I don't have the time now to really delve into this.

Let's look at the left side dwarves.

the-dwarf.pngthe-dwarf.png

I'm going to assume the silly "THE DWARF" text was mandated by the studio and has to be there. Annoying, but it's the cost of getting a license title, you're constantly stuck with stupid things that you roll your eyes at. Pretty sure people can figure out those are the dwarves.

The typography though is all over the map here. Start with THE DWARF text. Three instances next to each other, all rendered differently. Gloin gets a full justification, Oin gets his text shrunk horizontally to try and compress it against his shorter name, and Dwalin gets the opposite treatment, his copy is stretched, as well as having the tracking blown out to force the justification.

It's extremely distracting if you have an eye for type. It's part of a pattern of very inconsistent typography throughout the whole playfield.

Then we get to to the names themselves. They're rendered in a bit of an ornamental font, which tonally feels appropriate, but again is inconsistent, and suffers from legibility. Gloin gets the clearest treatment. Oin starts getting a little ornate and introduces a two color O, and then Dwalin goes full on with ornamental elements inside the negative space of the D. They get progressively more difficult to read as you go. The white keyline attempts to distinguish them from the background, which becomes very needed as the colors shift more and more towards the background tones, but it's so thin and there is so much small type and ornament that it quickly becomes very busy.

Thorin gets a last name instead, and he gets a body too, lucky guy! And speaking of that body, the disembodied dwarf heads are just awkward. Everyone else gets some shoulders to anchor them, but not the poor dwarves.

So where do we stand? Inconsistent dwarf type, some random changes in the name typography, tough legibility with the keyline and background colors, and awkward shoulderless floating heads.

Lots of ways to solve this stuff. Here's the first thing I would try as the designer:

1. Anchor each head inside a circle, maybe an octagon to echo some of the angled stuff in the dwarf hall. Let's call it a circle for now. The tops of the heads could break the circle, but you could include their shoulders bounded inside of it. You'd get a similar effect to now, wouldn't take up much more space, but would anchor them.

2. In a curve across the bottom-right quarter of the circle, following the line, include THE DWARF text. Now you have a consistent place to include it for each character.

3. On the left side starting just outside the circle and breaking into it you do the name. Keep the type simpler, let the dwarf body and the color inside the circle (make them different shades if you want to include colors to differentiate them) provide more contrast for the type.

Maybe that works, maybe it's the starting point for a better idea, you gotta just try things sometimes. This is just a few square inches of the playfield, I could apply this analysis to probably just about any other section too. Fixing the floating heads and type inconsistencies and illegibility issues would be a great start though.

Here, did a napkin sketch of my dwarf circle in case my explanation wasn't easy to follow:

image-991.jpgimage-991.jpg

#142 9 years ago
Quoted from pinball_keefer:

I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I get what you're saying about the head backgrounds and what not. To my eye, to some extent they are already "anchored" being attached to the inserts, but IANAA, etc.

And unfortunately I don't want to say you completely wasted all your time railing against the Dwarf text, but all of that stuff is straight out of the style guide and unchangeable, so, yeah, you kinda did. Right down to the fact that Thorin gets a last name and the others do not (so does Bilbo and some other certain characters - or other qualifiers if not last names). I do appreciate you taking the time to explain yourself, though.

I would be very surprised to find out that the way that text is rendered is out of the style guide, though I totally believe that having to include the dwarf text and Thorin getting a last name are. If they are truly stuck like that then they are, not much you can do. I get that you can be handcuffed by that stuff, very familiar with working with a client's style guide. That typography is just really shaky, not what I'd expect out of a big studio.

I was doing a little dinky banner ad for Porsche the other day for an Ars campaign and just as an example their style guide says there has to be two P's space around their text logo. It's the first time I can remember a client actually request that I make their logo smaller. I'm sure every element for Hobbit comes with a little rulebook full of things like that.

#151 9 years ago
Quoted from Sunfox:

Eh... you might be surprised.

Wow, nice find. It's hard to compare the relatively low rez art I can see of the playfield with those, but I may have to eat my words about that text not being to spec. Those shirts are a lot more like what I was thinking for the heads though, coming out of the shapes like that. Zoomed in a little, not so much body, but otherwise that basic idea.

So let me just say, apparently even major studios can seriously F up some typography. And really, in hindsight I should have realized anything shown here is obviously studio approved, so I should have figured if they were okay with it then it must be "right". No sir, I don't like it!

I'm still excited to see this fully populated and lit.

