This past weekend I went to see Detective Pikachu. i was really looking forward to watching the movie as its the first live action Pokemon movie and the trailers have looked very reasonable. I was both happy and disappointed with the full movie.
Does it live up to all the hype? No. The movie has a convoluted plot backed by a script that sounds like it was put through Google translate several times. Much of the acting (outside of some small moments with the main protagonist and Pikachu) is forced and feels ridiculously fake. This isn't helped very much by the script which stresses plot points as many times as possible in order for Pokemon's younger fans to keep up with the needless plot twists that can be seen coming from a mile away. With the unique cast of characters we already know and love in the Pokemon universe, it feels weird that we see none of them in this movie. Sure it's probably a good idea to keep Ash and gang quarantined in the anime world, but there are many evil teams that have cooler (and more understandable) objectives than the villain of this movie did. Additionally it would be cool to see nods to popular characters from the video game franchise. In particular an appearance of the mythical Pokemon trainer Red would be a perfect inclusion as he is rarely talks in the games but holds a special place in many of the series' fans' hearts. Despite all of these setbacks, there are many hidden gems in this movie. Whenever Ryan Reynolds seems to have been given a little more leeway in the script, the resulting jokes are funny and land a lot better. The relationship between the movies' main character and Pikachu is well developed and the scenes where we just get to see them interact are some of the best in the entire movie. Finally the animation is frickin' beautiful. The movie is honestly worth the watch simply for the live action Pokemon world it creates. The few sweeping shots we get of this world are breathtaking. I can feel the young child in me yearning to live in the world of Pokemon. Whenever we see Pokemon in this film they don't disappoint. Their reactions are equally life-like and unique. I simply wish the movie was longer so we could spend less time on the terrible plot and more time on the cool visuals of the world. Overall a terrible movie but an enjoyable experience. -Watching Detective Pikachu -Problems in the movie -Enjoyable parts of the movie -Final thoughts
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This week in game design disaster struck. Steam got updated and when it did our game suddenly stopped working on the new version. To remedy this we had to update Unity and VRTK. While we though this would be a quick fix, it soon became apparent that just attaching the updated assets to our old project wouldn't work. We needed to create a new project and work from the ground up with the new VRTK set up.
This had several annoying repercussions. The lighting in the building had to be rebaked and now looks much worse. We decided to skip fixing this for now as it's still functional and right now we need to finish our game before worrying about aesthetics. We also have to make all of the intractable game items work again. Once we have that done it will be a race to make the game winnable and check up to make sure the menu and credits scenes still work. Next Week I will: -support Ryan in testing and fixing the game Recently for many of my portfolio images, I've been exploring the limits of what I can do in Photoshop to create images that are weird and fun. It has been exciting to explore areas of the program I haven't used much before and see what I can make out of them. This has led me down paths I would be too scared to go down for a normal project. I've used weird brushes to create painting-like images. I've messed around with the blur tool to soften lines and create weird atmospheres. In the future I'm planning to dive even more into these tools. The more I use tools in a creative, experimental manner, the better I can use them when creating an actual piece of artwork for a project. Already I feel excited to put the brush tool to use sprucing up the basic polygons I use to create the main bodies of my Photoshop works.
Continuing to experiment and evolve is one of the things you always need to be doing as an artist. Most of the time we are unmotivated to break outside of our comfort zone. It's hard to start a piece of art that you know isn't going to look great. However, the tools I've used while creating my last line of works in PS have shown me unique ways to make things look good even if the works themselves look less-than perfect. For every great masterpiece in PS there are at least too or three failed abominations and that's beautiful in its own way. In the coming weeks I look forward to finding even more tools in PS and getting to use them in a creative and powerful way. -Exploring creatively in Photoshop -Why it helps me grow Just before spring break started at our school, I traveled with my school ITS theatre troupe to the North Carolina state competition. I brought my sound design for Dead Man's Cell Phone with me to compete. This was a very new experience for me as I had never competed with a theatre tech presentation before. I knew what I had was good work but I worried I wouldn't be able to present it all properly within the given time frame. Our school has a lot of great tech people and I wanted to put my name up there with them by getting a superior score.
