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.
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The project is going great. I've been setting goals for myself, and I've been achieving them with my own skills. Be it coding, rendering, modeling, I've been able to power through and solve problems myself, and while my methods might not be the best, most streamline in the world, they work, and that's what matters. This project is going to prove that I know in ins and outs of every step of the game design process, and that is going to go a long way in the game design industry. Once it's done, I can add it to my portfolio, and actually have a fully fleshed out game to point to when people ask "Why should we hire you?". And honestly, I'm excited to see the final project. I've still got a long way to go, and the final project probably won't be exactly what I imagine it will be. Though, I will admit it's extremely satisfying to have everything exactly how I want it to be, and only settling for changes when I realize I genuinely just can't do what I set out to do, instead of having other opinions (as much as I should probably be asking people for those).
This quarter, outside of school, I've been focusing a lot on college and the future. I've been thinking about how the skills I've been learning here are going to help me get a job, and I'm really glad that I'm doing the project that I'm doing. It's not really going to help me get into college, but once I do get there, I'll have significant advantages over other people going into Game Design programs, which is going to make me stand out for apprenticeships and job opportunities. The project is also helping me hone in on what parts of game development that I enjoy and don't enjoy. 3D modeling, tinkering with settings, and problem solving, as frustrating as they can be, are fairly fun. Coding has been really difficult, and I think I really need to take a professional class on it before I can really say wither or not I enjoy it, but I'm definitely still looking to learn how to use it.
Recently I've been taking a look at games that have gone through the pre-release stages, and thinking about developer and gamer interactions, specifically with PlayerUnknown's Battleground, or PUBG. It baffles me that companies can look at the complaints that their player base has, in this case hackers, and look at the solutions they come up with, in this case locking regions to make it so that people from other countries can't play on servers based in other parts of the world, and not even respond to them. It would be one thing to have a complicated situations where locking the regions would conflict with their interests, or international law prevents them, but we don't know if either of these are true, because they haven't communicated with their players. They simply issued an apology and an ingame currency compensation, which gave different people different amounts of currency for undisclosed reason. If I ever am on a development team for a game that becomes as popular as PUBG, I'm definitely going to push for there to be a competent team of public relations writers that would keep players updated on the state of the game, future plans, and actually respond to the communities complaints.
The project has been going fairly slowly. I've been running into a bunch of coding issues that have been slowing me down a lot. I'm thinking of taking a break from the coding and just work on some modeling instead, to get the scene better set. Get some trees in there, some buildings, get rid of the ugly mountains in the background, make it look a lot more like Durham. But beyond that, motivation has been running low. I'm sure it's just a slump, been dealing with increased stress and personal stuff, but it's just made tackling issues a lot harder. Hopefully I'll get back on the ball and get everything running again.
I've picked up a couple games over the past few months, and done some reading on the state of gaming, and the state we're in right now is interesting. Indie gaming is sky rocketing, big AAA games are failing, and people are getting fed up with EA's shenanigans. Well, actually this is the second movement of people getting upset with big gaming, with new results. Before, there was a wave of satirical "games", such as Rock Simulator, where the main gameplay is literally just looking at a rock. This satirical gaming brought the definition of a game into question, allowed people to experiment, allowed the Indie scene to gain publicity. Now, we're seeing the satire start to die down again as the big corporations actually genuinely struggle to make profits, and the Indie scene realizes that they can capitalize on the general upset by putting out games that lack the stupid trends AAA games have been taking on that people are upset over. Now is the time to join the field, as smaller companies begin to have more hold over the industry, which makes my future look fairly bright. I, along with my peers, will pioneer a new age of gaming. The Indie Age.
It's been really interesting to see how differently I play games now a days. Instead of just suspending my disbelief and skimming over details to try and immerse myself into them, I'm picking them apart. I see the edges, the seams at which they're pulled together, and the patchwork for coding and modeling becomes clearer. It's, actually kinda takes away from some of them. Makes it harder to use them for entertainment when I'm analyzing them, and even coming up with better ways for the mechanics to be run. Fallout 4 specifically has been getting on my nerves, because of the leveling and Vats system. You have to put more points into a broader skill such as Perception to unlock a new skill to put levels into, and it's just a bad system that takes too much time and effort to actually manage. And the Vats system, while cool, kinda gets rid of the skill factor in gunplay and puts it to a coin toss. But it's certainly been interesting to be able to see more about how the games I love have been put together.
Working on a project alone has a lot of ups and downs. It's great because I get to make all the executive decisions, I make the rules, I can take the game in the exact direction I want to, and I don't have to worry about anyone else getting in the way. It's also great because I can make everything up to my standards, and make it all fit together as cohesively as I want. I also get a great sense of what I'm lacking, what fields I enjoy doing, what I'm good at, and what I need to improve. For example, I really enjoy modeling, but I'm really lacking in my ability to code. And that brings me to the downs of being by myself. I have no one else to fill in for those flaws, I just have to make up for them. Which is also kinda good, makes me learn, which is the whole point of this project.
So far, I've only really worked with modeling the characters for my game, and shaping the environment. But, I'm genuinely proud of what I've done, and it's starting to look like an actual game. I'm excited to no end about this, that I'm actually making a game. But, it's not all been pretty. I've learned a good lesson about importing and exporting assets. That lesson being, avoid it if you can. In this case I really couldn't avoid it, because Unity doesn't have the extensive object manipulating ability that 3DS Max does, but it's really frustrating when you do finally import an asset and it doesn't go through right, and you have to figure out what the issue was, and then remodel around that issue. Specifically, I figured out Unity really doesn't like the mirror function that 3DS Max has, so I had to remodel a large section of the truck. Though, in honesty, it was probably for the better, it helped me rediscover soft selection, and I got a much better product due to it. That's another thing that I've been running into, rediscovering a lot of old features that I'd forgotten about that really make modeling so much smoother. But, once I get the bridge done, which shouldn't take more then a day, I'll have all the models that I need for now, and then I can move into the coding and animation part of this project. And, oh boy, that's going to be interesting.
This year has been really interesting. It's been really fun to just kinda, sit down, and get an idea out of my head. I've got everything planned out, I know what I want to do, and I've just gotta get from point A to point B. I've also been scheduling myself fairly well, I've mostly been getting my goals done every week, I've been working diligently, and I'm making good progress. This is of course before I've started coding, which is going to be a hassle, but it's going to be a really good learning experience. In general, all of this has been a good learning experience, figuring out what I'm good at, what needs improving, and how well I'm able to work without an real prodding from anyone besides myself. All in all, I feel like this year is going to go really well, and I'm going to produce a good product.
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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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