Making a game is obviously better said than done, but in order to fully understand it you must go through the process yourself, or as I did, with a group. In our class we didn't have a choice of group parters, so the examples I'll give is for people I wasn't used to working on big projects with. A positive of working in groups you split up the work in making the game another good thing about working in groups is people can give out ideas and improvements to ideas for the game you will make, ideas that could help drive the game in the right direction. Some downsides is in a group it's hard to keep everything organized, it's hard to trust that everything will get done in time, it's hard to every do your part on time. So you may say that you'd like to work on your own, that you trusted yourself enough or you just don't want people to "mess up" your vision then you're in for a ride. As of writing this I've had to start over completely on my game Strict Parents Simulator as every bit of code slowly broke down one by one like a domino effect. With no one really to collaborate on this project, the old build of the game was unplayable as things like the ground being solid and enemy movement patterns did not work no matter what I did, the path finding program did not want to move the Father on the path and I kept falling through the floor even though collisions were on. Eventually I decided to start over after I got a Macbook for my birthday with updated hardware and a more code friendly device, also starting over is a lot easier then fixing everything. If you're getting into game design, make sure your projects are small if you're working by yourself or even with a team, focus on simpler ideas and don't try to go all out like I did (twice).
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This year our class worked in Unity and C# code, slowly learning the ups and downs of creating video games virtually on our own. To help us understand how Unity worked exactly we followed a tutorial called Create with Code, Create with Code is a course on the Unity website that has video tutorial teaching beginners the basics like how to make a character move left to right. The course is very accessible and easy to understand, the problem comes from the difficulties of using C# scripts. C# scripts requires the user to spell everything correctly and everything has to be perfect, one small mistake can and will break the entire script and not directly tell you what's wrong. When there's a mistake in one script, Unity will not work and show an error message and highlight the script with the error, not telling what was wrong. When using Unity I learned it is extremely frustrating when code and elements start to break down because of one little mistake, so when using Unity I have to be very careful. In my experience when one thing does not work it can be a lot more trouble then it's worth when fixing it, I spent a lot more time fixing one little problem I could have spent finishing everything else. But that's is the only big downside, when everything works Unity is a great engine to make games with, pretty easy to use and understand especially after going through the Create with Code course. Unity and C# script can be tricky to maintain but most coding and game software are tricky at times, Thanks to Create with Code I have enough know how to make my own games even if I will definitely run into problems.
Introduction Just a Regular Game is a flash game on the Cartoon Network site made up of three other unique mini games, all with scoreboards and high scores. These games were made for children 10+ so the games have to be simple and easy to play for any one and Just a Regular Game achieves that. For this review since the game is three separate mini games, I'll be reviewing them in order of least level of enjoyment to the highest, but first some background on Regular Show. Background on the Show Regular show was made by J. G. Quintel, the same who worked on the Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, and it follows a blue jay named Mordecai and a racoon named Rigby and their job at a park where an episode starts off fairly normal then quickly devolves into madness. For example, Season 1 episode 1 "The Power", where Mordecai and Rigby start off by accidentally making a hole in the wall in their room to using a magic keyboard to accidentally send their friend Skips to the moon and have to get him back. In this episode we meet Benson the park manager, Pops the son of Benson's boss and Skips, the parks groundskeeper. Another episode to know in this review is the next episode, episode 2 of Season 1, "Just set up the chairs" where Mordecai and Rigby are given the jobs to set up the chairs for a kid's birthday, when searching for more chairs the two find an abandon arcade machine that released The destroyer of World which they have to defeat with a arcade monster of their own. so now that a little background has been covered let's start reviewing the Game in order of my level of enjoyment for least to greatest Escape from the Moon
Destroy the Destroyer
Put the hurt on him
Conclusion Just a Regular Game holds a special place in my childhood but one game being good, one alright and the other boring doesn't translate as a good game. I know this game is a basically a flash game on a website that lags every time an ad off screen loads in but Just a Regular game is still a good time waster. Is it a good game? Overall not really but that doesn't mean I and others don't still enjoy it. Call it nostalgia but I think this game still holds up to this day, mechanics are easy to understand and the game isn't too frustrating, it's a good game, but isn't just regular game. Just a Regular Game:
