A new year of theatre shows is upon us at DSA. While I decided to sit out on doing sound for our first show, Godspell, I'm back to work on our next production of Dead Man's Cell Phone. This is a play by Sarah Ruhl that explores human connection and how technology both connects and isolates us. For this play our director wants it to have a distinct noir-mystery feel. We plan to incorporate this in our sound design by using smooth noir-jazz during transitions. I started doing research on the kind of music we could use and found a lot of good royalty-free music online that our sound screw could use in the show. The noir music clashes with harsh technological sounds throughout the script. There are a lot of phone rings that are used throughout the course of the play. To find the best phone ring to use I started by asking my director what her idea was on how the ring should sound. She envisioned something like the original blackberry ringtone. Going off of this i found several possible blackberry ringtones. However, what I realized is that to set this play in the modern times many of these ringtones are outdated and not easily recognizable as a phone. To solve this, I shifted my focus to I phone ringtones. My director liked the idea of having a more recognizable ringtone and in the end we settle on two versions to try out later in the blocking rehearsals. I'm very excited to be working on another theatre production. I had a great time designing sound effects for Anne Frank and while I didn't do everything perfectly in my first show, I'm looking forward to continually improving my skills as a sound designer. -What is Dea Man's Cell Phone? -What I'm doing for Dead Man's Cell Phone -What I'm excited about going into this production
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Nowadays there are a lot of issues you can advocate for in video games. You don't have to just make games for pure entertainment but you can use games for a greater good. However, there is a very fine line you must walk when create a game with a deeper message. Let's explore just a few of these considerations.
First off, you need to make sure your game is still fun. Way too many "serious games" get caught up in shoving information down the throats of their players and so nobody plays it. In order to get your message out there you need somebody to play your game. This year I made a game about the Durham Light Rail Project for my Game Design Class. Unfortunately even though the game was completed no one really played it because it turned out kinda boring. You see as game designers we are incredibly biased towards our own game. You don't want to get to deep into the development process only to discover that the game that sounded so good on paper doesn't work well once you start playing it. To solve this problem it's essential to create prototypes. The game should be fun on its own even without any over the deeper message added. The second thing you should be careful of when designing a serious game is that you don't flaunt your opinion too much. Games are their core interactive and therefore while you can hint towards one side of an issue, people are bound to get frustrated if you present a one sided argument. Players love to play the devil's advocate and if you don't let them the game can feel rigged. Let players make their own choices and come to their own conclusions. that's the most effective way to make sure players will be receptive to your message. -Serious problems for serious games -Being fun -Being objective Recently, I learned how to use a new skill in Unity. Unity terrain building is a relatively easy-to-use way of making terrains for your video game. It uses textures and bump maps so you can create a lively environment. But what are the advantages of doing this over just importing your own assets. Is creating a terrain fresh in Unity really better than designing one in 3ds Max?
The short answer is yes! Unity has created a simple built in way of designing your map. It utilizes a point and click method which allows you to paint on mountains, valleys, hills, and streams with ease. The way you shape terrain in Unity feels a lot like Sculptris yet since it's for the specific purpose of making land it works more intuitively for making land forms. Another advantage of building a terrain this way if that it keeps your project centralized and in one place. You won't need to worry about importing a bunch of models, textures, and other assets. If you can make a beautiful map for your players to explore in your game engine there is no need to build it anywhere else. From what I've observed this is a fully comprehensive way to make a play area offering all the same features that any other program I've used (such as 3ds Max) has offered. -What is terrain building in Unity? -Is it a good option for making terrains? When I decided that for my AP US History end of the year project I would make a Tennis For Two inspired game in Unity using my newfound game making skills, I had no idea what I was in for. First off one cannot overestimate the value of previous codes. Up to that point, I had nothing even close to the style of game Tennis For Two is. I also didn't realize how frustrating programming problems can be when you don't have a nice tutorial script to compare to your own creations. This meant I had to learn the importance of research. Looking through pages of forums and manuals to find the fixes for errors or swatches of code which would help realize the ideas in my head became large amounts of the time I spent working on the game. In fact I estimate that for each script I made I probably spent up to four times as long fixing it than I had spent creating it in the first place. In the end though the skills I took away from making this game alone were invaluable. It taught me how to keep my cool when things aren't working and helped give me a much deeper understanding of coding logic. This was an exercise that I recommend any aspiring game maker to take as it tests the patience and drive of the game maker.
Before diving into making games in Unity we started by taking a 24-ish video long series on getting started with C# coding in Unity. The aim of this was to give us a solid base of coding knowledge before diving into the more complex side of coding a complete Unity game. What I soon figured out however was just how large this leap in coding logic was. So just how effective were the tutorials in their initial purpose? The answer is while they didn't help me in the end with the initial purpose of getting my head around computer logic as it pertains to gameobjects and other important items, it did introduce me to a lot of the jargon I needed to understand for later tutorials. When I started making actual game in Unity the first couple of scripts went entirely over my head. The logic I had to use in order to get a sprite to animate and move across the screen was too different from what I had been doing. However, over time I was quickly able to get used to this more complex coding because of the base the tutorials had given me.
For the last couple of months we have been working extensively in Unity making 2D games. Now that the year is winding down I would like to devote a blog post to reflect on my time working in Unity and see what conclusions I can pull out of the mess of successes and failures I've had.
