Introduction
Just recently Genshin Impact was released for PC, PS4, and mobile devices, and ever since its release I haven't been able to put it down. It is a open world action role-playing game published by miHoYo, a company known for previous mobile titles such as Honkai Impact and Guns Girlz, both of which are only semi-popular games. However, with the release of Genshin Impact miHoYo has attracted the attention of just about everyone, and currently has over 2.6 million players on PS4 alone. Personally I never thought I would play a game such as Genshin Impact, as I felt I would be judged for my decision to do so, but it's not often that you find such a diamond in the rough that is the entire online RPG genre. Enjoyment Genshin Impact is definitely a fun game to play, and whenever I finish playing I'm always left hungry for more. Having a party of four characters that you constantly switch between during combat, each with their own combos and abilities, ensures that combat is never boring and each fight feels fluid and unique. That being said, as the game progresses enemies become harder to kill and storyline quests become more spaced out, but there is never nothing to do. While there currently is no way to "win" or "beat the game," the replay value of Genshin Impact is insanely high. On average players should wait about 12 hours between sessions in which they play in order to ensure the best experience, as the game features a resource used to obtain certain loot that takes about 12 hours to fully recharge. On top of that, players who would rather continue to playing instead of waiting 12 hours can use a resource obtained throughout the game to refill their limiting resource and continue playing. Of course refills can also be purchased with real money if the player runs out, but in no way is Genshin Impact pay-to-win. It is entirely free with no payment roadblocks, which makes it beyond worth the $0.00 it takes to download and play the game. I would recommend the game to others, though unfortunately I can't because everyone I know is already playing it so recommending it would just be a waste of time. Narrative Due to the fact that not even half of the story has been released yet (Genshin Impact is episodic) all I can say is that the exposition is both fun and informative. I never found myself bogged down with details, or just killing enemies not knowing my objective. Understanding that I'm not exactly the target audience, I can't say whether or not the story is engaging or exciting, but I can definitely say that it was written well. Each character had their own introduction and backstory, as well as their own unique objective when introduced to the player. Both the storyline and gameplay are certainly targeted toward the same market audience, which is generally anybody who enjoys games equally for their story and their gameplay, fantasy games, games in which combos are performed, or enjoy Chinese/Japanese-influenced media. Gameplay Being an open world game, it should be expected that Genshin Impact provides a more open experience for players, which it does, but it also does a good job ensuring that the player stays on track with the storyline. Quests progress in a logical manner across the vast expanse of the map, and provide players the ability to explore nearby areas and unlock waypoints which can be teleported to later along the way. The gameplay tied in well with the narrative, requiring the player to complete reasonable objectives depending on how far they have progressed in the story. As the player progresses further in the story and events become more intense, the gameplay increases its intensity to match that of the story. Due to the fact that each player will obtain completely different characters (because Genshin Impact is a gacha game) the difficulty of the game can only be estimated. Based upon my playing experience I found myself falling into the state of flow many times during my gameplay experience. At times the game would be nearly frustratingly difficult, though once I overcame those challenges I only felt more satisfied than I had ever been before. Learning how to build your team and combo them together is a huge part in overcoming difficult challenges. For example, if you find yourself fighting a tough hydro enemy, you may want to use cryo or electro elements in order to react with and counter that enemy. Because each character specializes in one element and you can only use four characters, building a party that can face multiple elements or completely counter one can be crucial to your success. The gameplay was very fun yet logical at the same time, there are many occasions in the game that provide the same satisfaction of fluid motion in combat that players may experience when playing Doom or Devil May Cry, though unlike Doom the storyline is easily seen playing out even during combat, rather than only contained in lore and secrets. Even with that feeling of fluid combat though, the player will still experience challenges, most of the time without even breaking their flow, this is because the flow comes more from mixing elements to produce reactions than it does from killing enemies in rapid succession, so if the player does come across a tough enemy, they will still enjoy the experience just as much as they would when fighting easier enemies. Visual The graphics style fit the theme of the game and enhance the player's experience. Genshin Impact features cel shading graphics of which are extremely similar to Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, creating what feels like a 3D anime experience in which the player is in control of the pacing. All elements of the game were recognizable and rendered well, and for most part human characters were proportionate (except for their eyes, which are often rather large as is common for the anime-like artstyle of the game). All backgrounds within the playable map featured appropriate shading, depth of field, and perspective, yet when standing at the invisible border of the map and looking out towards the unfinished content of the game, terrain is very low quality and barren, though typically players don't even come across a scenario that leads them to looking beyond the borders of the map. The colors and intensities of them used in the game blended well with the selected graphic type, and were neither too dark nor too bright, which made for an aesthetically pleasing gameplay experience. The animation is very smooth and all characters move in such