My days left in high school are numbered, and as I head towards the end of my final year I've been thinking a lot about my high school experience as a whole. It wasn't exactly what I expected, especially not these past two years, but through all of my years in high school there has always been one class that has kept me sane and in order. In fact it is also the only class that I've taken for all four years under the same teacher too, and that right there is what has shaped my whole experience. Mr. Bourgeois has been a great teacher and a perfect fit for the game design pathway, especially due to his ability to level with his students and be perfectly clear with his expectations. Straight from day one he made sure we were aware of the amount of work we were getting into and that we wouldn't just be sitting around playing games on the computers in class. With each project we were reminded to read the rubric, at least until it was a given procedure that anyone who wanted full points would do. I also significantly improved my writing skills with this class, though I know my writing is still far from perfect. The format of this pathway was slightly disappointing at first, seeing as I signed up to make games and wouldn't be doing so until my senior year, but the skills we learned in each class leading up to AGAD have all been valuable and have helped to expand our interests. I never thought I would have enjoyed working with Premiere Pro or 3DS Max as much as I did, and now I do both 3D modeling and video editing in my spare time (so actually not much these days). Possibly one of my favorite aspects of this course is that it actually stays true to the DSA motto of "rigorous academics" unlike many other classes. I've pushed myself several times each year to complete projects that at first seemed impossible, even though some (like the train station) were primarily difficult due to render times. Likewise I've also fallen several times, but Mr. Bourgeois understands that as humans failure is inevitable, so small blunders here and there have not been the end of me. The only mistake that is inexcusable is to give up, it will bite you a lot harder in the future than you think it will, especially for this class. On the bright side difficult assignments often feel as though they are trophies themselves when completed, so there is never a reason to feel the need to give up. This year I particularly enjoyed the assignments to create a UI prototype and a GDD for a game we know, though I still feel that I put way too much effort into the GDD assignment. In years past I enjoyed the neighborhood and train station assignments, but sadly I've already forgotten many of the others that may have been fun. You're probably noticing by now that I've barely even touched on the actual skills we've learned related to software in this class, and that's because the experiences I've had in this pathway amount to much more than what someone looking at a course overview would be able to tell me about this class. Sure we learned how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, 3DS Max, and Unity, but frankly anyone could teach you that. What's more important is the teaching process and how enjoyable the class can be even as a working environment. I can not thank Mr. B enough for the wonderful job he's done getting students invested in this pathway while preparing us with skills that will be useful in the real world. That being said I don't want to make this post any longer than it needs to be, especially if I end up repeating myself as I am about to do, so for the sake of brevity I'll just say thanks Mr. B, and I can't believe I'm already writing my final blog post (at least for this site).
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With just over two weeks left to work on our game it's hard to tell how much we'll have to scrap from our game idea while still aiming to create a finished game. Personally I feel that we should have had a lot more time available to us for making our games, especially since we formed teams very early on in the year only to dismiss them for pretty much an entire quarter. I also feel that the proportion of time spent on pre-production unnecessarily outweighed the time spent on production, primarily because it was hard to set realistic standards for how much we could do in a year without yet possessing the firsthand experience of creating the game. We've run into many problems that we'd have no way to account for in pre-production, even with the assumption that hitches would be inevitable we never thought they'd be lasting too. Despite these setbacks we've continued to work steadily on our game, though with the end in sight it feels like we'll have to have another group meeting to decide what our game is even going to look like. It almost feels like all of the time we spent on pre-production has amounted to nothing aside from a game concept that has only been chopped to pieces over the course of the year. Perhaps we may have inadequately prepared for the future with our pre-production, but it felt like we were doing everything right at the time. It's hard to locate the origin of this dilemma, though I'm sure this wacky year has certainly played a part in it. Coming so close to the end of the year all we can really do is appreciate the experience of working as a team to produce a game and finalize what we have.
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Now that we're working on our game again that means we need to plan what gets done and by when, which can only mean that our friend Trello is back to hold the team together. This time for real though, because now we've actually better communicated our ideas and all have our own work to do. For the first time now I've actually started to check off items on my to-do list on Trello, and it's such a good feeling to get things done before the deadline. I'm grateful that our team leader has organized our objectives well so that I can get an idea of how far collectively our team is with the creation of our game and contribute my own work accordingly. Prior to fully making use of Trello most of what we did was still up in the air, but having to solidify precisely what must be done and by when gets ideas down and things done. Even so we still need to work some on our communication as a group, which I'll admit has been better recently but could always use more work. I've certainly contributed to our problem with communication, though most of it comes from the fact that I'm not really sure what we want from our game. I'd like for our producer to lead the direction our game takes, because either way I'll make the models we need, so when questions about choices for the game are aimed towards me I'm not much help. I understand I make up a quarter of our team and my input may be just as valuable as anyone else's, but I truly do not mind which way our game goes, so with no creative input of my own to add I'd rather not derail the progress we're making by adding conflict to the creation of our game.