At the end of the day I could bitch about most modern pinball art at length, from everyone. I haven't seen Jpop's sekrit shit, so maybe he's the magic exception.

I said it before, but I have faith in Keefer, this is going to be a good game. Just need to see if it has what it takes to be great. The art isn't such that it kills that chance for me, I just wish it was something a little different, and we'll leave it at that.

#202 9 years ago
Quoted from Sunfox:

My father used to work at an in-house printing plant for a major public utility. Quite often the graphics department would be assigned to create something, so the artists would slave and slave over the absolutely perfect design. But then, since the higher-ups (who had no actual design sense) always wanted to have options, at the very end they'd whip up a few quick-and-dirty examples - and I mean *bad* ones - just so there would be the perception of choice.
And don't you know it, a good part of the time those higher-ups would pick one of the crappy options to go to press with... and that's how ridiculous and completely unprofessional designs come to be at a major corporation that should've known better.

Oh man, I'm so familiar with that. I had a creative director back in the day who would always insist on that same model, do another design so they have more choices. And of course we'd crap one more design out at the end after spending a bunch of time on the first ones. And inevitably they always picked that rushed and crappy one. Time after time.

15
#203 9 years ago
Quoted from JoeJet:

Whos not excited?

Man I'm excited. I'm excited to see the full thing even if not a thing changes on this (well better swap the dwarves).

I think some people are just seeing negativity, but you need to understand that it's because people are excited that we want this to be the best it can be. We're lucky enough to have direct access to people working on the game, Keefer is posting here and explicitly appreciating the constructive feedback.

I've exchanged some PMs with the designer, and I told him that I hope he doesn't take my comments personally, because it's not personal at all. We just want this to be an epic game. I don't know the behind the scenes story here, but I've been around the block, I can make plenty of guesses based on what I know that are probably roughly accurate, and it's not an easy position to be in.

I see some good comments in this thread with real solutions to issues, if any of them are taken into consideration it will only make for a better product for everyone in the end.

#215 9 years ago
Quoted from DarkWizard:

He also gave you a solution that included the 'The Dwarf", that was kind of the point of his drawing to indicate how you can still keep the "The Dwarf" but make it look a little bit more proper. Ignore the Thorin gets a last name thing for the moment, lets look at one thing at a time.

Yes, but it's become clear that those names are straight out of the styleguide, and there's probably no touching them, as irritating as that type is. This isn't Keefer being stubborn, he's just bowing to the realities of a licensed title.

#262 9 years ago
Quoted from PinballHelp:

The take-away I ultimately come up with is that IMO, it would have been better to license the JRR Tolkien source material and not the upcoming movie license (plus if the movie turns out to be a dog, the game has an unforseen liability to compensate for). If they'd licensed the generic Tolkien stuff, it is the best of both worlds and there's no reason why the game couldn't be released and bask in the attention of the movie, but not have as many restrictions on the content and art design.

Thing is it's ultimately a lot more expensive to do that, assuming you could get it. Licenses really aren't that pricey when you compare them to needing to hire artists to actually create all the artwork from scratch (and you're talking paying for a license anyways here). Remember we're talking the cabinet, backglass surround, and playfield, but that's just the beginning, because after that is all of the art and animation for the LCD screen. No movie clips and PR stills to lean on.

With the way the business has been going I doubt Jack wants those kinds of expenses. I'm speculating though.

That ship has sailed, no point in going down that rabbit hole now anyways, all we can do is provide feedback and let JJP respond as they can and see fit. It's obvious some things can't be changed, but it's sounding like parts will see tweaks, so let's just see how it goes.

#264 9 years ago
Quoted from Vongoosewink:

It is almost like someone has inexplicably dictated that all 13 dwarves must be represented on the playfield

I'm sure that's exactly what happened, yes. Welcome to doing a licensed game.

I have faith that whatever it ends up Keefer will make it make sense.

#301 9 years ago
Quoted from lllvjr:

Or u can just eliminate it from the game, cost u nothing and do a phantom lock into some drop targets... Easier to not reinvent the wheel.

They're rollovers in the middle of the playfield, it's a pretty obvious design decision, suggesting that they change it (with what, drop targets?) just because the art runs into the dragon wings in a little bit of a awkward manner seems somewhat extreme.

#319 9 years ago
Quoted from B9:

It's the rainbow plastic all over again

Wow. I'd missed that, just ... wow.