a way that not only does it feel natural, but you can also get a feel for their personality based on the way they move. When playing online however, animations tend to get more buggy and sometimes players even appear to just be running in place when they are moving around. Objects, much like players, also move in a realistic and logical fashion, making their movement believable and not distracting from the gameplay itself. Audio The music is varied enough so that the same song is not played over and over to get stuck in your head, but generally during combat the same combat music will be played for every fight. Even though combat music is often repeated, the music of the game is still very enjoyable as it well-composed and includes a variety of genres as far as video game music goes. Voiceovers were professional and believable, never breaking the immersion, though for some reason some voice lines during less important part of the games are not even acted out at all. The game could have at least done what other games such as Monster Hunter do during less important dialogue, which is include just a single "hey" or "alright" from characters when they are saying more than that, but not having anything said by the characters of Genshin Impact during those less important lines is sometimes confusing and makes it appear as though your audio may be broken. All game sound effects were useful, and could lead the player on the path to progression. Interface The controls are well-designed, make sense, and can even be changed if the player does not feel they are perfect. All menus are user-friendly, and even orient themselves to be intrinsically easy to understand. Like many games of the modern era, options to adjust audio and graphical elements could be found in the settings menu. The inventory is organized and easily accessed, with long descriptions of each item as well as quick notes on where to find them. The map is accessible during all parts of the game and is extremely useful, as it can be used to fast-travel around the large domains. The hint system offers the solution if you are stuck long enough (trust me its a long time), otherwise only useful nudges are provided. Accessibility There were no spelling errors and subtitles are provided for players who can not hear, from what I saw there did not appear to be anything that would exclude any particular player from enjoying the game. Technical To this date the game has never crashed for me or had any performance issues of any type, there are no dead ends or obvious technical errors either, for such a large game it does a good job staying organized. Conclusion I would most definitely give Genshin Impact five stars, as it is an amazing game and is free at that. It has a few small issues, but it is a very large game that isn't even half finished yet technically and yet its already better than over 80% of the current market.
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Recently in class we've been working with modular design, which is modeling each part of a whole, of which is repeated within that whole, as individual pieces that are later put together. For example, walls, windows, and staircases are often repeated within the design of buildings, so when modeling buildings it would be helpful to model each once and reuse the same model whenever they need to be placed in another area. The same can be said for game development, if an asset is used in various places throughout a game, it can save a lot of time to model it or pieces of it then assemble it when needed. Having individual parts modeled allows for unique combinations to generate separate structures without having to actually model an entirely new structure. Prior to working with modular design I've always wondered how open world RPGs created all of the buildings and cities to be seen without spending an absurd amount of time on them, because after all there are usually hundreds in these games. Now however, when I play these games I can see the use of modular design in order to create buildings and reuse pieces in a different order all around the city, to make it appear as though the player is surrounded by numerous unique buildings, when in reality it is the same pieces arranged differently. I greatly appreciate the amount of time that can be saved with the use of modular design, and now I'm not so worried about modeling the assets my team needs for our game, as I'll likely be able to use this new knowledge to save dozens of hours of modeling. I look forward to working with modular design more in the future, especially when it comes to texturing, which has always been a hassle for me.
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I've had my phases with art, though I've never been too passionate about it until there was nothing better to do after ten weeks of staying at home doing nothing. Even now I wouldn't exactly say I'm passionate about art but it is definitely something I've been doing more of to help the time fly by. School has been pretty easy this year which means I've had lots of free time to practice my drawing skills, though most of what I do is on paper so I can't post all of it on here. I am by no means a master artist but I have noticed that my skills have been getting better, and as I've branched out I've started to find what I prefer to use when making art. The combination of taking a digital art class as well as a 2D art class has great synergy, allowing me to take the concepts of one class and apply them to the other. For example, my inspiration for bringing life to some of my sketches through the use of Paint.net or Blender initially comes from adding our own perspective when drawing images in 2D art. I've never been a fan of art or willing to do it, but through practically being coerced by school to do so I've found out that it's not always terrible. I have learned some things at least, such as the fact that consistency is not my strong suit. Whether I'm doing 2D art or digital art my products are always vastly different, some look like they could have been made by a five year old while others leave me in disbelief that I could have ever created them. That's actually what I find most fun about art is never knowing what the end goal is or how good it will be. Even with my inconsistencies I have noticed that my artistic skills and will to do art have noticeably grown over the years, and now with even more time at home it's become even more clear that my skills continue to grow day by day.
