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Sunday, January 22, 2023

New Year, New Me(ss of ideas)

Global GT Lights cars racing in Silverstone by butter_lord and Kad'O

It's already halfway past January and things have been positive so far for me, at least for normal things I do. Past 15 days were filled with me following this year's Dakar Rally while being in awe with how the cinematography are put along with the commentator's plethora of dad jokes, puns, remarks witty enough to wipe floors with Lorelai Gilmore, and sneaks that unfortunately doesn't include Taylor Swift references (but thankfully I got that one covered myself). Other things include finishing Combat Mecha Xabungle which I consider it as an "unserious mecha anime with more comedy bias despite having its fair share of serious moments", and an office trip to Jogjakarta of which I haven't visited the place for a long time, but last and not least is rebooting my content creation project after reflecting on my actions in terms of creations, although I have to say I still have a slow start with not that much post interactions along the way.

Even then, my homework is stacked as the time goes, but my discovery of a new method in creation and a more active community actually help alleviating the burden and actually make the final work satisfying. I do have this target where I need to make sure that I can make good creations and cash in some new audiences on social media on the way to keep the top down racing genre alive and interesting, especially with more games on the sub-genre making their returns such as GeneRally 2. That said, this was something that led to the first ever major announcement for the new project: the 2023 Dakar Rally T1 class cars, three of them, with 10 major drivers represented so far.

But Dakar Rally vehicles are just the tip of the iceberg. It actually started with something that doesn't have to do with top down racers, or racing in general, let alone racing games: Taylor Swift's new album, Midnights.

MIDNIGHTS


The date was 29th of August 2022, the time... probably midnight somewhere in USA night time in USA, but it was no ordinary night time as it was the 2022 MTV Video and Music Awards. Taylor Swift won her third award of the night for Video of the Year: "All Too Well: The Short Film". From there, she ended her acceptance speech and thanking the fans for the short film by saying "it might be a fun moment to tell you that my brand new album comes out Oct. 21. And I will tell you more at midnight." Since then, the world was shocked, the galaxy was screaming, and Swifties, me included, shouted as loud as if they were in EVO 2022 when the Cell Yell returned during the Dragon Ball FighterZ finals, continuously hollering as Taylor revealed the song names for the new album one by one leading up to the album's release.

The date was 21st of October 2022, almost two months from the announcement, the same day where BOOM Esports delivered a karma to defending TI winner Team Spirit that called them "mediocre". Safe to say that on that day there were two booms but as the midnight came one of them became a bang, more precisely a series of bangs as Midnights became an album with a series of bangers: "Anti-Hero", "Vigilante Shit", "Snow on the Beach", "Bejeweled", "Lavender Haze", just to name a few. These, however, are just 40% of Taylor's power as the coveted 3am Edition dropped and more bangs means more impact, both on charts and lyrics with strong entries like "Would've, Could've, Should've" and "Bigger Than The Whole Sky" which brought out her saddening and painful perspective to one of her older love stories she experienced.

Taylor Swift's new album enjoyed its run as a chart-topper and even clean swept the Top 10 in the Billboard Hot 100 at some point, an unmatched record that is a fruit of her years of successful labor. But then you'd be asking... what does this have to do with my top down racing project? Understandably, her songs isn't made for competitive environments such as car racing, but there is one aspect of Midnights that inspired me: the album cover. It is clean and simple, with a perfect color combination that makes it click. I was thinking if this would play a role on my content creation project's reboot, given that I left [R]GARAGE brand out cold due to real life commitments. And so the rebranding plans began, from the album's announcement, to the release, and finally seven years after I actually unveiled the new face for the brand. It is something that has led up to the next phase of my content creation game after doing stuffs like this since... 2008, I think?

A NEW PROJECT CALLED PROJECT.38R


From Rendy Andrian's TS Site, RendyTUNED, and [R]GARAGE, these brands had their own stories to be told. What started as just a journey dedicated to Turbo Sliders became an intertwining story involving more top down racers as well, and eventually I lived with the top down racers despite not spending that much time with them. I got drawn by this sub-genre from my junior high school days, and I kept doing this even as someone who's now employed somewhere. As my design approach on content creation matured and given that it exceeded the standards I set during my college years, a re-brand is the way to go, and so Project.38R came.

The aim of this so-called "Project" is to mainly promote top down racers aside from being a content creation project of yours truly. I kinda noticed that there aren't that many content of top down racers, and even if there are, it'll be just something from, say, 5 or more years ago. I also noticed this after watching the Ultimate Racing 2D 2 videos of James Early, thinking if someone can do the same with other top down racers. I'm not dismissing Circuit Superstars and art of rally either since these two have a sizable amount of fanbase and content creators covering them in their playthroughs (so they succeed in that regard). Even old racing games have their footing too thanks to content creators like GPLaps, of all people.

Project.38R can also be interpreted as a carryover of the past brands. Since college, I took the number 38 in almost every competition I'm in, and the color scheme used doesn't differ much from [R]GARAGE either (apart from swapping the main color), not to mention the logo itself, which is the "R" inside the box as a tribute of the [R] symbol used in Gran Turismo 2 to denote race cars in the game, only this time with a modern interpretation where I actually made use of the Golden Ratio circles. Basically this is my graphic designing freelance projects summed up reflecting so much, it actually feels like a total rebrand.