The Fallout series are games, that in recent events, me and a lot of other players have some issue with. From the awful launch of 76 to the ultimate backlash for fans to Bethesda for their bug filled games and lack of updated engine. I have fond memories with Fallout 4 so in recent events I decided to play through it again, this time with a more cynical eye. When starting the game I was greeted to a bug, my wife in the game had mysteriously disappeared only to pop right back into reality, wonderful. Overall the game was still a fun FPS but when completing the game I felt no real positive emotion, maybe from my countless playthroughs or maybe just the fact the ending doesn't bring too much of an impact, either way the ending was the weaker of the series. Going through the story feels like a chore and this was true before making this review so not much for replay value. I would say this game is worth the money since it is an older title now and the price is marked down, It's not an awful game it just seems passable. Does it deserve a recommendation? my opinion no, it's not strong story wise and it's not fun RPG wise so no, I will not recommend this game. Speaking of story, this games got one alright for how forgettable it is. The story reflects the story of Fallout 3 in which you go searching the wasteland for a family member, in Fallout 3 it was your father, in Fallout 4 it is your infant child Shaun. Since this game has a voiced protagonist the game only gives you one outlook and one opinion, you want to find him and when you do, it is a twist but a predictable one. It turns out that your son is actually running the evil faction know as the institute, and depending on which faction you side with, you either kill him or he dies anyways, I love choice. The characters throughout the game are your standard Bethesda NPCs with no charm or memorability, the dialogue wheel has been extremely simplified, giving your 4 options, 3 of which is saying yes different ways. The Fallout series was build off of witty and fun RPG game, except Fallout 3 as it was more of an FPS with RPG elements which was fine until Fallout 4 became a FPS with RPG similarities rather then elements. The game does well at an open world gameplay and the first person shooting aspect is not bad, although the enemies sometimes feel like standing targets that sometimes move to the left and right is there is no real challenge, even if you crank up the difficultly it just turns them into bullet sponges and not effect the AI. It is possible to completely forget about the story and do whatever in the game, although the side quests aren't exactly fun but you can play through the entire game without touching the main quest. The game can be completed by someone who hasn't played it before with some harder challenges for veterans, although the ladder part I find is very rare. In previous titles the visuals had a slight color tint to it, in Fallout 3 it had a green tint, in Fallout New Vegas it had a red tint, Fallout 4 ditches that completely with normal natural colors with is a nice change in my book. After 5 years of the game being out it still looks good, although characters pathfinders get messed up often, making them block doorways or not know where to even go. There are very few animations and the only well thought out ones for the player character was the one when the player picks the one no option as to opposed to the three other yes options, which isn't a compliment. The music is forgettable and I think it was designed to be, ever since Fallout 3 there has been radio stations that play music from the era Fallout is replicating that being the early 1900's, so the background music is composed as boring so players will switch to the radio, or maybe I'm giving Bethesda too much credit. The voice acting is not bad, while there were times where the delivery was off or you think to your self "that was the best take?", it's still professionally done. There were no real awful sound effects, a lot of it was just passable, it was gun sounds not a lot I can say. The Pip boy and map are the same as they are in every 3D Fallout game, easy to use and quite convenient, although if you play for to long items might be lost forever in your inventory but that's late game, as it stands the Pip boy, map, and inventory are easy to use. Whenever you get a quest it'll always have the Bethesda map marker so you know where to go and can follow it blindly and not take in the world you're in, not to say it's not important it can just be a little distracting. If you bought Fallout 4 for the replay ability and the RPG elements well, don't get your hopes up, the role playing aspect went out the window once a voiced protagonist came into the mix and there isn't any real difference between endings besides the Institute ending and that's about it. With an open skill tree you can make the ultimate killing machine and not have any real choice at the start. Subtitles were legible expect for one part that always happened to me, when Preston Garvey is explaining how to get rid of some Raiders in the early game he tells Sturges to tell you their plan, problem is the subtitles for Sturges never showed up, it was just the same line of "Sturges, tell him" at the bottom of the screen, only happened there. Oh crashes, bugs, glitches, is it a Bethesda title if it doesn't have all three? The community has excused these errors for long enough, I've had textures missing, NPCs T posing, random crashes, the works. I feel like Bethesda needs to actually fix these problems instead of having them as silly little jokes and "oops too bad" moments, sometimes their games including Fallout 4 are unplayable, in my play through recently I was met with a hour loading screen followed by a crash, fitting. Opinions on Bethesda aside, is Fallout 4 amazing? No, is Fallout 4 awful? No, it is just ok, the controls are ok, the music is ok, the story is ok, everything is mediocre execpt for the consistent glitches and the lack of any real replay ability. I give it three stars, it's not amazing and it's not awful, I still had fun playing in making something out of something lack luster, that is when it's not crashing.
