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
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Games create community. This is the basis of our love of games. At their core, games create social experiences. Whether it's an obvious one as seen by player interactions in multi-player games, or the more subtle community of fellow game enthusiasts that form around single player games. Last night I had the opportunity to see this community in action as I volunteered at the EK Powe Elementary School game night. Game night is the most diversely attended event at EK Powe and boy do all the kids show up for it. For my part I was left in the cafeteria e=where there were many games set up. We did everything from play Yahtzee to build puzzles. I was astonished by the good sportsmanship all around. No one got mad when they lost a close game nor did they fight over placing the final piece. Such a happy group of kids gives me hope for the future of game playing, and making, everywhere.
This is great behavior was exemplified in one group of kids who spent a large amount of time playing the Pokemon TCG in the corner of the cafeteria. Remembering how heated those games could get I walked over to see if I could work as a mediator for rule calls in some way. What I found over there however was not Pokemon. Sure from a distance it looked similar, but on closer examination, none of the kids knew how to actually play by the rules. Instead they had formed a complex game in which both sides did whatever they wanted and everyone just accepted that as the new rule. This may seem like it would make an extremely lop-sided game where only the loudest, most confident "rule maker" would have any chance of winning. However, the game was close. Any argument was washed away instantly with a quick compromise and neither side tried to take advantage of the others' ignorance of the actual Pokemon rule book (take notes Washington). Maybe one day they'll grow up. They'll separate out into strictly defined groups of people who only share their beliefs. They'll lose the ability to play for fun at the expense of rules and forget the benefits of compromising. But, for now, their future looks bright as they do what children do best: play games. -EK Powe game night summary -A game of Pokemon? Accessibility seems like and obvious improvement to any game. After all the more people who can play your game, the more people who will end up buying it. However, issues with accessibility are some of the hardest to solve. How can a color blind person recognize different potions of varying colors? How can a deaf person recognize when the next wave is on the way without the aid of that loud trumpet blast.
Many companies solve this issue as well as they can. Often games offer options in their menus such as "large text" or "easy mode". The problem with many of these solutions is that they use a brute force method of solving accessibility problems. Sure, the text is big now, but due to lazy graphic art skills or other issues the original font was lost and replaced with basic boring block script. Situations like these are just companies trying to be accessible as possible while in reality they completely ignore the experience some of there players are getting. They are trying to be as accessible as possible for the least work instead of focusing on quality game play throughout their entire product. There are elegant ways of solving these problems. For example simple shapes can be used conjunction with colors on items. This gives color-blind players a way of telling apart items that is just a rich and full, experience-wise, as players that can see color. Using creative solutions like this helps retain the experience of the game for all players while making it more accessible to a wider audience. This will be the challenge for games going forward as more people start to take an interest in games. The more people who play, the more diverse our games will have to be in their inclusively. -Why is accessibility important? -How to do it wrong -How to do it right On Friday, a representative from Full Sail University came in to our class to discuss her school and what it had to offer. The talk was okay but left a lot of questions regarding scholarship opportunities and the kind of work students did while at the school at the school. In further research I found that there were many scholarship opportunities available if I was willing to go after them and that much of the student work looked good and was creative in its vision and execution.
However I still have some reservations about the school and how I might fit in to it. On the one hand it isn't a traditional University. This, for good or for bad, changes the experience of going to college. It also only offers 20 month degrees. This means that if I change my mind on my career I'll have to go back to a traditional university to get a more general education. These are the pros and cons I'll need to weigh in the next couple of years as I try to decide what I want to do with my life. -Thoughts on the Full Sail visit -What do I think are the Pros and Cons of Full Sail? Video games are expanding. Long gone are the days of independent developers and arcade tokens. Replaced by expensive consoles and thousand strong gaming corporations, billions are poured into making the best graphics, best physics, best story, and the list goes on. Theater is a long standing industry. Studded with tradition its exsistance dates back far beyond even written words. Miraculously surviving the sands of time what can this ancient artform get out of the robotic 1001110 of games. It turns out that the answer is quite a bit and is something that may start to bring these vastly different industries very close together.
Games have proven that stories can include audience members. Now it may seem odd; how can an auditorium full of strangers interact with a story and not fundamentally throw it off. Yet everyday games craft experiences for millions of strangers, an audience even the biggest shows can't boast of. That's why now, more and more, theater is turning to audience participation in order to engage the spectators and heighten tension. I've seen these plays like this up close and let me be the first to tell you: they are special. From Shakespeare Abridged to the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee there's always something about seeing audience members onstage that brings you full into a show. Whether you're the unfortunate "volunteer" or not, seeing a genuine human up there gives you a feeling of power, a feeling of challenge that we would normally only associate with video games. Even more immersive plays have also come out. In Rift's production of The Trial by Franz Kafka they used the audience to tell the entire story. They gacve the audience freedom to walk around and observe the set until they were eventually drawn into the story at an execution site. Does it sound like a game? It should. Many exploration based games use these same techniques to push the player along a secretly linear track. People if left alone try and find a story. It doesn't need to be shoved in their face. This is something playwrights are only beginning to find out and something that will continue to bring games and theater even closer together in the future. • Where do theater and games meet? • What theater can learn from games? •Where theater is heading for the future It has come to pass that our game design class may be switching from Unity over to Unreal Engine next year. This being the case we were asked (ordered) to check out the Unreal Engine website to learn about the program and its differences from Unity. The main difference between Unity and Unreal is how the two engines handle coding. In Unity we had gotten used to doing code through c# scripts which we typed out in Monodevelop. Unreal Engine uses a more graphical format to code called blueprints. I personally like the idea of blueprints. They can be used to keep things in order while you code; something I, myself, am not very good at. By using arrows and connectors, they also help the casual viewer follow the logic of the code more easily. In fact they look very much like what I try to imagine in my head while writing scripts in Unity. This would no doubt help me create game faster and not have to spend long periods of time scouring over my script looking for misplaced semi-colons and open-ended brackets.
However the one thing that does worry me about making the switch is that the code is based on c++ a code language related to but not exactly the same as c#. I think that by the end of the year I would get over this problem but still the combination of learning the interface of a new software (something that will be very important while making blueprints), and altering my coding logic will make for a very confusing couple first months for coding. In the end though I believe our class is up to the challenge and look forward to seeing if we actually will get to use this exciting new software newt year! |
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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