thankfully I was very prepared going into the room. We worked the night before with our teachers and fellow tech students to put the finishing touches on our presentations.When I went into the room I was relaxed and ready to show them what I had. Everything went smoothly as I quickly went through my sound plots, cue sheets, and played cues off of my bluetooth speaker. In the question portion I didn't get any questions that left me at a total loss which I took as a very good sign. At the end of the competition I got my scores back. i received a perfect score and critic's choice (an honor given to the best person in each field). While I will not be taking my sound design on to nationals, (due to my ability to only compete with one event and a critic's choice in duet acting) presenting my sound design at State's was a valuable experience. It helped me learn to explain the choices I made in the show clearly and concisely. It also gave me even more appreciation for the technical side of creating a working sound system as I had to explain the challenges I faced in rigging up speakers and creating a working speaker chain. These are skills I will be sure to take into the future as I continue to do sound work. -When and what competition I went to -The competition in summary -Important takeaways This week in game design my teammates and I worked on putting my last major pieces into the game. Pretty much everything worked as planned with a couple minor hold ups. The one thing we need to fix next week is the death text that displays when the player dies. Right now the display doesn't seem to be working and if it did the text would render directly onto the player's eyes. This is obviously a problem in several ways and we need to figure out a way to both render the text in world space and have it follow the player's headset as they look around waiting to re spawn.
Next week I will: -Fix the death text for our game -Help with creating any other last minute assets If you've read my past Pokemon and game related blogs it probably comes as no surprise to you that my favorite Pokemon game is Pokemon Black and White versions. These games have a riveting story line backed up by an interesting cast of characters all packaged in what is still one of the hardest Pokemon games to actually defeat. All of these would be great on their own but up until recently I hadn't realized just how deep this game truly goes.
The land in Pokemon Black and White is based off of the real-world location of the USA. I've written blogs in the past about how GameFreak brings this world to life in the Pokemon and characters of the game. However the deeper I look, the more I see that there is an elaborate comment on the way American society functions as a whole. The main evidence of this is the two main legendary Pokemon in Black and White. Zekrom and Reshiram are the legendary Pokemon of ideals and truth respectively. The legendary Pokemon of each region usually represent the heart and soul of that region, the core values of the real life people who live there. In different regions we might see a sun God Pokemon or a Pokemon that controls time. Instead we see in America that ultimately we pursue our own goals. Instead of deferring to higher gods or powers, in America the ultimate power is your own will to get things done. The legendary Pokemon also reflect this aspect in how they follow humans. Most legendary Pokemon are found in far off places. They avoid humans or actively seek to destroy them. Zekrom in Reshiram however follow humans by nature. Even in their Pokedex entrees it claims that they follow a trainer with strong truths/ideals. Could it be that GameFreak is making a larger comment on American society by doing this? We can't be sure. However, one thing is certain, these Pokemon games are much deeper than many people give them credit for and deserve to be looked at in greater detail from time to time. -Why I like Pokemon Black and White -What is GameFreak saying about America with Reshiram and Zekrom? This week I finished up a lot of the materials I needed to get done for our project. I finished all the functionality for both the menu and Credits scene. I put a nice skybox on both of them so that they look pleasing to the eye. I then created some ambient music for the menu scene. The biggest challenge I had was getting the controller pointers to work in the Credits scene. For some reason when I copied them over from the Main Menu scene they stopped working. After a couple headaches and a bit of adjustment we were able top get the controllers working properly once again. For the background ambiance I found some good spooky orchestrations and combined that with wind, chimes, and heartbeats to create a thoroughly creepy atmosphere. Next week I will: -Assist our programmer in anyway possible to implement the assets I've created -Create more audio assets for the game For the past several weeks I've been focused on making a working UI system for our VR horror game. There have been plenty of ups and downs throughout this process and I wanted to take a brief moment to talk about the important takeaways I've gotten from the past couple of weeks.
