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.
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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. Just to be clear, this is my opinion, take it with a grain of salt. On March 8, 2018, Trump gathered head executives from the game industry, parent groups, and members from Congress for a meeting about violence in video games. This meeting was created in response to the Parkland shooting in Florida a little while back. From what I have looked at online, this meeting was very unproductive and had nothing to do with actually changing any laws. At the meeting, Trump showed a clip that was roughly a minute and thirty seconds long that displayed out of context clips of violence in video games. This is silly and doesn't make for a good argument. All this clip does is demonstrate that certain video games do indeed have acts of violence portrayed in them. If there was some evidence depicting that video games that have violence of some kind in them have a correlation with people committing acts of violence in the real world, there may have been some worth to bringing up this argument again. However, there wasn't any substantial evidence brought up in the meeting, so it didn't do much. I find it kind of funny that video games are being made to look like they have a correlation related to gun violence in the real world once again. Anyway, that is my opinion on the matter.
As the title suggests, the last quarter of the year is coming up and the year is starting to wind down. I am pretty happy with what have done this quarter. I have successfully started to code my game, and I have implemented many key features to it already. The whole process of learning how to code has been an interesting one. I am always so happy to find a new way to code the same thing but with better efficiency so that the game runs smoother, or when I figure out how to code something new like movement, a working HUD, a combat system, etc. Although I have coded quite a lot of my game, I still have a good chunk of coding that I need to get done in order for my game to actually be played and considered a game. I am hoping that I have enough time to get everything coded in time for the presentation of my work at the end of the year. If I don't get everything done by that point, I will still be proud of what I decided to make this year since this will be my very first attempt at making a video game, and I never expected it to be any good. I am looking forward to the last quarter of the year, and I hope that it is as productive as the rest of the year.
Recently, while I was perusing Youtube in my spare time, I saw a video about this company, Euclideon, that has been researching and developing a new way to render graphics in a game in order to make extremely detailed without having to worry about computer limitations of RAM, CPUs, or GPUs. This intrigued me a lot so I decided to go take a look at their website to find out a bit more on how this works. Basically, the way that this company has been able to render things in such high detail is that instead of using the traditional polygonal method of rendering objects, they are using point cloud data. Essentially, Euclideon uses very tiny particles to build a complex and detailed object, kind of like how atoms combined to make up us and the things around us. I was surprised to see this kind of rendering work since it would seem like it would take a lot more resources to render millions upon millions of points of data to render and object, but it worked regardless of how much data they seemed to render at any one time. What was even more surprising was the way they were able to take pictures from something in real life and render everything in the picture with such a high fidelity. Anyway, I thought I should share this interesting bit of information that I found randomly one day. Here is a link to the Euclideon website to check it out for yourself: http://www.euclideon.com/
It's time for another game review by yours truly! This time I felt like I should do a review for quite possibly my favorite video game of all time, Final Fantasy X (that's a ten, not an 'X'). Just to show you how much I love this game, I have a copy of the game for my PlayStation 2, 3, and 4, and on Steam. Not only do I own four separate copies of the game, but I also beat it 2 or 3 times. The reasons as to why this is my favorite video game to date is a combination of the game's amazing story, soundtrack, character development, and the combat system. Also, it was one of the very first games that I ever played on the PlayStation 2 which probably skews my judgement a little bit when I look at other games that I played as a kid.
Enough about me and more about the game! I think the best place to start is the most captivating thing about any Final Fantasy game in the franchise, the soundtrack. The soundtrack of this game has many motifs repeated throughout a lot of the songs in the game, which makes each song feel connected to another one. Also, as the game progresses, I have noticed that the music also starts to get more complicated in terms of rhythm and instrumentation, which reflects the character growth of the main characters, which brings me to the next topic, character growth. This game does a great job with the amount of character growth that happens over the course of their adventure. Tidus, the main protagonist of the game, starts out being confused, lost, and unsure of himself and the reality he has come to known, but eventually he grows into a confident, serious, and determined character regardless of the fact that he knows that saving the world means that he has to die. This is just one example of the game's amazing character growth, the rest of the main cast of characters also grows along with Tidus. Since I'm already talking about story, let's go into that a bit. The story of the game is very captivating, especially as it approaches the end of the game and all of the puzzle pieces fall into place (really, Final Fantasy games are pretty confusing as you play them for the first time and it makes them a puzzle to figure out). An example of this confusing bit of story is the idea that Tidus isn't even actually alive anymore and he is just a dream from a city that was destroyed over 1000 years in the past of when the game takes place. You don't figure this out until the last couple hours of the game since that is when all of the puzzle pieces are available for you to complete the picture. The game first gives you Tidus in the dream world in the city that he is from (you don't know that this is a dream right from the get go), then it transport him to a world where everyone says that it was destroyed 1000 years ago, then right before you