Main Points
School this year has been extremely different than what everyone is used to... and I love it. For the first time in my life public education has become entirely an online process, for now at least. The transition to online has been very difficult for many teachers and students, but even so it hasn't been entirely unsuccessful. The attendance may have been wacky and everything may have seemed to go wrong within the first weeks, but now that they are over we have learned what works and how to use the tools we have to be successful. I'll admit that attending only first, third, fifth, and seventh periods on Mondays and Thursdays but second, fourth, and sixth periods on Tuesdays and Fridays is pretty confusing, but the fact that we have Wellness Wednesdays to get our work sorted out clears up all of the confusion caused by the days in between. Even with such a wacky schedule we're only attending 40% of what we would normally attend during a normal school year, but I feel that asynchronous time makes up for all of the time lost. Teachers have been doing great ensuring that their students learn and understand the material they must learn, and honestly online class has only helped with ensuring all students are on the same page. Emailing a teacher is just a click away at any time during the day, and because the classes are so awkwardly silent asking questions is a breeze. Taking it all into account though, sure online school has its disadvantages, but it has a nearly equal amount of advantages such as working at any hour of the day (which I absolutely love), doing work weeks in advance, being home the instant any period ends, and seeing all of your assignments in one spot so you know what you have to do and when. I may be biased because I'm very lazy and I specifically dislike the student population of DSA (so being at home is quite a blessing), but if we just look on the bright side we can see all of the advantages that online school brings, despite the minor setbacks we run into when getting started with it.
Main Points
This year I'm most excited about the fact that we will finally be making our own 3D games, prior to now I've only made a few 2D games (in software that did coding for me) and attempted creating one 3D game before I was even familiar with coding. Of course my first 3D game was never finished because I got frustrated by all of the errors in my code and could no longer bear watching tutorial after tutorial just to create my own game. However, now that I've become more familiar with coding as well as 3D modeling I have the resources to create my own 3D game. I'm rather certain that the creative aspect of our games will be driven by our own ideas so I'm excited to finally be able to apply all of my game development ideas that I've thought of either while playing games or in my free time. I know for sure that not all of my ideas will work out and some will definitely give me more trouble than others but I'm excited to at least try to incorporate all of the ideas I've come up with. Even if I can't use all of my ideas I'm still excited about the process of fully producing a 3D game anyways. Maybe for once this year I'll realize what it's actually like to be a game developer and why not all games are perfect due to limits placed on the developers. Above all though I hope that whether or not I consider the game I create to be a success that the process I go through to make it will help me to create more games in the future that I will run into less mistakes making and will certainly be better than this first game I will be making.
Main Points
From what I've heard in the news recently it seems that some or all of this year is going to be online, so in preparation for working from home I've decided to make sure I am able to model, code, and render if needed for anything we will do this year. Since I'm at home I'm using Blender instead of 3DS Max so it is slightly different but still gets the job done, though I've never rendered an animation with it. In order to become more familiar with rendering animations and get a feel of where all of the required options were to do so I made an animation of rolling dice with the help of a tutorial as I have still not mastered Blender. I ensured to watch and then do in order to retain as much knowledge as possible so that I would be able to do this if needed in the future and it helps to work with a sense of independence rather than hand holding the entire way through. Once I got the hang of the keyboard shortcuts and processes required to create the animation it was much simpler, so though it took some time initially I feel that if need be I could repeat the process with ease. I'm not entirely sure what this year will entail though I'm rather sure we will be doing a lot of coding to develop 3D games but who knows rendering may come in handy at some point as well. Even if I end up not needing to create any 3D animations this year I feel it still helps to keep myself up to date on all the different skills I've learned so that I don't put perfectly good skills that took time and effort to learn to waste. Main Points
Resources used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhN3X3MvD4 Since digital art was my original inspiration to take this class I decided to return to editing images in order to re-familiarize myself with what I used to do in my free time. Ever since we started 3D modeling and creating code that was all I did at home as well, but when I stylized one of my pencil drawings in Paint.net I wanted to do more 2D work again. I returned to Paint.net in order to further explore what I could do with the program by stylizing another one of my pencil drawings. The process proved to be harder than I remembered, most likely because the drawing I chose had more shading and graphite smudges than the original one I had done but even so I attempted to add more details. Going into the project I had visualized specific colors for the dragon I had drawn as well as crystals in the background but I quickly realized that while the colors were simple enough, getting crystals to simulate a real crystal texture was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I instead put them in the background and focused my attention more on the dragon, adding details that weren't originally in the pencil drawing. While experimenting with different techniques I found that adding a vignette helped to bring out the features of the dragon and overall made the image look more professional, while a lot of the other options I tried either didn't work as intended or conflicted with one or more layers I used to make the image. Overall while creating this image wasn't as easy as the other stylized pencil photo I made during the school year it was helpful to get back into working with digital art creation as I hadn't practiced for months and being familiar with art production will aid in game production if I would like to digitally plan out designs. Main Points
