Return to Camelot

Once again, I return to Camelot for a redesign:

One of the great joys I find in maintaining this blog is witnessing my own skills improve over time. While my redesign of Camelot is one of my simpler creations on a technical level — created with mostly conventional building techniques — throughout the design process I focused more than ever before on overall attractive presentation.

I strove for good presentation by establishing guidelines to follow as I made design decisions:

• Opt for a cohesive scale of detail, rejecting even interesting ideas if they compromise consistency
• Use enough colors to achieve visual clarity, but not so many that the creation is visually cluttered
• Favor gentler shades over vibrant ones, to create a pleasant appearance

The slideshow below shows my design decisions unfolding throughout the build process:

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Regarding scale of detail, I threw out a number of ideas that were interesting on their own because they were too finely textured and wouldn’t have fit in with the overall blocky style of the castle.

Regarding color, I included almost the entire array of LEGO browns as I felt the variety contributed to the visual clarity of the creation. I like how different colors of brown imply specific materials like wood, plaster, and dirt. Besides browns and neutral colors, there is only one shade of blue, green, and red. During the design process I contemplated replacing the garish bright red of the roofs with a moodier burgundy, but ultimately felt classic LEGO red provided a needed visual pop.

I enjoyed working within self-imposed presentation guidelines throughout this project. My rules for attractive presentation forced me to consider my design decisions from a different angle than I usually would, and I feel as though the result is better for it. I always want to push my skills to meet my aspirations — this progress is deeply gratifying.

It feels fitting that today I share my redesign of Camelot, the first creation I posted here on my blog, as in just two weeks, I move away from my family home to complete my college education. With the move I leave behind my LEGO collection, perhaps for some years.

Thank you for reading ❤

~ The Royal Brick

A Box Art Fantasy: The Portal 2 That I Want to Play

Sometimes anticipation can be so much more magical than arrival. I remember the wild adventures my imagination took me on as I anticipated playing Minecraft for the first time. I created a vast, beautiful Aztec-inspired city in my mind, and felt so much joy just envisioning it.

Today, I am going to enjoy following the thread of imagination I went on as I anticipated playing Portal 2, the sequel to one of my favorite games. The promotional art for Portal 2 exploded my imagination, launching my mind into beautiful ideas and hopes. The sequel that Valve Corporation created was a smash hit. For me, it missed the mark, but that’s ok because I feel a great deal of joy just imagining the game that the box art inspired in my mind.

The original Portal masterfully creates an eerie sense of dystopian unease. The player encounters nobody, but there is a creeping sense that you are not alone. Chilling ambient music plays and observation areas lie curiously vacant.

All of the concept art which was published in promotions for Portal 2 depicts an Aperture Science facility in the aftermath of the destruction, which occurs in the first game. When I look at these, I can imagine hearing the air — the way you can in vast, abandoned spaces — filled occasionally by the chirping of a few birds or a crumbling rock-ledge. In Aperture’s new dilapidated state, I feel a sense of awe rather than oppression, like the feeling one might have stumbling upon a hidden waterfall in the forest.

In my envisioning of Portal 2, I picture Chell waking up, deep underground in the halls of a crumbling Aperture Science. The lower levels of the facility are still intact, having been shielded from from the aforementioned explosion by miles of earth. As Chell traverses upwards, through narrow halls and shattered windows, she comes upon greenery, at first only here and there, but later in abundance. As Chell climbs higher, the destruction is more thorough.

In my imagination, the Ratman’s art would again be present, hidden in nooks and crannies like in Portal 1, but now depicting images of euphoria rather than of torment. Beyond these details there would be no core narrative forwarded by dialogue and action sequences, just the beautiful environment and the player’s personal experience of climbing up, up, up, and out of Aperture Science.

By focusing on beautiful, crumbling architecture, contrasted with green growth and warm rays of sunlight, Portal 2 becomes an experience of discovering beauty, while retaining the solitude that makes Portal 1 so enthralling to me. And this collapsing Aperture Science is a perfect playground for portal-based puzzles, as broken floors and rubble-blocked pathways require creativity to traverse.

Those who have played Portal 2 know that the game delivers briefly on these ideas. The opening few areas are beautifully green and sunlight filled, and the wrecked state of Aperture Science Laboratories affects the puzzle design in interesting ways. Chell discovers the Ratman’s art in a light and water flooded clearing… it’s absolutely heart grabbing. This is, in my opinion, the best moment in the game, and it occurs 15 minutes into the 8 hour playtime. My imagined Portal 2 is all about these moments of discovering fascinating, beautiful spaces.

Perhaps it’s better that the game I envisioned doesn’t exist. This imagined game belongs to me alone, and so it can be exactly as I fancy. My anticipation led me to envision a game exactly the way I want, even though that’s not how the real experience ended up. I so much enjoy imagining my one-of-a-kind box art fantasy.

