Four years. It doesn't feel like it has been that long, but I have been in the game design pathway for four years. Over the course of those four years, I have learned a lot about what goes into making a game as well as the tools used to make them. On the first day of this pathway, I knew nothing about the game industry at all. All I knew back then was how much I enjoyed playing games. Over time, this class helped me to understand fully just how much work goes into making a game. Making us work together in teams to create our own game using our newfound knowledge of the game industry helped to solidify how hard it is to make a game (especially when you have more than one brain coming up with ideas that sometimes clash). I also learned how to use software when I had no prior experience of working with it. The most helpful things that I have been taught in this class is how to use 3D Studio Max and Unity since they helped me a lot with my project this year. However, I rarely used things like Adobe Audition and Premiere or GameMaker after the years we looked at them. I wished that we spent more time working with 3D Studio Max since I still got confused with the different modifiers that are available. Also, seeing other students work in 3D Studio Max this year made me want to learn more about the program. Another thing that I wanted to look more into was how to code in C# since Unity uses C#. Coding became my interest after we looked at it last year, but we never really got into learning it unless we took the time to do it outside of class. Well, that's about it. It was a pleasure taking your classes.
0 Comments
My last year of high school is finally coming to an end which also means that I am also getting ready for what I am going to do after high school. I have talked quite a bit about college in the past and what I am interested in, but I never actually told you all where I decided I was going to college. Turns out I will be attending NC State University this Fall with the intent of pursuing a Computer Science degree in the College of Engineering. I was pleasantly surprised to find the acceptance email for NC State in my inbox. I never expected to get into NC State let alone the College of Engineering due to how competitive it is to get into both. I decided a while back that I enjoyed coding (pretty sure I have a blog post about that somewhere) which has changed my college application process to focus mainly on computer science. You can see in my project that after a while I mainly focused on coding. Once I started to do that, I was having more fun with my project since I was able to explore my interest more and I was always happy when I accomplished a rather difficult task. That's about all I have to say about what I am going to be doing next year. Wish me luck!
Welcome back to another game review with Tim! This time I will be reviewing one of my favorite games, Dark Souls 3. This game was the first Dark Souls game that I played, so I was going in completely blind compared to veterans of the series who have started from the first game in the series. Nevertheless, I found myself to enjoy the brutal combat that this game is known for as well as the atmosphere that the game has. The game first greets you with a breathtaking cinematic before sending you off to the character customization screen, which is one of the more entertaining character creators I have seen. You can either make yourself look like any other human, or you can run around as a deformed, purple skinned human.
Once you are done with making your character, you are given an indirect tutorial that the player can view through messages on the ground that give you various controls for the game. This is awesome since it allows for players who already are familiar with the game to run straight through these messages and skip a tutorial they wouldn't need. After getting familiar to the game's controls, you explore the initial starting area, eventually running into an area that looks like an arena with a statue in the middle of it. When you walk up to the statue, you are given a prompt to pull out the sword that is impaling it. Doing so starts the first boss fight of the game not even an hour into the game! The first time I encountered this boss, I was shocked. I never would've expected a game to give someone a difficult challenge this early on when they are still learning the controls. I still remember dying to him at least 8 times before I finally killed him. This just emphasizes the brutal nature of this game as well as how punishing the combat can be. If you perform an action at the wrong time while fighting something in Dark Souls 3, you will get punished for it. The game forces you to get good at the combat or else you won't be able to progress so much so that the term "get good" has become a staple response of the Dark Souls community when a player asks how to do something. Besides the combat, Dark Souls 3 provides an incredible atmosphere through its visual and auditory design. The Gothic architecture and setting along with the very limited amount of music and ambient sound creates a dark and oppressive feeling as you explore the world. The only times the game plays music to my knowledge is when you are fighting a boss. The music typically starts out simple and quiet as you battle the boss' first phase, but when the HP of the boss drops below a certain point and the second or third phase of a fight starts, the music picks up and adds to the terror the player may feel if they are nearly dead as well as the intimidation of the boss itself. One of the draw backs of this game is how difficult it is to figure out the story of it. I had no idea why I was killing all of these bosses until I looked it up on Google. The game doesn't tell its story through dialogue interactions between the player and NPCs, nor does it tell its story through cutscenes. Most of the story is hidden in the description texts of the game's items as well as previous entries of the Dark Souls series. In conclusion, if you haven't played any of the other Dark Souls games, I recommend you start with this one. I have gone back and tried the other games in this series, and those are a lot less friendly to newer players. If you can get past the fact that this game has a rather complicated story and a brutal combat system, I think you will enjoy this game.
