Over the last school week we worked on using Unity in VR. To do this we obviously had to start by setting up our VR rig and this led us to the first major problem of our project: none of us know how to coil wires properly. While this might not seem to be a big problem at first you have to consider how much we will be setting up and taking down our rig. Everyday we want to be able to work in Unity requires us to set up the rig at the beginning then take it down at the end of the period. This means that tangled or messily-stored wires will not only waste a lot of time but also damage the wires. The solution to this problem is simple. We just need someone to learn the proper wire coiling technique so that the rest of us can learn how to make sure our wires are neat and safe from damage. This is the role I decided to take and here is what I've found:
For thin wires the coiling technique is pretty simple. You make a loop, then keep loops the wire around without doing anything special. This just makes sure the wire is neat and organized when you put it back into its container. Thick wire are more complex. If you coil a thick wire the way you would coil a small one you risk the twists damaging the thicker cable. To start you must make a loop just like in the small coil. Make sure the coil is loose enough to not do any damage to the wire. Then instead of looping around like you normally would, grab a piece of wire a distance away from your original loop and bring your hand straight to the top of the loop. The wire should naturally loop around forming a new looped section. After that alternate between looping normally and using the new technique and voila you now have a beautifully (or not-so beautifully if it's your first time) coiled wire. -Why I'm looking at wire coiling -How to coil thin wires How to coil thick wires
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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 Last week we finished up our first semester in Advanced Game Design and oh boy what a semester it has been. The biggest thing that stood out to me this semester is how many new tools I've learned. Last year in Game Design we mostly focused on strengthening our grasp over our old skills. We mostly worked in programs we had already used such as Photoshop and 3ds Max. This year has been the complete opposite. We did our usual 2-3 infographics in Photoshop to kick off the year but past that (and our large Unity game project in the first quarter) we have focused on new programs. This quarter in particular we focused on learning AV techniques using Audition and Premiere. This has taken me out of my comfort zone a couple of times already this year but has been extremely fun. I love learning new skills that expand what I can do creatively on a computer and what we've done so far has certainly put a big check mark in that box.
So out of the new skills I've gained what have been my biggest takeaways? AV tools take time to make a good looking final product. Much like making a video game in Unity ther's just no way to get around the fact that in order to make a good video or sound you need time. Sure knowing your way around the program can help speed up the process but videos and sounds require lots of tweaking to get perfect. Even with a story board and clips, once you import them into Premiere you will need patience to slowly craft your perfect video. Clips will need to be edited. Sounds will need to be synced. transtions will need to be added, watched, and adjusted according to the material you need to present in a given time. Everything takes patience and creativity to work. That said once to put time into a video or sound it will be good. You can very easily make something that looks good from nearly anything if you have enough patience. Going into the next semester I look forward to bringing these new skills as well as the patience to use them with me. This week in game design we focused on creating UX in game design and how it helps gamers understand and play complex games. Without UX games such as League of Legends would be an unplayable mess of menu screens and buttons. UX is what holds games together and so it was inevitable that we spend a full week to barely scratch the surface at what UX techniques can do for a game. In order to explore UX we started by taking a screen shot of a website we often use. We then were tasked for recreating this website's UI (user interface) to target different audiences. Here's my initial page: As you can see this website already has good UI. The buttons are clear and the key information on the page is highlighted. You can tell that it is targeted at a specialized audience because of the use of symbols instead of words on the buttons used to navigate around the site. This is my take on the website for a more minimalist audience: As you can see I first took out the background to make the buttons easier to see. I then made an easy to navigate sorting menu at the bottom of the page where it can be easily accessed. By keeping everything on one screen, users are always only a mouse click away from anything in the site and can always see their full list of sorting choices. I also added in a forum links page which promotes community building; a thing the original site leaves out.
•Weekly review •Why UX is important to game design •My approach to re-designing a website Last week on Friday as a class we visited the US2020 Stem N' Art Expo. To start we talked to a panel of professionals asking questions on how they got to where they were in life and what inspired them. Then we got to take quick 5 min one on one conversations with other accomplished people who used both Stem and Art for their job or research. After that we played around with some robots during lunch then went in and walked around the displays of several Art and Stem companies that wee showing of their work at the Expo.
As a student is was relatively fun to get to go and look at all the options there were for careers in the Arts and Stem areas. I liked being able to talk one on one with people in those fields but in the "speed mentoring" section of the day I did not end up talking to many people who were actually in the gaming or even design field. One thing I learned while I was at the Expo was how the shape of triangular waves effects the sound of a synthesizer. This knowledge will help me create better music for my games and be able to create better feelings and atmospheres with my music. Welcome back visitors! It has been a great summer but school, game design, and blog posts await me as I start my second year in Durham School of the Arts' Game Design pathway. To start off the year we have talked about the many skills, obvious and otherwise, that are a necessity for a great game designer. Many of the skills I have for game design are given to me. They include my natural quickness for learning programs, my sense of game logic and my unwillingness to give up even when the going is rough. Other skills I have learned over the years such as how to create something that is visually pleasing and brainstorming ideas to come up with the best solution to a problem. Now while these skills are all pretty obvious there are other, less obvious, skills that also help me design games in way unique to me. These include my love for books, my theater skills acquired in plays and musicals, as a well as the talents and life skills I learn simply by being a imperfect human being. All these skills shape what it means to me and hep me approach project from an angle unlike anyone else. In the end that is what separates great games from just "okay" ones.
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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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