Software used: (Paint.net download) Now that spring break is over all of the confusion of school is back and I'm lost again for what I have to do. I've heard from several people that the next two weeks are essentially a half spring break in which teachers aren't allowed to teach new material, set due dates, or give any kind of grade for assignments. I'm left in a great pit of confusion by this because several classes had already assigned work prior to the corona cancellation and now I'm not sure if it will be due then or after these two weeks, because either way a grade can not be given until then. The primary issue with this is that it is not a large enough concern with me to ask whether or not assignments will be graded or accepted late because I don't want to go through the extra work and every assignment will have to be done at some point. So I figure I'll just work on all of my assignments as usual and finish them when I can, which for this class works great, we've already been working at our own pace following the tutorials for the majority of our recent assignments so I should be able to continue doing that, but now I'm not sure when the quarter ends. If work can't be graded for the next two weeks then there's no way the quarter ends on the 29th, but it is marked on the calendar to end then and it causes me to wonder when our large project is due. Essentially, while the sudden spring break and school closure has been quite confusing and unproductive I'll try my best to stay on top of these assignments, which I'm not even sure will be graded.
Main Points
This year we've mainly focused on creating games as well as improving our art skills on paper to aid in the production process. Overall I can say that my artistic skill on paper has increased tremendously, and though not all of my drawings turn out great they are at least distinguishable and detailed at this point. As for the work we've done with coding I'm pretty sure I now have a pretty solid grasp of basic coding, at least enough knowledge to be able to build my own simple game. I may not have mastered it yet but I'm sure with time it will come, as long as I continue to practice my coding skills. As for the cancellation of school, I'm not too sure what we're supposed to be doing right now in any of my classes but at least for this class I can work from home with Unity. Luckily my experience with the tutorials has gone rather smoothly so far and I hope it continues to stay that way especially when working from home where there are no classmates or teacher to help me if I run into issues. I'm also trying to up to date with all of the deadlines for these assignments, I know I'm ahead of some of my classmates but even still I'm somewhat behind compared to the recommended due dates. I'm sure in the end all will be fine so long as I work and spend my freetime wisely in these coming weeks. I may even spend some of my freetime drawing on paper, though I won't start any of that until I'm sure I know what is going on with all of my classes.
Main Points
It's hard to believe that it's already the third quarter of school, it feels like just yesterday was the first day but I suppose time flies sometimes. Now realizing that the year is already over halfway over, I figured it would be beneficial to see how far I've come and what I can do with what I've learned. Early this year we primarily focused on careers and the various aspects of games that come together to make them, though I still didn't expect us to get much experience actually making games for some reason. At that point, actually being able to design and create a game seemed like a far away goal I'd eventually achieve at some point in my life, but not this year. First quarter was also when this class was most different than the years prior. Instead of assigned blog posts as well as our own personal additions to our portfolios, we started to focus more on drawing assignments. If I have to be honest all of the drawing was somewhat grueling as it wasn't something I was necessarily used to, but I came to accept it as a way to improve my art on paper that I otherwise don't practice much with. I'm glad we changed up the process of turning in the drawing assignments though, as it made my life a lot less stressful. Often working on the drawing assignments was either a multi-day or several hours in one sitting kind of task, that even when I looked on the bright side, still burnt me out. Now with only having to turn in the final drawing I can focus more of my efforts on that drawing in particular, as the templates become repetitive rather quickly and whittle my brain away. I still find the provided resources extremely useful in understanding exactly what I should focus on, but the template work was always numbing. Aside from being relived of my stress regarding the drawing assignments, I'm glad that we are now able to move along at our own pace in the class. After second quarter I got a good understanding of the exact process used to create games and now with my knowledge of coding from this quarter I believe I can apply all of what I've learned to actually create a game. We don't always get to move at our own pace with learning, but I've always enjoyed it as I find it helps me to understand the content better when I can move quickly through things I have a deep understanding of, and take more time on things I find more difficult. Overall this year has been great so far and now looking back I'm starting to see all of the pieces coming together that will aid us in creating our games.
Main Points
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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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