The time has come for quite possibly the last post for my independent project. This week I was able to finish coding both the construction and basic combat for my game. This involved quite a lot of coding to get this done. I coded in the option for players to construct different buildings from the worker unit, an outline of the building the player selected that follows the cursor so that they will be able to figure out where they are placing the building, a way to turn the outline red when the place the player is trying to place a building is invalid, a health bar that fills up until the building is completed, and a way for players to cancel their building selection by pressing right click. This was only for construction. I coded in a projectile that is shot from the tank unit whenever the player left clicks an enemy unit and is in range of the tank, and I coded in team colors so that the player can tell which units belong to which player/computer. This projectile also damages the enemy unit when it hits them and their health bar updates accordingly. Next week is the week that I will be presenting what I have made all year to the rest of my peers and their families. I wont be updating on my project after this post except for a potential final post that shows any changes I make after next week. This project is nowhere near completion yet, so I will be working on it after my presentation next week.
Plan for Next Week:
This week was a pretty rough week for me. I was out sick for 2 days and I didn't have a full class period the day I came back since I was busy catching up on stuff I missed. All of this boils down to me getting very little done this week sadly. Of the work I got done, I was able to get the ground work for a worker unit done. The goal of this unit is to allow the players to create more buildings for them to use. For instance, if the player wants another refinery to spawn twice as many harvester units, they can do so with this unit. Now that I feel better for the most part, I am ready to tackle the rest of the code for construction next week. I will hopefully get that done and I can start combat so that there is something for the player to do other than move units and spawn things. At this rate, I probably wont finish my game, but I will hopefully have something to show in the next couple of weeks.
Plan for Next Week:
I got quite a bit done this week. I was able to get resource gathering completed for my game for the most part. I still have to fix it a bit so that the player can see their resource counter and that the harvester actually deposits the resources. What I have done, however, is make a unit to collect resources, make a resource deposit the player can gather from, make a building that can create more harvesters, make the harvester collect resources, show that the harvester is collecting resources through a health bar over the resource deposit, a bar on the selection box of the harvester that shows the amount of resources it has, and the resource deposit gets smaller as it is depleted. The harvester also returns to the building it is made from once it has reached its capacity or if the deposit runs out, but it currently doesn't actually deposit resources to that building yet. I also added health bars to every building and unit. Next week I plan on make a unit that can construct buildings, and after that I will start creating a combat system.
Plan for Next Week:
I was able to finally finish the rally point system for my game so that players will be able to move around the spawn point of their units if they need to. I also started the process of creating a way for players to collect resources and use them. I first focused on creating an ore object so that I can hide parts of it as the player depletes it of its resources. There is a picture of my ore object below. The idea is that I will hide the twenty something cubes one at a time as the health for the ore reaches zero. The next step in resource collecting is making a unit that actually collects those resources and code it so that the player will receive those resources. I plan on finishing resources next week and then jump onto creating a way for players to spend those resources to create new buildings.
Plan for Next Week:
I am making this blog post early since I wont have access to my computer tomorrow due to a school trip that I am going on. Anyway, I was able to successfully get the spawning of units done within Unity this week, something that I am really proud of. On top of this, I got a majority of the code for a rally point made for the player to see, and in the future change, where their units will spawn when the build time for them is finished. I still need to code in the ability to change the location of the rally point. I will do that next week along with the coding of resources so the player can actually generate an income that they can then spend on units instead of them being free. If I somehow have extra time after that, I will try to code a way for players to construct buildings using a unit.
Plan for Next Week:
Despite this week being short since Spring Break starts tomorrow, and with the fact that the class I am in made me have to move computers since other students needed the one I typically worked at, I was able to get through a good chunk of my coding for the player being able to spawn a unit from a building. The extent to which I got my code done involves being able to add any prefab object to a list of game objects if want to add more buildings or units to my game, and I was able to set up a test building and unit where if the player selects the building, any units that are able to be made in the building can be selected, however you can't spawn them quite yet. If I had another day, I might have gotten to the point where I can spawn a unit from the building. Regardless, I wont be working on the project next week since I will be out for Spring Break. After that week though, I will be right back on track to work on this project again in which I hope to finish coding unit spawning and start the coding for harvesting resources.
Plan for Next Week:
This blog post will be a bit early since I will be out of commission on Friday due to me getting my wisdom teeth removed tomorrow. Regardless of this fact, I got some more coding done this week. I was able to code unit movement, but when I started to code the player resources into the game, I messed up the unit movement as well, so sadly I wont be able to show anything until next week. When I check Unity, there is an error relating back to my Dictionary variables in my code, so I am going to have to do some debugging. I will hopefully correct whatever is messing up my code next week on top of making it so that buildings can spawn in units. This will be a pretty big step towards making my game playable since making units is one of the most important things when playing an RTS. If I have the time after coding that, I should be able to work on allowing the player to harvest resources so that they can then use those to purchase units which is also another big step towards making my game playable.
Plan for Next Week:
|
AuthorMy name is Timothy Czerniejewski and this is my blog for my Game Art Design interests. Archives
May 2018
Categories
All
|