Amazing FTL Concept Art
I'm a big fan of FTL and spotted these amazing pieces of concept art recently by a concept artist named Martin Lutz.
His evocative take on the top-down strategy game that normally looks like this:
...reminded me of the awesome work by the artists on display at the IAM8BIT gallery in L.A. mentioned in A Life Well Wasted.
My experience with early computer games probably mirrors your own; the graphics were so rudimentary and my imagination was so active that I ended up filling in the blanks, using the game as a jumping off point, more like the experience of reading a novel than watching a film. That's changed for the most part in modern games, with the exception of retro-styled darlings like FTL. Of course I may be wrong, the experience of playing games for a ten-year-old now may be even better than it was when I was ten, but my imagination isn't as malleable and impressionable now as it was then. I feel strongly that an important part of remaining creative is being unafraid to do silly things like imagine what it's like to hide behind a bulkhead when a boarding party arrives on your ship in FTL, or to think about what your nearest forest in Minecraft smells like.