The Outer Worlds is a RPG by Obsidian and Private Division, an game which has the feel of older RPG games like Oblivion or Fallout New Vegas, a game that Obsidian worked on. In the Outer Worlds, the player character is a colonist frozen in a pod on a ship called the Hope. The player is rescued by Phineas Wells who tasks you to help him revive the other colonists, the player is ejected into the planet below and the game begins. While playing the Outer Worlds I felt levels of enjoyment to anger, I personally loved the dialog of characters and the fun interactions you can have, but then find myself in a spot where I kept dying and dying, but that never made me personally quit the game. As an RPG, one thing it does well is its replayability, with different playstyles, endings, and secrets not yet explored, there is lots of replayability with makes it worth the 60 dollars. I would definitively recommend this game to my friends, it's a RPG straight out of the 2010's with a nice coat of pain with a little more streamlined customization. The gameplay was very open as RPGs should be, the game is spilt up in different planets with lots to explore and aren't just glorified levels. The player goes to these planets by the story, Phineas will give you directions and main quests to show the player other players and characters. The games difficulty is not so consistent, I played on normal and some parts were easy while other would be incredibility hard which only made me quit once with is a feat. Seeing as the Outer Worlds is an RPG, there are different playstyles you can use, although I found it hard to do an melee only run, making feel like the game was made for guns, but people have done it before me. The gameplay was fun, there is a machinic that functions like the VATS system from Fallout, instead of selecting a bodytype and pausing time, TTD or Tactical Time Dilation slows down time and lets you give harmful effects to enemies, for example if you target the head it will blind enemies decreasing their accuracy. The gameplay is logical, it feels like a normal FPS but with some imaginative SciFi weapons like a shrink ray that shrinks enemies. The graphics both look dated and new at the same time, the technology shows age but nothing too big to bring you out of the immersion. While you'll get your occasional texture pop where texture load in while you play, it's mostly cloths or landscapes everything was on model with no noticeable errors in that regard. The backgrounds and worlds were beautiful with bright colors for one and deep and depressing colors for another, it's imaginative to say the least. The animations for NPCs were minimum, only having a couple poses when in dialog, some head nods, and of course lip syncing, the monsters are also minimum but that's understandable considering the size of the game. The music was not too memorable as it's blended into the background, I couldn't tell you one track except the main menu music, which isn't the best. The voice acting is on point and very felt stilted to me, everything sounded natural like the creature sounds, the environmental sound effects, all sound effects and voices sounded great. The controls were your standard FPS RPG control layout which doesn't have customization, but isn't a problem for me at least. The menu is very streamed line so anyone can use them without trouble, although this makes the more hardcore players a little disappointed as some crazy character customization are not present. The menus like the inventory was organized and streamed lined, the menu options involve changing the difficulty, volume, and even an option to have your dialog options pop up before an NPC is done speaking. The map was only used to see where exactly you're supposed to go and to fast travel, so the map isn't anything to write home about. There is a hint system that appears during loading screens at the bottom of a in universe ad, which are random and aren't related to your quest since the game wants you to deal with it your own way. The text had no spelling errors although it didn't always say what the NPC was saying but something similar, like them saying "We have to go kill those guys" with the text saying "we got to kill those guys". There were no technical problems like crashes or bugs I found, only thing that bugged me was the loading screens that took a minute or two, which if I'm honest I and other people who've played a lot of RPG games have grown accustom to. For my final score, I would give The Outer Worlds 4 stars, not the best but definitely a sort of love letter to people who grew up or enjoy playing the RPG games of the 2010's, I honestly enjoyed this game so much it has become my favorite game and I know lots of people agree with me fully.
When I thought about making games and the production part of it, I always saw myself doing most of the work, but when making your first paper prototype, you need a plan with your group on who does what. When going in we didn't really have a true plan, we didn't assign people to do different things we all worked on one thing together then moved on to the next. We treated this as if it was a group project, some did a lot less then others. We all did a little bit of the big part of the entire prototype, that being the cards. This prototype was a paper version of a dialogue tree for an RPG like Outer Worlds or Skyrim, and it was hard work to make unique dialogue trees for 5 separate npcs and even then we weren't even finished. We lacked the tools at home and some didn't do work they promised to do and stayed in confusing while another stayed stressed, frustrated and wanting to do have creative input. Everyone had different visions on how NPCs acted and talked, which made the narrative a little messy, I believe what we should have done is split the work up among ourselves. We should have had one doing the art, one doing the rules, one doing the survey, and one person writing one or two characters. Now we did have that in mind with the writing but because we weren't a full group so we had to split the work which explains the tone changes. I believe this was a learning experience, so now I know that games take a team effort to make, that no one is a jack of all trades and that I should stay to my strengths.