Touching on Social Media aspect, [R]GARAGE brand did get active Facebook and Twitter but it doesn't do that much and it was... all over the place if I had to say myself. The banning of dedicated email made rebranding the existing [R]GARAGE Twitter page impossible so this called for an all-new account, but finding out that I still have another burner account I don't use often actually helped as the next phase would be repurposing that burner account to become the eventual page for this new brand. For the Facebook page, fortunately, it's simply rebranding without all the fuss, and Instagram is definitely a new territory. Either way, there is still a lot to learn as having an audience and getting more post interactions are the next goal for the pages, to which the start has been slow for now. Last but not least, the post plan for now focuses on normal posts, with video posts coming soon, as soon as I will get a new and better laptop.

However, I felt like Project.38R won't be just limited to top down racers. My other visions for the page are this being an art portfolio to showcase my works, and this being a page for racing games and cars. Every time I see pages like Japanese Racing Cars, I'd always feel like I would do one of those profile/story type posts while showcasing my or others' creations so that this page won't merely just be a "content dump" type of page (I assume that this can be called as content diversification).

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK


The content creation initiative of Project.38R led to an ability for me to share my WIPs, and the ever-growing WIP are in their "ready" phase, in terms of graphics. However, part of the success is also riding on the current wave, in this case it's the 2023 Dakar Rally, which eventually led to an announcement of the mod for the three cars for Ultimate Racing 2D 2. Here, I announced three cars that are ready for release: Audi RS Q e-tron E2, Prodrive Hunter BRX T1+, and Toyota Hilux DKR T1+, featuring notable liveries for each car spanning this year's Dakar and, to some extent, last year's running, while others, such as Martin Prokop's Ford Raptor to name a few, are in the planning phase and will come soon as a later release (read: part of an ongoing collection). Whichever way you look at it, this will be my most recent grid of cars completed, and even the fastest in process from WIP phase to finishing phase, thanks to the new method I am using now.

Making these cars however were a challenge all around. The availability of blueprints was one of such factors; the Audi one was easy since Audi MediaCenter has the car's top view along with the original RS Q e-tron that ran last year, Prodrive's had these "conflicting" blueprints where the one I found and ended up working with had some "interesting" perspective compared another one I found, though I decided to make sure the eventual car has a believable shape for a top down racer by making the latter as a  secondary reference. Last but not least is definitely the Hilux, as the blueprint for the 2023 car doesn't exist and the only way was through a ripped 3D model somewhere which my laptop wasn't in mood for opening a 3D modeling application given the current spec, the existing blueprints meanwhile do not match the current car's dimensions so I had to take some creative liberty from the existing one and, once the shape was made, adjust the shape so it'd look like the current car, all within the scaled dimensions.

And then there's the liveries: BRX cars weren't that hard, Toyota Gazoo Racing ones look challenging but no problem in the end, and so does Audi Sport's, leaving me with two challenging ones: Vaidotas Žala's Teltonika Racing livery and Guerlain Chicherit's Mad Max-inspired livery (by Chris Warner Design) featuring a logo that doesn't exist online yet. Since these cars are scaled not too big for the game, the keyword I had to carry (and actually played a big role in the creation of the aforementioned Dakar cars) was "believable"; the  series of blue stripes on the sides of Žala's car are actually interpreted as a solid shape, while the gradient effects were achieved with the help of Feather settings for the concerned shapes, and lastly Vector Masks make sure that these feathered shapes do not bleed to unwanted parts of the liveries. As for Chicherit's livery, methods used consist of just scribbling shapes and use appropriate fill and stroke colors, use additional shapes on some parts with the right levels of Feather, and utilize Vector Mask on parts. For the logo that doesn't exist, I used the closest font similar to the real-life application and the rest is just adjusting the shape accordingly, and eventually place it on where it's meant to be placed in.


However, the Dakar 2023 collection won't be the first release of 2023 despite going to be the "main event" release as that title goes to Global GT Lights, also for UR2D 2, a lightweight racing machine for professional racing and track day environments. I actually first knew this car from ToCA Racing Driver 2 during my career playthrough long ago and didn't notice it'd appear in the next game until way later, of which the cars don a different livery in contrast to the former's solid colors. Knowing the car ported to GTR2, this car became one of my wishlist items for WIPs, but it didn't materialize until way, way later after discovering a new (and eventual) car making method myself which has made work easier, successfully scratching the car from the eternal WIP list. Looking at the situation, I can guarantee that it's not impossible to see cars in the eternal WIP list get scratched one by one this year and eventually be done for. For now, the cars can be downloaded by visiting the link(s) on the above embed tweet.

Current ecosystem of content creation allows for better media showcase, whether if it's WIP or a completed ones, and going forward this would help in promoting top down racers and their contents, however this is definitely just the start, as the next set of goals to be met for this year will be diversifying contents, enforcing daily post activity, and, as said way above, finding audience, doing promotions, and getting all the post interactions, be it likes or replies.

~[R]
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