#325 9 years ago
Quoted from pinball_keefer:

...and who's done all the art for the past x games, be it JJP or Stern? Greg Freres, Kevin O'Connor, John Youssi, Jerry Vandersteldt (not as storied as the others but has games under his belt)...
Fact is, licensing has changed a lot in the last 20 years. Guess I'd be interested to see what he can get away with in a modern licensed game.

No doubt. I have EATPM, Scared Stiff, and Star Trek Premium all in a row, and no one would ever guess the same artist was behind all three. I imagine there was some adjusting for Greg, different era, different styles, more work (Pro/Premium/LE translights now).

Different rules to the game now. I expect more from Greg his second time around at Stern though personally, and I also don't believe much of the failures of Star Trek's art stemmed from the license.

I guess for me though I'm not really all that interested in why things are bad, or excuses, because at the end of the day the destiny is in the hands of the pinball companies.

No one held a gun to Jack's head to pick the Hobbit license. Or Harry Potter or whatever else. You can't put yourself into handcuffs and then complain that they restrict your movement.

Pick a license that gives you more freedom. Don't pick a license at all, people would still support and flock to the next JJP game. You did LOTR already, this is a rehash in some ways for you.

And, while I admit I haven't had to deal with the issues you're privvy to Keith, I always believe that there are ways to do things in the face of obstacles. I have a long career as a designer working with licensed properties, creativity and good pitches take you a long way. You lose some battles, but hopefully win wars. Good design helps win arguments.

Frankly the Hobbit movies haven't been that good. Overwrought mastubatory films, losing del Toro to letting Jackson run wild turned out to be a mistake. So as much as I like the theme I wouldn't have shed a tear if it was passed over either. And I say this as a big fan of the story.

Is what it is, I hope we see some improvements, but as I said before, the full package still excites me.

#331 9 years ago
Quoted from PanzerFreak:

Sorry Aurich but saying The Hobbit is a rehash for Keith is not cool.

Well sorry but it is, so deal with it? Am I suggesting he's going to rip off his own rules? Of course not. Gonna be a whole new game I'm sure. But Keith did LOTR, and how he's doing Hobbit. It's a rehash. Same movies, same director, bunch of same actors. JJP picked a less than original theme for their second game, and that's all there is to it. The art for it isn't amazing, but the art for Stern's LOTR sucked, so whatever, obviously people still love the game. Hobbit can still be great, if nothing else I have faith in Keith. In fact he's the only part of JJP I have any faith in at all.

Not only was the LOTR art bad, but Stern's print job on it makes supermarket cereal boxes look like giclee prints in comparison, and the WOZ playfield makes it clear that JJP can screen properly, so in that sense it's already ahead of the game. Cabinet will be the same upgrade I'm sure, LOTR cab printing was that shit direct screen stuff that looks so awful.

Also, to be clear I thought the LOTR movies were awesome, bought all the extended DVDs and rebought them again on Blu-ray later. Big fan. Too bad Jackson disappeared up his own ass after them, because the Hobbit films are overwrought and not particularly good. Which is a damn shame. If Guillermo del Toro had done them as two films as planned we'd have seriously superior movies to enjoy.

#332 9 years ago
Quoted from Pimp77:

DEMO MAN art, by Doug Watson, is horrendous.

And if you've read his Pinball Magazine interview you'd know why, and he should be maybe more sympathetic to the perils of licensing. He got boned by Wesley Snipes pretty badly.

That said, he probably put more time and work into just the rejected concept drawings for DM (there were like 10!) than all the work put into the Hobbit's playfield so far. The DM end result was crummy, and obviously I don't care for the end result on The Shadow either, but I respect the man's talent.

There shouldn't be sacred cows here. I respect the hell out of Keefer, guy is a legend when it comes to pinball programming, and a serious player. But I'm not going to kiss his ass and say the game he's working on looks great when it doesn't. The art for Hobbit is disappointing, and at the end of the day no one really cares why. Just like no one cares why Doug Watson had to do horrible headshots for Demolition Man. We dump on that translite all day long, without "licensing is hard!" conversations.

#335 9 years ago
Quoted from thedefog:

I'm guessing it will be an epic 45 minute battle scene

45 minutes? lol, we should be so lucky it's that short!

#370 9 years ago
Quoted from ek77:

Add ac/dc premium and Avatar

You've got to be kidding me. AC/DC is an awesome game, but that's despite the fact that it's ugly.

#373 9 years ago
Quoted from ek77:

I think AC/DC is far better than Sterns clip and paste Batman AND IM.

Okay? I wouldn't say those games had particularly good art either.

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