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We're finally actively working on our games with our groups again and even though I haven't done anything yet I am actually excited to get back to work on our game. I've been extremely lazy this quarter, between online school and being a senior I've been using my share of excuses, but when it comes to the success of a group I can not fall behind. That being said I've already failed to hold up my part for the group in planning a level so things aren't looking too well for me, but I promise my group and myself that I'll be on top of things as I crawl out of my sluggish third quarter. In fact, while I don't plan to turn in my level planning I am actually working on the 3D models for our game right now, that way we can actually replace the boxes in our levels with the real models. For the level I was supposed to make my plan right now is to just start from scratch using the actual models, since by the time I get around to it I'm sure I'll have already made all of the 3D models necessary for the level. It'll be like a more fun way of whiteboxing the level, because instead of using temporary geometry to hold for visuals I'll actually be able to see how everything interacts with each other, which will also help me to edit any models that may not align with each other well. I can't wait to continue working on our game and things can only continue uphill from here.
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Recently in class we've been learning about affordances and how they are used to help guide players through games. In my past I've encountered many affordances that have distinctly stuck out and made me appreciate the design of the game, though I only attributed them to "good game design" rather than a specific aspect of it. To name a few, I specifically remember the green lights on platforms that indicate where the player should jump to in the newer DOOM games, as well as checkpoint gates in Nioh that are only meant to be opened from one side (shown by a bar that must be lifted from the other side, which shows the player where they have to get to). Now that I understand what affordances are and can recall many of the times I've seen them in games I will better be able to create games that make sense and are fun to play. I'd like to also incorporate affordances into the game we are working on as a team this year, which should be pretty easy for me to do because I'm the 3D modeler so a lot of the visual environment will be my job to create. Unfortunately we'll be making a few levels individually, so I'm not quite sure how exactly things will pan out in terms of consistency, so we may have to communicate more before adding additional things to our game idea such as affordances. On the bright side though adding affordances should be easy for our type of game, as we can indicate areas for the players to explore and weaknesses of the monsters just through how they are visually designed.
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Everyone says third quarter is usually when students achieve their lowest grades, and frankly I can already see it coming from miles away. Last quarter I completely skipped the creation of our third-person parkour level, as I would still end the quarter with an A even with a zero on the assignment (which is what happened) but now it is finally coming around to bite me. I should have considered the outcome of such an action, knowing fully well that this is a class that both loves to add on to old assignments as well use them for display on our portfolios, but I had a lot of other work to do at the time last quarter so I was only completing the bare minimum to maintain my A's. Luckily for me, earlier this quarter the option of reusing our parkour level for future assignments was tossed around and ultimately it was decided that we'd have quizzes and matching activities in place of using the parkour level, because apparently I may not have been the only student who had not turned it in yet. Unfortunately it seems this decision was completely forgotten because we now have assignments to complete using our parkour level anyways, and even worse I still don't plan to even get started on making my parkour level in the first place. Had I known we would have been actually using our parkour levels I would have gotten started on it after that fated class period, but now it is too late and too much work. It's not that I don't enjoy working with Unity, I just probably shouldn't have created such a workload from my other classes for myself that would cause me to enter scenarios such as this one. I don't expect any compensation for my mistakes because they were ultimately my fault for being lazy and thinking I could get away with one zero, but now I just have to accept that my grade will tank because of it even though it's an assignment from a completely different quarter. To end things on a positive note I'm sure there will be assignments in the future, especially fourth quarter, that I'll actually be able to complete in order to display my understanding of the content we will have learned.
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We've finally come back to our year-long project to make a game as a team, and honestly I can't wait to get started working on our game. So far I haven't been able to do much 3D modeling for our game, and I'm not sure how much I'll really be doing in terms of 3D modeling for our game because we plan for it to have 2D sprites with some 3D objects. I know I haven't been the greatest team member either, as I'm already a reserved person and on top of that I'm having trouble finding where I can be useful, but I hope as our plan finalizes I can really get to work on 3D models and backgrounds. Aside from my momentary lull in work, I'm sure making this game will be a fun experience that I'm looking forward to, but even so I hope our work will be equally distributed. Seeing as all of our characters are 2D a lot of work falls on our 2D artist, and we can't really do much to help or the artstyle between characters would be vastly different and ruin the continuity of the game. I feel like the amount of work we've set out to do is possible within the year, but I know it will require lots of work outside of class from all of us. Personally I wouldn't attempt making a game with lots of dialogue for my first official team game, but I'll still be willing to help seeing as this is quite an ambitious goal. Overall though we've got a pretty solid concept of a game, which will help tremendously knowing exactly what we want to do at the start, rather than trying to make a game with no guidance and conflict of ideas.