Producing Concept art for a game or any sort of media is not as simple and easy as doodling on to a piece of paper and sending it in, there's a lot more effort and research that goes into concept work. When doing concept art the team or yourself if you're working on a project only, has a vision of how they want a character or an environment looks so they will give you details and tell you want they want ultimately but still leaving room for the artist to add their touch. For environments and characters, you'll need a mood board, a mood board is a collection of reference picture on what you want the art to look like including color, if you wanted to draw a old building you would want to collect images of old buildings to have as references. While sketching out your concept art, you should make multiple sketches with different designs or details because your first sketch won't always impress the team or even yourself. Once you've gotten an idea of what you're drawing, you're ready for your final concept art, where you draw your character or building in different angles being front, back, and the sides, the drawing should be fully colored and doesn't have to look perfect but that doesn't mean get lazy, put enough effort to show you care but you don't have to over do it. Now you know concept art isn't as simple as one would imagine, it's still a job and an every important at that but that shouldn't discourage you from trying to be a concept art, you should just be prepared to take it seriously
Every game from card games to video games have core elements that are put in place as supports for making a game an engaging one. The first element to consider is the kind of player you want playing your game and how many players you want playing the game, for example if you made a game geared towards teens you would market your game to that demographic. Time is another element in every game, some games have time limits to have stacks and having a consequence of losing if time runs out while others have not limit. Space is a very important element in all games, there are two different states of space, discrete and continuous. Discrete space is a space that the player has to go in a defined place, Continuous space is space that is open ended as long as the player is in said space. An important element in any game is the rules of your game, without them the open ended nature can be harmful to you game. Rules must be concrete meaning clear and easy to understand once explained, achievable meaning giving the player a sense of them winning, and rewarding because a player must feel a sense of reward or victory from winning and following the rules. In games there is always a level of skill involved in games and those skills can be physical, mental, and social. Physical skill is all about your physical capabilities and how fit you are, mental skill is where the game challenges the player with puzzles to test there intelligence, and social being a test of the players skill to communicate with team members and work together to win. There are a lot more game elements and basics but I believe the ones listed are some of the most important to consider when making a game.
Tetris is a long living title from the arcade era whose name remains relevant to this day, but does it still stay consistent at keeping people playing and having fun? Well I sure think so, the game is all about planning ahead in a game of randomized blocks and slowly building speed of said blocks. The game rewards players who rank up a lot of points and think strategically, which is an aspect that hasn’t evolved from the original arcade game and for good reason. The visual style of different shaped blocks and charming simplistic graphics helps all different Tetris games stay consistent and appropriate. Since Tetris dates back to the early days of arcades, there isn’t a lot of music playing in game besides the Tetris theme, there are little sound queues for when a block is placed down or if the player gets points by lining up Tetris blocks but other then that the audio is lacking. When playing Tetris there are different little windows showing you the main game play where you control the Tetris blocks, a window showing the next blocks that will drop, a window for a block you want to save for later, a window for what level the player is on, and a window showing the player the score. Now a days, Tetris on almost all platforms is a free to play game that anyone from newcomers the veterans and pick up and play any title available, newcomers tend to play faster and lining up blocks to get points while veterans take their time and build up their blocks to get lots and lots of points. As a game, Tetris isn't technically demanding, the frame rate is smooth, there is little to no input lag and the graphics aren't slowing anything down. All and all, Tetris is a fun game that anyone can play and get into, its arcade style of point based objectives and leader boards holds up to this day, it’s a fun game series that I’m sure everyone has played at one point in their lives.
Super Hot is a first person shooter game where time only moves when you move, with a story that isn't as simple as the game play. The game starts with you talking to a friend via an online chat, they tell you to download a game called Superhot.exe which you do and begin playing the game, which is both unique and enjoyable. Time moves whenever you move, a mechanic that makes the game fun to play yet at times frustrating. Super Hot is a puzzle game as much as a shooter, the players have the same objective of beating all the enemies in the level, each level has a unique theme like being stuck in a elevator with three red enemies with guns attack you or being forced to dodge bullets without anyway to defend yourself. While the characters in the game are really just red guys, the player and the game itself aren't exactly three dimensional characters, they aren't supposed to be, the red guys serve as basic enemies, the game is the main antagonist and protagonist (and I'm not talking about controls, the game of Superhot.exe is a character) and finally you, the player. Character and a thrilling story take a back seat to player experience, where in levels it's always the objective of kill all enemies and it's up to the player on how to execute that. The graphics of Super Hot go for a old late 90's to early 2000's era graphics with the characters made of visible polygons and the UI of the main menu looks like a old game launcher, even the computers and VR headset look like 90's futuristic gear. Now there is little to no music in Super Hot, there's the buzzing sound of the level starting or the noise of a crash slowing becoming bit crushed as you died, to even the victory screen repeating only SUPER HOT SUPER HOT SUPER as your actions throughout the level play in real time. The lack of music is I think a choice to immerse the player into the mechanic of time only moving when you do, it would be annoying for a song to keep starting and stopping or continuing playing while you play, it would ruin the fun. The only times Super Hot crash is when it's intentional, remember the game of Superhot.exe is conscious and will sometimes send you out of bounds and crash for story purposes rather than a simple bug error. This game doesn't have any real replay value since all the surprises are spoiled and the game is very long, but other then that Super Hot to me is a 5 starts, it's engaging, fun, frustrating, the story sucks you in, the world sucks you in, it's a amazing experience that is worth every penny.
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The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and Do Not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools.
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