reach that city, you learn that he is in fact a dream that shouldn't exist, and finally, you reach the city and see it with your own eyes that it is completely destroyed. By introducing the story in small in complete bits throughout the whole game keeps the player engaged and interested in finding out what actually happened. Along side the story, the game has some amazing CG cutscenes that were amazing to see in a PlayStation 2 game at the time. Now, the cutscenes seem like it was made with today's technology. The last thing that made this game engaging for me was the combat system. Final Fantasy X uses the turn based combat system that was used in the previous entries of the franchise. This makes it a lot more strategic and engaging that that of a beat em' up or live action fighting combat system since you have to think about your fight decisions carefully and adapt to the different enemies that you run into on the fly. This is especially true for the bosses within this game which employ very devastating attacks that are unique to them alone. If you haven't played a single Final Fantasy game and don't know which one you should play, try out Final Fantasy X and you will not be disappointed. Take it from the guy who has multiple copies of the game and has played 3 times to completion. Don't worry about the other games in the franchise in terms of story, each Final Fantasy game in the franchise has a different set of characters and a different story, so you wont be missing anything if you start with X. I haven't realized just how far into the school year I was until I typed up my last weekly blog post and saw that I was already on post number seventeen. Man does time fly. Anyway, I figured that since I already did a post after the first quarter of the year to reflect on what I have done, I might as well do it again at the halfway point. This quarter has been a pretty productive one. I was able to get a rough idea of what my level is going to look like, and I was able to create a good amount of 3D models for my game. Last quarter was difficult since I didn't really know where I was going to start and how I wanted everything to look. This quarter, I feel as if I have a good overall list of things that I need to do in order to make a functioning game, albeit not a polished game, but what do you expect from a senior in high school who is making is first game ever? All in all, I found this quarter to be great and I can't wait to start getting into the coding for the game, which will be a massive re-learning process since I haven't touched C# after school got out last year. I hope that this process wont take too long and that I will be able to make leaps and bounds of progress on my game next quarter.
Time for another game review, this time I will be covering League of Legends, a very popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, or MOBA for short. A MOBA is a genre of video games in which players are pitted against each other or AI in a small arena setting. League was officially released in 2009 and I played it for the first time sometime in the Summer of 2013. I have been playing League on and off since then and I have seen the game grow, change, and progress to what it now is today. Anyway, League of Legends delivers a fun, fast, and simple gaming experience that allows for newcomers to get acclimated with its intricacies at a good pace. The game boasts a large roster of characters to choose from, which has its ups and its downs. Having so many characters in the game means a larger variety of different team compositions. However, by having so many characters, it can overwhelm new players by giving them so many characters to choose from, and balancing the characters to make them have an even playing field can become a challenge. League's solution to the overwhelming amount of characters is to lock them behind paywalls accessible through paid or in-game currencies and by making about 10 or so characters free to play each week. This gives new players a chance to try a handful of characters each week in order to see whether or not they enjoy them or not before purchasing them. Compared to Dota 2, in which they let the player pick from all 100+ characters, I feel as if League's system for characters is superior even though players wont be able to play all the characters in the game immediately. While we are on the topic of comparing League with Dota 2, the gameplay for the two games is drastically different. Dota 2 games tend to last longer than League games, the items in Dota 2 give players more buttons to press since most items in the game have active effects that can make the character invisible or teleport them a short distance whereas League tends to have more stat based items that have passive effects to make it simpler, and Dota 2 has various extra mechanics that increase the learning curve and make it difficult for newer players to get hooked on the game since they will most likely run around with their head chopped off for the first 100-200 games they play. Although Dota 2 can appeal to the crowd of gamers who seek a larger challenge, it can't compete with the simpler game experience that League has that makes it a quick and enjoyable experience instead of a massive headache. In the end, I prefer League of Legends and I would easily recommend this game to anyone who is new to the MOBA genre and wants to dive in and check it out.
Since I have been mainly posting about my project over the past 2-3 months, I would like to talk about some of the stuff that I have been making outside of that project. I have been mainly working on learning to draw in Illustrator using just my mouse since I don't have the money for a drawing tablet lying around. My main focus is weapons since I have always had a fascination with them ever since I played games like Final Fantasy in which the weapons were very intricate and beautiful. I'm not that much of a fan of guns since they always looked the same to me, however, sci-fi guns are another story since they also appeal to that amazement that I feel when I look at impressive weapons. Along side those weapons, I have been look towards some of the games that I have enjoyed, such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, in order to find something that would be interesting to recreate using Illustrator. Overall, I think I have gotten a lot better at getting over the handicap of using only the mouse when it comes to using Illustrator, I just have to improve my detail and coloring in order to make my digital work look amazing.
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AuthorMy name is Timothy Czerniejewski and this is my blog for my Game Art Design interests. Archives
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