Thanks for reading!

Your Party Escort Bot,
The Royal Brick

The Joy of Building LEGOs Together

I have been building with LEGOs for almost 20 years. The last 6 of those years have been documented here, where I have found immeasurable joy imagining and creating on my own. I have shared my love of LEGOs online with kind people from around the world, and in-person with friends and at conventions. Yet through all this time, I have never experienced the joy of building LEGOs together with somebody else.

built by me

I will refrain from gushing about her in today’s post, but suffice it to say I was surprised and felt very much overcome with affection when my partner asked me if we could build together. I have always expected to be met with judgement from my future-partner should I delve back into my LEGO obsession as an adult, yet here is my wonderful partner, asking me, unprompted, if we can build together! Of course I obliged.

First we tried to build a minifigure-scale house together. We discovered quickly that such a project — which I would already find difficult to complete on my own — is very stressful to coordinate between two people. We scrapped this project and instead have been building miniature houses and buildings together. This is a much better collaborative project because we can each build small creations independently, allowing us to make our own design choices but still create a cool project together.

built by me

Focused silence, mixed with the clamorous sounds of pieces clattering together, and small moments of collaboration when we discuss creative ideas; there’s a deeply connective quality to the time we spend building together. I love when my partner makes design decisions that I would never think of, or hearing her explain her plan for a building and getting to see how she translated that idea using bricks once her creation is done.

built by ‘J’

I asked my partner to share a little about her design and build process for the mini house shown below. Here’s what she said:

“I knew that I wanted to build a house with the dark green blocks because that’s one of my favorite colors. I chose the gray and brown accents because I liked how they looked with the dark green. Even though I didn’t have a clear house design in mind, I knew that I wanted it to be different from the previous two houses that I had built which were bigger and more symmetrical. I was pleasantly surprised by the final product, and I feel like I used a lot of unique pieces, like the cupcake swirl over the door, the angle-bracket for the bench, and the cone pieces around the window.”

‘J’

built by ‘J’

If you get the opportunity to build with a loved one as an adult, take it! Find a project you can enjoy working on together and you may be surprised how much you enjoy sharing that time building.

figures built by ‘J’

‘J,’ thanks for building with me, and thanks for everything else too ❤
And thanks to everyone for reading!

Stay well!

~ The Royal Brick

A Postcard from Celeste Mountain

I bought Celeste this May, and it’s the only game in my Steam library that I’ve played almost continuously since. I’ve been itching to talk about this game since mid June, and recently I was asked for a game suggestion, a query to which I offered Celeste. The conversation that ensued gave me the chance to solidify my thoughts about why this game is worth sharing.

Celeste is a 2D-platformer about a young woman named Madeline who is determined to climb a mountain.

This game is wicked hard… seriously, Celeste will kick your butt. At the time of writing, I’ve accrued more than 24,000 deaths (and I haven’t even completed the final chapter yet). This can be a very frustrating game, at times demanding pixel-perfect movement, superhuman timing, and an uncommon flavor of problem solving. So… what keeps me climbing Celeste Mountain, even as the game gets more and more difficult?

For me the answer lies in the masterful writing of the game’s protagonist. Early on, Madeline explains:

“I told myself I would [climb the entire mountain]. I’m done breaking promises to myself.”

There is a fierce tension between Madeline’s fragile, desperate determination to reach the summit, and the relentless assertions from the people closest to her that she is a woman of little mettle who will surely give up.

Madeline’s desire to prove her naysayers wrong and to demonstrate her inner strength to herself is contagious, and forges in the player a surprisingly robust drive to reach the summit, despite the steep difficulty rise.

I discovered Celeste at a time when I, much like Madeline, was facing serious doubts about my own ability to overcome my life’s challenges. This game stands out amidst other stories about overcoming self-doubt because the folks at Matt Makes Games convey the journey back to mental strength with a level of nuance that is rare, and with a level of harsh honesty that is actually encouraging.

The encouragement I drew from Celeste was, among many other experiences I had this summer, a vital reminder about how to find my own strength again.

Beyond Celeste’s story, I could gush about the level design, music, and art direction of this game forever. Instead I’ll leave you to discover all of that for yourself.

Ultimately I’ve decided to distill my praise down to the one element I think this game has done better than any I’ve played before, which is to invest me so deeply in the characters that I’ll push through 24,000 deaths worth of frustration just to see how their journey ends. For me, that’s what takes this game from a great 9/10 to a 10/10 masterpiece.

Celeste is an absolute triumph. Challenging yet warm, this is truly one for the books.

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And now, a special thanks to those of you who have been reading since the beginning way back in 2014. Today’s post marks 100 on this blog. I write each and every post with you long-time readers in mind, truly.

Stay safe everybody!

~ The Royal Brick ❤