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.
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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.
I was able to get a good amount of work done this week regardless of missing a couple of days of school as well as a shorter school day on Tuesday. I got the framework for my cursor created within the code of my game so that the cursor will switch between a select cursor when the player isn't hovering over the HUD to the default mouse cursor when the player does hover over the HUD. I also made it so that the cursor changes into an arrow pointing in the direction of the movement of the camera whenever the player moves the cursor towards the edges of the screen. I can't change the cursor to anything else yet since I haven't coded a way to attack another unit or building, or a way to harvest something. I plan on implementing a better way of moving units next week so that I can then make the cursor change into a cursor that is animated and shows that you have moved a unit. If I have more time after I code movement, I plan on setting up the player resources and a way for the player to create units from buildings.
Plan for Next Week:
This week was very productive since I got a lot of coding done for my game. I was successfully able to create a method of selecting both buildings and units which involves the player simply left clicking the unit or building to select it or right clicking anywhere to deselect the unit or building. Along with this, I made it so that the HUD will display the name of the unit or building the player selects on the right hand side, and I made a selection box wrap around the unit or building the player selects so that the player knows what they have selected. All of this can be seen in the picture that I placed on this post that uses some placeholder models that I made using Unity's game objects. I haven't gotten to making it possible for the player to select multiple units at the same time yet, nor have I gotten to the point of allowing the player to control the units and buildings to do stuff. I plan on making a cursor that changes as you scroll over different object in the game as well as setting up the unit movement and resources next week. Side note, I got a lot of coding help from reading over this blog here: stormtek.geek.nz/. This blog has been very helpful when I have had any issues in figuring out what to code next or how to code something. I am learning a lot from this blog, and I thought I should give some credit where credit is due since I am using some assets that are on his blog in my game which may or may not be replaced later on.
Plan for Next Week:
Sorry for the late blog post, forgot to write one yesterday. This week I decided to clean up the script for my camera controls and add a feature that allows the player to rotate the camera by holding down the alt key and the right mouse button while dragging the mouse in the direction that the player wants to rotate the camera towards. This was a bit challenging since the I messed up the code a few times trying to change it, but luckily it worked out in the end. After I did that, I learned how to set up the basics for the GUI of my game. I didn't do much with the script yet, all I did so far was set up the backbone of it so that I can add to it quicker and easier. On top of setting up the script, I made the script draw two different rectangles in to see if I set everything up correctly. I hope to have the buildings in my game set up so that I can select them and hopefully give them orders next week. I didn't have time at school to grab anything visual to show on this post, but I will definitely make sure to put something on the next one.
Plan for Next Week:
This week I wasn't able to get much done with my game sadly. Turns out the process of creating the GUI for an RTS is very difficult to do. You have to code the selection of units both individually and with a box selection method, the actions of the units themselves, the actions of the buildings in the game, the interactions of units and buildings, the interactions of resource gathering and use, and the actions of an AI opponent. This is a lot of stuff to code, and this is only the general stuff that I will need to code for my game. Since I don't remember too much about coding, all of this stuff will take some time to learn and create for my game. That is why I spent most of this week looking into what I will need to code in order to make an RTS rather than actually coding said things. Now that I got a list of things to learn how to code, I am going to take some time outside of school to look up how to code all of it. My first order of business is setting up the unit selection for my game so that you can select one or more units at a time which I plan to have done next week. Sorry for not having anything to show for this week, I plan to have a lot more done next week.
Plan For Next Week:
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.
This week I was able to successfully create the script required to make my camera controls for my game. The script enables the player to use their mouse cursor to move the camera towards whichever edge of the screen they move their cursor to, and it allows for the player to use their scroll wheel to zoom in and out. The script wasn't too difficult to make and it works out the way I wanted it to so I am happy about that. I didn't get to the UI this week, but I will definitely start that process next week and hope to have it mostly done by next week. I will still need to work out other aspects of the game before I will be able to make sure that the UI is working one hundred percent of the time, such as the process of gathering resources, or the process of creating more units and being able to select more than one of them. Other than that, I think I should be able to make my UI next week.
Plan for Next Week:
This week was very successful. I was able to complete my goal of getting my character to move, albeit a bit weird looking since he starts out slow and accelerates instead of going at a constant speed. The way I wanted to move my character involved a point and click system in which the character would move towards where ever you clicked. This proved to be very easy to do (after I looked up a video) and all it required was to bake the map so that there is a Nav Mesh on it, add a Nav Mesh Agent to your character, and a simple script which I will include a screenshot of below; feel free to look at it while I explain how it works.
Plan for Next Week:
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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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