First up is my experience with Unity's interface. I cannot express how easy it was to not only learn it but also be comfortable enough to explore its limits and truly see what I could do in Unity. In the beginning, I won't lie, the interface was very intimidating. Just watching Unity's tutorial on where everything was made my head spin and I was timid going into Unity for the first time. This was mostly caused by a lack of knowledge in what everything did. Going in as someone who had never made a computer game on a "serious" engine I had no way of knowing things like the difference between the console tab and the assets tab. The confusion which resulted from this really threw me off in the beginning and only went away with time as I used the interface more and discovered that it was rather intuitive once you got in to coding and were able to see some off how the computer processes you're inputs to make a complete game. In the end the conclusion I draw is this: Listen to tutorials and watch carefully mimicking the teacher exactly. This will give you the needed confidence to get of the ground in the Unity interface until you get comfortable enough to use it on your own. The second thing I learned during my time working with Unity can be summed up with the acronym TAB and are a godsend when things go wrong while coding. T: Think about the problem. 100% of coding problems are your fault. I don't say that to be mean but instead to encourage you to think about what's wrong. What do I want to happen? What is happening instead? Why aren't they the same? A: Ask for help. Many problems get solved by just two brains and having four eyes scavenge for miss placed semicolons is much better than just two. B: Be calm. Coding gets people frustrated. Something that seems perfectly obvious to you isn't always the same way to the computer and fixing problems take time, research, and a good attitude. Problems won't solve themselves and the number one thing that I see delaying my peers and myself is when we get frustrated and give up on looking for a solution. These are my major takeaways from Unity this year and while they definitely haven't been easy lessons now that they're over making games is actually turning into the fun work every nerd dreams of doing. I hope these lessons get read by some other people so that maybe, just maybe, they can find a passion for making games and all the hard, complex work that entails. First off let's start with a little introduction to the music I've experienced in my life. When I was in first grade my mom started me with my fist piano lessons. Piano lessons are a fact in my house, not an option. This forced march may not seem to be the best start for a deep love of music but in fact what started as a requirement soon grew on me especially after I discovered a talent for singing and began singing in several choirs. In middle school I again expanded my musical repertoire by beginning the double bass. Truth be told my passion for games may be in part because of the beautiful, exciting, and even emotional songs games use to bring an experience to their players.
Why are sounds and music so important to games though? Well think about it. Your life is filled with sound from before you even open your eyes in the morning to long after you close them at night. Imagine an old soundless movie flick. Without sound emotions are lost, large collisions seem fake, and its hard to truly believe in the action happening right before your eyes. With this kind of weight it's no wonder why games like the Legend of Zelda series, with their iconic sound tracks, do so well and have such a large fan base. Sounds serve many purposes when making games. They help add to the background with music meant to strike emotions into the players' hearts. Collisions, breathing, footsteps, and other actions are accentuated with music helping them pop out. These add clarity and realism to action sequences. After all sounds surround us in normal life so why should they be left out while playing a game. Sounds can even have games based off them as seen in rhythm games. The best part is this; we, in the game design industry, probably haven't even scratched the surface of how we can use sounds. Now tell me that isn't amazing. I don't want to rant about state courses. However, the NC "scientific visualization" and "game design" courses leave a lot to be desired. Lets start with the small stuff. This is stuff that is so easily done it should have just been done in the first place. These include things like checking the tests and quizzes they give us to prepare for the final test for typos and vague questions. It's a quick fix that could be solved with a good editor which apparently they lack seeing as every test has at least one question that is made made hard to solve due to poor use of grammar or left out words. Vague questions also come up a lot and are made even more aggravating when they are paired with similar answer choices. A prime example of mistakes that could be solved with and editor is this question from a couple years ago: Why do we a yellow banana? I'm sorry if it sounds tough but really how did that one slip by? This small mistakes are further compounded by the fact that the information on the test is usually outdated. The quizzes are notorious for asking questions abut programs more than 5 yrs. out of date. How are we supposed to know what a certain button does if we don't have that button on our current version of the program. All of this could also be fixed if they just asked questions on the material in the power points they give us however even taking a quiz while looking at the state power point gave a worse grade than before when I was just guessing because the test questions that were vague and hard where never even addressed in the power point. These mistakes are easily fixed. So why can't they get fixed?
Two weeks ago we began our 3d modeling unit using 3ds Max. Over the course of the unit we went deeper into the program solidifying old skills as well as learning a few new ones. Rigging was the first skill we started learning in this unit. At first it was hard to do because it was hard to get used to the way bones needed to be created in order for them to fit into a model. However, after a coupe days of practice it got easier and by the end I felt I had a solid grasp on the skill. We then learned how to skin and animate with bones. This skill was easy to pickup and I was able to pretty quickly animate my skeleton. Then we learned about MassFX and particle systems. These were also easy to pickup though how MassFX actually works still doesn't make much sense. After that we learned the worst subject in the unit: cloth and hair. Hair is easy. Cloth just doesn't work. Finally we moved on to mental rays which was a big relief after trying for days to get cloth to work. All in all this unit was hard but I think I learned many skills and have vastly improved my modeling skills for the future.
Today per the request of Mr. B, my teacher, to do some things for my portfolio outside school I downloaded the free version of Sculptris onto my computer. It was a quick and painless download only taking about 5 min and worked as soon as it was done. As I opened the program I was confronted with a perfect ball and an interface to the upper left. Despite some mistakes, It was easy to get a quick grasp on the program though I doubt I'm even close to knowing everything you can do with it. The program has a couple of features that make it stand out in my mind. The first is the simple design. Sculptris' interface is simple showing exactly what each button does without having to read through long tutorials. Everything reacts much the way you expect it to giving the program a realistic feel. The second feature is the symmetry line which really helps people like me who aren't all that artistic when it comes to doing the same thing twice on something like a head. However there are some limitations to the program. One is the fact that I can't figure out how to start with anything other than a sphere. I also haven't been able to find a render option in the interface so I can easily port it to the Internet. All in all the program has been good and I'm looking forward to using it more in the future as I get better.
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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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