The first of these is that creating UI in Unity is really easy. Unity makes it super easy to create buttons and sliders that do things and are easy to access from scripts. Once I got my buttons into place for my menu it was far easier than I had anticipated to make them load new scenes. This saved me a lot of headaches and for that I give the Unity program two large thumbs up. The second takeaway is that putting UI into the actual world space is really difficult. Due to our game being in VR it doesn't make sense to project our UI right onto the eyes of our players. This would probably just blind them and hurt to overall game experience. In order to avoid this issue, we need to put the UI a little bit in front of the player in the actual world space of our game. This of course leads to a whole host of problems in order for the menu to work. The menu can't be too far away from the player or too close. You have to work with the scaling of the graphics to make sure the menu doesn't accidentally stretch across the sky. We need to disable player movement around the menu so they don't accidental wonder off and can't find their way back. All these things need to be taken into consideration and sorted out slowly through mostly trial and error. There is no quicker way to make the UI work than applying some parameters and seeing what fits. These are the two biggest things I noticed while creating UI. You need to have patience when setting up your menu to work in VR. Thankfully once you find those perfect parameters the rest should come easily thanks to Unity's fantastic UI system. -What I've been working on -The joy of Unity UI -The patience of creating UI for VR This past week I buckled down to make the Main Menu and Credits scenes work. Originally when we made the Main Menu scene we only had a start button and so when the player clicked the button all we had to do was write a code that loaded the next scene in the build. Unfortunately when we added a credits scene this no longer worked as we needed the player to be able to get to either the Credits or the Main Game from the Main Menu scene. After a bit of tinkering around I got a new system to work based off the string names of each scene. I still need to do some work making the credits scene look nice and professional as well as adding sound to both scenes but by the end of next week the starting UI scenes of the game should be nearly done. Now that all the coding is done I can simply focus on making these areas of the game look good.
Next week I will: -work on beautifying the Main Menu and Credits areas of the game Recently Nintendo has announced the next mainline series Pokemon game: Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield. We haven't seen a lot about this game yet as there is currently only one trailer out however I wanted to go ahead and give my opinion on what I want to see out of the new set of games.
I have always been a fan of the mainline Pokemon games. I remember saving up to by my first DS and then using the extra money I had to buy a used version of Pokemon Diamond. The challenge of searching for where to go next. The rush of success when I defeated hard opponents, the sharing of strategies with my friends whenever we were having trouble defeating certain areas of the game, these are some of the most precious memories I have of playing Pokemon. The first thing I would like to see in the new games is a return to the more challenging side of Pokemon. The past couple of games have been fun but lacked the challenge I felt as a grew up playing pokemon. The puzzles in Gyms have gotten shorter and easier, victory road is now a mostly linear path without any of the maze-like qualities of past games. I want to be able to feel the rush of having accomplished something hard in a Pokemon game again. I realize that Pokemon's fanbase is largely made of younger kids but I hope that with the release of easier games such as Let's Go Evee and Let's Go Pikachu, game Freak will be more willing to up the level of difficulty in their main games to appeal to older fans. Many people who grew up playing Pokemon are now young adults and I think it might be time for a Pokemon game that's aimed at pulling some of them back into the fold. Another big item I would like to see in Sword and Shield is an emphasis on good story telling. My favorite Pokemon games to this day are Pokemon Black and White purely because of the beautiful and interesting story they told. I would like to see something similar in Sword and Shield. Sure battling and training Pokemon still has to be the main focus of the game. The player still needs to battle through all the Gym leaders in order to become the champion of the new region but that doesn't mean there can't be an interesting plot behind the core game mechanics. I loved in the Unova region when you tried to challenge the champion only to be suddenly surrounded by the castle of team Plasma bursting out of the ground. Twists like that make games interesting and keep players on their toes. Ultimately these are the two biggest changes I want to see in the new region. -The new Pokemon games Sword and Shield have been announced -Why I want harder games -Why I want a better story line |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. 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 Schools Categories
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