Being in this pathway has been instrumental to understanding and fully grasping the difficulty of being a Game Designer. Before I went through these classes, I had no idea what it meant to design games. I had no idea how difficult, long, or expansive the process of going from one end of the design process to the other was. Honestly, I didn't even know the skills or programs involved. This concentration answered all of those questions, and did a great job of helping me understand the pitfalls, hurdles, and rewards of being a Game Designer. I've learned how to work in Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, Unity, 3DS Max, I've learned how to code, how to 3D model, how to rig a 3D model, how to animate, and how to stitch all of these together to create a finished produced. I also got extremely useful glances into the job market for this field, to gain a realistic understanding of the money I could make, how likely it is for me to get a job, and how viable of a future these skills will give me. What's been the most useful however has been being free to taste each step of the production process, to get a feel for which parts I'm willing and or capable of doing. I've learned that 3D modeling, animating, coding, story telling, and production management are all fields I'd be willing to work in. Sound design and 2D art however are fields that I struggle in, and would need a lot more practice in if I wanted to make a career out of either. The least useful information I learned was the difference between electron and light microscopes in Sci Vis, as well as other random things that class taught me that had no bearing on the game design field. I also wish we had spent more time on coding, specifically independent coding. Copying what they tell you to in tutorials didn't teach me coding at all, as I found out this year. Rather, having an issue and needing to overcome it by searching through the scripting reference and actually figuring out what needed to be written is what taught me how to code. If we had learned how to code this way, I wouldn't have needed to spend months trying to learn it on my own when I could've been advancing the progress of my independent study.
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As a Teaching Assistant, you can be an invaluable asset to both your teacher, and your students. Picking up questions and solving problems to ease the workload on your teacher can help them provide a better education for the students, and generally make their teaching experience easier. Students benefit from having more than one person they can turn to for problem solving, and hearing multiple opinions on an issue has a better chance of helping them solve it. Specifically within the Game Design field, extra eyes on code can help spot issues that would have normally gone unnoticed, and due to visual design being so subjective, multiple opinions can provide more objective and useful criticism. Additionally, being a teaching assistant is greatly beneficial to the TA, and provides a unique educational opportunity. I greatly enjoyed being a teaching assistant, and I learned a lot about working with students, problem solving, and how to present myself as a role model to my fellow students. I would love to do this kind of thing again, and recommend it to anyone who is passionate about their pathway.
As we end the year, now would be a good time to look upon my project as a whole. And, as a whole, I did great. I set out to make a product, and even with all it's flaws, glitches, dinks and bumps, there is one aspect about it that I can be uninhibitedly proud of.
It's fun. Other human beings, other people, played my game and had genuine fun. It's very gratifying to have an idea, work on it for so long, and have people actually enjoy it, and I feel this game is going to very much influence what kind of games I'm going to make in the future. I've always wanted to make experiences, games that make people feel certain emotions, and this has only added fuel to that fire. And, for the first time, I can really see this whole game design thing working out. If I, by myself, can make a product people enjoy, with a team of people helping me I can make a polished product that people enjoy. I'm excited for the future, and for what I'm going to make, and the stories I'm going to tell. Lets just hope my career hasn't peaked already. This year with Mr. Bourgeois has been a blast. Working with students, helping Mr. B help them learn, running errands, and working on projects for him has been informational and fun. I've expanded upon my ability to teach students and help them through material, as well as increased my familiarity with the materials they're working on, such as Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Unity. I've greatly benefited from being Mr. B's teaching assistant, and I believe that both the students and Mr. B have benefited from my work and effort.
Yesterday we presented the current state of our projects to our peers and parents. Seeing what everyone else got done in the time we've had to work on this, seeing a side by side comparison of our products, made me realize a couple things. Firstly, nobody besides me likes coding apparently, which makes me excited for my job prospects. If my future peers dislike coding, that means I get to be paid to make it so they don't have to. From what I've seen, everyone likes either 3D modeling or character design, areas that I'm capable of working in and understand, but am certainly not as adept in as my peers. I also learned quite a bit about how far my presentation skills have gone since freshmen year. If I make a complete fool of myself, I'm much more relaxed and capable of presenting in a fun and entertaining way. And, generally, if I treat a presentation as entertainment, rather than a serious production for serious people, I can actually get across more information in a much more comfortable fashion than if I stood up there awkward and stuttering. So, generally, a good learning experience.
I threw out the last method of moving the cars, in favor of NavMeshs, which are paths on which NavMesh Agents can move. So, now my cars have actual AI, which controls acceleration, top speed, and makes them automatically swerve to avoid obstacles. I've also figured out how to instantiate NavMeshs, and have set it up so that the meshes line up with the roads, allowing cars that are instantiated along them to drive down the road. Unfortunately, right now, I have not figured out a way to link the meshes, and the cars will just stop dead at the end of the mesh they were spawned on, even though they overlap. But, seeing them swerve to avoid stuff and actually collide rather than phase through each other is really nice. Next Week:
- Get NavMeshs to connect - Get back on creating a speed dial This week I worked on tearing apart how the cars move and redesigning it from the ground up. Right now I've gotten it so that that drive forward based on physics, and roll on their wheels, but getting them to follow the road is the main issue. I've been looking into spline systems to create an AI that follows a predetermined path, but getting that to duplicate properly is going to be difficult and probably way too complicated for my purposes. Though, it would let me implement a curved road, but I don't know how possible that's going to be at this stage. At the moment I've gotten the cars to go straight by locking their Quaternion, but that causes it's own difficulties, making it impossible for them to do anything other than look straight in the direction I've pointed them, making crashes weird. I wanted to make it so that if they got knocked off course they'd correct themselves straight, and in principle that's how the system I have set up works, except it does it over the course of a single frame, every frame. So not optimal. Next week:
-Figure out a way to keep the cars going straight on the road This week, I created a credit scene, which includes both credits for the music I implemented, as well as sound effects that I am in the process of implementing, as well as instructions for actually playing the game. I have menu music, and am currently working on a realistic sounding engine, which is going to involve some scripts and sound manipulation.
This week, I created a secondary scene for a title/load up screen, as well as polishing the score text, as well as implementing a multiplier function. I also finally figured out why the buildings tanked the frame rate so much, and had to go back and edit the models directly. However, they work, and are implemented, spawning along with the bridges to block off the road. I also decided on a name, Bridge Mania, as well as actually building the game and creating an executable. I have a product I could present, though I still have a bit of polishing to do to get it exactly how I want. Next week:
- Mess with tire settings - Add sound This quarter I helped Mr. Bourgeois with students, ran errands, and generally helped around the classroom. I am an asset to Mr. Bourgeois, keeping order in his absence and helping substitute teachers know the flow of the classroom. I also help students that Mr. Bourgeois is too busy to help, and offer opinions and my expertise in coding and unity to help students overcome issues.
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AuthorI am 17 years old, and currently enrolled in Durham School of the Arts. Within the Game Design field, I'm looking to become a game writer or a programmer, preferably a combination of the two.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public School Archives
June 2018
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