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With Covid cases booming currently (10,000+ per day here) I doubt we'll ever return to school this year, meaning my whole senior year will be entirely virtual. For a lot of students this may come as a disappointment, especially seniors, however aside from the deaths caused by Covid, I could not be more grateful for this year. Online school may be different and problematic, however it has also been a huge mental relief. Over the past few years the daily process of work and a commute to school that requires a consistent sleep schedule has been bogging me down, whether or not I'd like to admit it. However, now that school is entirely online I've been given the opportunity to work whenever I want, meaning my sleep schedule can be whatever it needs to be, and while Wellness Wednesdays are a nice break, they are often the day most responsible for breaking my sleep schedule if any. Aside from Wednesdays though, being able to work whenever I want has helped to reduce the stress of due dates and assignments that can only be worked on in class, as many assignments can be done outside of class nowadays. It would be ignorant to only consider myself though, I'm sure many seniors or really students in general are disappointed that they won't be able to see their friends at school all year long. Though I'm equally sure they all understand how important it is that we stay home if we want to mitigate the damage from this pandemic. Either way I know this is a historic few years for the education industry and really the world as a whole, I'm not really concerned about what we've already lost in terms of school and socialization, but rather I worry about what we will lose in the future. How long exactly will school be online for? At some point my sleep schedule is going to hit me back for all of my all-nighters and wacky reversals of what time I go to bed. While I may be enjoying school right now I worry about the future of all of our education.
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As we all know, being locked up at home for nine months with nothing to do tends to lead to a rise of people choosing to play videogames in their free time. Alongside this rise of players comes a rise of toxicity, both from current players as well as new players, either aimed towards said new players for being new, or towards current players from new players who don't understand the game but don't want to look bad. So while it would seem obvious to say that Covid has been great for the game industry, that's not entirely true for the players, and if the players end up quitting then games stop making money. This rise of toxicity is especially prevalent in competitive games such as League of Legends, Rainbow Six Siege, and CS:GO. While there is no cure for toxicity, there is now a cure for Covid, so we should expect the toxicity of these games to decrease soon, right? Wrong, even after most people get vaccinated it's likely that many of the new players introduce to videogames will continue to play in their free time, surely they'll be more experienced but that doesn't mean they'll be any less toxic or encounter any reduced amount of toxicity. Negative emotions felt by players due to the general lull our country is in will continue to effect everyone's gaming experiences. Frankly, I'm not sure if toxicity will ever decrease in competitive games, it's almost like toxicity has momentum, so even though its source may die down some after a few months, the same insults are likely to continue being used for months if not years afterwards. The only solution it appears is single-player games or co-op games played only among friends, there the player interaction among random and often disgruntled people is fully reduced to zero. Sure there may be a little toxicity among family or friends every once in a while, but having the advantage of prior relations to those you're playing with helps to reduce toxicity and the effects of it, creating a healthier gaming experience.
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Recently in class we've been discussing the role that user interface plays in games, and honestly it needs to get more recognition. In all of the games that I've played I've encountered many different kinds user interfaces, and even though I see them so much I rarely take the time to analyze how they've created my gameplay experience. For example, imagine a first-person shooter without an ammo indicator, it's instantly a completely different game, forcing the players to keep track of their ammo rather than just being a number in the display. User interface design choices such as this completely change the feel of a game, for that same example the game would instantly become a much more tactical and realistic experience, rather than a fun yet fantasized war simulation. Taking into account the information that could be provided to the player, alongside the information that the player's character could interact with, developers must make choices that have the power to make or break the user experience. Even some of the little details such as those of diegetic user interfaces in which the character sees what the player can see, create whole new levels of immersion. The inventory system from Fallout and the HUD from Halo being displayed on the Pip-Boy and in your helmet are probably the two most notable examples from games I've played that I've noticed and felt a little joy seeing the details developers put in games. Whenever I've thought about making a game I never thought so much detail could go into anything beyond the story or game world itself, though now with my new understanding of the effect that user interface can have on games I'll have to ensure any future games I make have a great one.
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AuthorMy name is Andrew Prichard and the this is my first digital arts class, I look forward to a good year with lots of hard work. Archives
May 2021
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Last updated 5/14/21
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