Next year for my senior project, a several people (including me) will be building a VR tour of our school in Unity. To do this, we’ll need to push our skills as designers farther than ever before to create something truly amazing. I decided to get a little bit of a head start though and do a bit of research on how VR works in Unity and if I could find any tutorials that would get me ready for next year.
What I found was super encouraging. There was plenty of support on the Unity website for designers looking to get started in Unity VR. I even found a tutorial series for VR games which I intend to try and complete before the end of this school year so I will be comfortable coding when the time comes next year. The only worry I have now is about the specs requirements for VR and our school computers. I think we will be able to run Unity VR but I’m worried it will be glitchy due to the bad graphics cards on our school computers. Either way we’ll find a way to make things work and I’m very excited to see where this project takes me. unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/virtual-reality/vr-overview -My senior project -Fruits of my VR research -My worries
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If you're reading this blog you probably are aware of the massively popular game Fortnite. From its release onward it has had huge success and become a large phenomenon in the gaming community. After having become the center of memes and jokes so quickly, it can be easy to forget the genius that went into the making of this game. In this post I intend to unpack those core ideas from the viewpoint of a pure observer (being someone who has never played the game).
The first thing I want to delve into is the core game play. For those who don't know, Fortnite is a survival shooter game where 100 players are dropped onto a single map. These players must then find guns, ammo, health packs, and more as they struggle to be the last player standing. This battle royale style of game play is far from new. Popular video games in the past such as H1Z1 and Player Unknown: Battlegrounds use a very similar style. So what does Fortnite do to change the formula? Fortnite adds a construction portion. Using a building style similar to games like Rust or Conan Exiles, players in Fortnite can construct ramps, walls and other protective barriers. This addition gives players a new feature to explore and master which is a welcome change to a genre that has been looking for something new. However, this isn't the only thing Fortnite has done to improve its game play. Fortnite's art style and general feel is perfect for appealing to a wide audience. Earlier battle royale games have stuck to a muted realistic art style. After all, this style makes sense for a harsh realistic FPS which is the target of games like H1Z1. Fortnite has switched this style for a much more cartoon and inviting experience. This opened up the game to a much wider audience. Now not only could the competitive community play an intense battle royale, but casual players could also have fun with a visually exciting game. Fortnite shows that your game doesn't have to be incredibly innovative to be a success. By tweaking old formulas and choosing an effective art style, a game can reach a wide audience and improve on its predecessors. -Why am I looking at Fortnite? -How they changed game play -How they changed art style -The takeaway These past couple of weeks in Game Design, we’ve jumped back into Unity. This isn’t the first time this year I’ve worked in Unity so I didn’t have a hard time getting used to coding or any of the general editing skills necessary for Unity. However there is one key difference between what I’ve been doing in Unity and the new stuff I’m currently working on. That difference is previously I had focused solely on 2D games and in our new unit we’ve entered the world of the 3D.
So what’s different? For a comprehensive list you can look at the button below but to make it simple: Another Axis and Lighting. The first difference is rather obvious and is the addition of the Z-axis. This has major impacts both when setting up your scene and when programming. You have to be careful whenever coding not to forget that objects need three inputs when you transform them them. The third axis also means you need a different kind of rigidbody component for the physics to work. Another major difference between 3D and 2D is using lighting. In 2D lifhting is generally very generic. Using 3D suddenly you need to think of how lighting will affect your scene. If you are using a single source of light what will happen when the player gets out of range? Or if you choose to go with a directional light how will that affect how your scene looks and how objects look a small they move around. -what are we doing in game design now? -what are the diffences between making making 2D and 3D games? -Z-axis -Lighting This quarter for my personal blog posts I've decided to focus on photo editing. This is a skill central to many jobs. It's used to make posters, graphic designs, and much more. Most of my Photoshop work so far focuses on what I can create on my own. These drawings, while good for my purposes in games and graphic design, leave a whole area of Photoshop unexplored by me. In order to keep growing my skills, I thought it would be interesting to go out of my comfort zone and edit some photos. The first thing I want to do and what this post will showcase is the first poster i made using only the skills I already know. To do this I took some photos (courtesy of Zack Hersch) of our current school production of Othello. Once I had some raw images I put my old skills to the test and made a quick poster. This is the result: As you can see the result is a little rough and not that different from what I usually do. Yet still I learned some valuable lessons already. I learned that the dodge and burn tools are really powerful when applied to jpegs. In some places I may have gotten a bit over zealous in created shadows. I also learned that some pictures may have been taken in different lights. This is why one of the actors is so yellow on my poster and I'm looking to find a way to fix this issue in the future.
-Blog post plans for this quarter -Why photo editing is important -My first try at editing some photos |
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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