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
0 Comments
There are many reasons inDesign is different from Photoshop. This week I have been tasked by my teacher to create a program for our school's jazz combo concert. I was told to do this in inDesign which In have never used before. My goal is to figure out how to use it quickly using what I already know from Photoshop and using Google to find answers to any other questions I have.
The immediate thing that hits me when I start in inDesign is that everything is based off of rectangles. Anything you put on the page must first have a rectangular area prepared for it. I can't say I totally understand the true reason for this except that it makes sure your design looks professional. When you use only rectangles it helps keep everything aligned and looking nice. All of the writing and specific pictures I need have been given to me. It is my job to arrange them in a way that is clear and pleasant to look at. For my design I will mostly be using basic shapes to frame the words I'm given. Our school logo (seen below) is just simple lines and circles. Using this as inspiration I aim to create a simple, but effective program with just enough flair to show the creativity of our school's students. -Why I'm learning inDesign -Some differences it has from Photoshop -My goal this week The past week in advanced studies was pretty crazy. We only had three days of school due to the hurricane and college applications for several colleges were due on the 15th. That said we still got some good work done in game design. The chicken model was finished which means these next couple of weeks will be filled with animations involving chickens. To get prepared I did a little bit of research on the chicken which will be detail ed in full in a fun blog post I plan to make in the future.
The game design room is being extended to the entire top level of our school's new building. With it came a slew of new models being created, simplified and textured. Due to the short week, we mostly just started projects last week which will get finished in the weeks ahead. It is exciting to finally be beyond the game design room. It feels as though we, as a project group, are finally out of the tutorial stage of making this game. As the kids these days say, "The grind starts now!" Next week we will work on: -Creating models for the new rooms -Creating chicken animations -Finishing textures and functionality codes in the game design room 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 Over the past week we've finally started working on 2D games again in our Advanced Game Design class. This year instead of doing this solo, however, we are kicking it off this year with a group project. The teams are trios and we have a lot of work ahead of us especially since this time around the objective of our games has already been decided for us.
Our game needs to inform people about the Durham-Orange Monorail project. This is a real life project that was started way back in 2011 as a small tax on Durham and Orange county residents. The idea was to make a monorail system that could run all the way from NCCU to UNC Hospital connecting a large area of heavy work traffic. This would ease the traffic as well as replace several bus routes that were responsible for parts of this journey. It is projected to provide 26,000 trips today which would help take cars off the road and give a cheap option to get between important places such as the Duke and UNC Hospitals. In 2017, this project finally has entered its final stages by getting approval from the Federal Transit Administration to enter the engineering phase. This project hasn't all been flowers and good news though. In fact there was for a long time large kick-back against the project from people who didn't want it going through their communities. They worried about the noise pollution and danger it may cause if it runs through a residential community. However, these concerns were mostly outweighed by the overwhelming evidence that the monorail project would bring none of these problems to the communities it went through and that its benefits were greater than many of these risks anyway. Many of the opponents wouldn't give up that easily and so even to this day it isn't rare to see an anti-light rail sign along the road or placed in front of City Hall. -What's new from the Advanced Game Design Class? -What is the Durham-Orange Monorail Project? -Benefits? -Opponents? Pre-production is the stage in a project where things are planned out. You need to effectively lay out your ideas in a clear way and assess of they are reasonable. Without this stage you end up wasting a lot of precious production time on solving problems that could have been fixed right in the beginning with a little planning. The best example I have pf this is when I did a project on Nintindo for 7th grade social studies. Instead of planning out how my team would research and lay out our findings in an organized way we skipped right to research. In the end, after spending most of our time messing around reading on Nintindo's wikipedia page, we sloppily threw together a powerpoint which was really just an assortment of random Nintindo pictures and no real information. I had learned a lot from the project but my peers, who were my target audience, most likely learned nothing.
From the Kelheor's lab article (link below) I learned that pre-production is an important time where the idea of a final product needs to be created. Along with that final idea there should be guidelines on how to get there and checks on whether or not it will work. Without this blueprint of sorts projects can easily get derailed at the slightest problem and using pre-production helps bring the project to a beautiful final product-unlike my 7th grade Nintindo project. Whenever you start a project it is always a good idea to state the problem you are trying to solve first. This not only allows for greater creativity in solving that problem, but also sets clear criteria to judge how good proposed solutions are. Stating the problem helps keep everyone on the same page while your working on a project which makes for better coordination throughout the project.
One time I didn't state my problem first during a project was the career exploration, tabletop game project last year in scientific visualization. In this project I skipped straight to the solution; I really wanted to make a card game like Magic: the Gathering. This instantly narrowed the creative space I had for the project. Since i was set on this one idea it cut off any other, possibly more innovative, approaches we could have had. Also without defining the problem I had no way of knowing if my solution had actually even solved the problem causing me to go back and refine the idea later in ways that should have been done in the beginning. The last and most crucial consequence this had was that it caused a lot of confusion among our team. Most of my team members had never even played Magic before. IN the end since I hadn't defined the problem I was forced to do much more work than was necessary even though in the end the project turned out ok. Over the past week we have been working with vector images on Adobe Illustrator. I found how fun it can be to work with simple shapes to form complex objects. It was fun to take normal shapes and contort them using different tools and features within Illustrator. However there were many hard things about working in Illustrator such as having to arrange shapes on a single layer whereas they were all on their own layer in Photo Shop. Another hard part about using Illustrator was that in order to upload anything to the internet it first had to be exported into a bit map and when uploaded it would a lot of times appear pixelated or have random negative colors.
|
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
All
Archives
May 2019
|