So last week I had the first taste of actual school that I've had in over a year now. With everything that has been going on in the world this past year, all of my tests have been online and I've had to sit at my computer and do them, but last week that changed. Wednesday morning after swim practice I had to shoot up to downtown Durham to be at DSA by 8:30 to take a test, yes to take a test. Now it was definitely not since all of my friends were there wearing masks and we al had to sit apart, I never thought I would say this but I was actually excited to be at school. The test we were there for was something that I have known about since my sophomore year of Highschool when there were some seniors in my game design class who had to take the WorkKeys exam, so I knew that I had to take it eventually. So the WorkKeys test was split up into 3 different parts, the first was a following instructions test, the second was a basic math test, and the third one was about reading charts and graphs. The basic instructions test would have a paragraph explaining how to do something or requirements and the questions would be about a specific part of that paragraph that you would have to identify. Th basic math test was pretty self explanatory except almost all of the problems were word problems and you could use a calculator to solve them. The reading graphs and charts test was also pretty self explanatory where they would ask you a question about the graph or chart and you would have to be able to read the graph/chart to find the correct answer. The purpose of the WorkKeys test is to measure your strengths and weaknesses in professional areas. I actually thought the test was pretty interesting, I felt like it had enough real world type situations to actually be useful for employers to figure out if a candidate is right for a job, so overall I feel like the test was actually something useful for people who are looking to get jobs or for employers to find candidates for their jobs.
Reflection:
0 Comments
So now that we are about to begin the final quarter of my school career, in class we are finally getting to build our game. This is what I originally signed up for all those years ago when I heard about the game design pathway, so now that we are finally getting to do it, it feels good. Before we really dug into the meat of the course, I wanted to take a look at some effective ways to work as a team during these odd and unprecedent times. The first thing that I read on this website called ScienceNorway.no, is that establishing a routine is one of the first things to do to create a productive digital workspace. I think that we are lucky to have such a rigid school structure so that it keeps us on a somewhat normal routine schedule. The second point is to to setup regular interaction points for each day, this is another thing where school keeps us in check. I do think that we should set up more meeting times as a team were we can go through and talk about what we are doing to try and stay on the same page as we work. The third tip on this website is to speak up on what you think. By this I think that it means holding yourself and your teammates accountable for their actions and what they are supposed to be bringing to the table to help he group. The fourth tip on the list is to celebrate the groups accomplishments, I feel like this would be good for larger teams but for a four person team like ours it seems kind of unnecessary. The fifth and final tip on this list is to encourage transparency and inclusion, I feel like this is in the same boat as the last tip where it would be good for larger groups but for us I feel like this is something that should already be built in. Overall I feel like this has been pretty helpful, taking other peoples experience working in groups and seeing the positives and negatives of both is good to help out us when trying to work effectively in a group.
Summary:
So with every new day brings new games, now this isn't necessarily a new game but it is a free content update to what is possibly the most popular game in the world right now, Call of Duty: Warzone. Now if you have been living under a rock for the past year, Warzone has become the most popular free to play game in the world, with Activision coming out in late 2020 saying that they have passed over 80 MILLION players worldwide, and that number has only been going up since. Now this update to the game was the "second" season of this years game, so this is like the second of what is most likely six seasons within the games yearly lifespan. Since Warzone was originally released with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the game has seen some major changes since its release. When the newest Call of Duty released, Black Ops: Cold War, we saw an integration between Warzone and Cold War. This meant that all the guns from Cold War were added into warzone and the leveling system in Warzone changed to be the same as the prestige system in Cold War. Now with all of the being explained I can finally get into my thoughts on the newest season of Warzone. This seasons theme is "jungle" so all the cosmetic items that you can earn in this Battle Pass are jungle themed, which I think are pretty cool. The biggest thing that they added into the actual gameplay is a new location on the map where there is a shipwreck on the south of the map that actually spawns zombies where if you kill all of the zombies you can earn a new weapon blueprint that is a limited time exclusive, I haven't gotten the chance to get the blueprint yet since its super crowded and everyone is dropping there right now but in a little bit of time hopefully I can get it. Other than the new battle pas and the new location on the map nothing else is really new for warzone specifically, so to me this update was kind of underwhelming. Like they did fix some bugs that were in the game but other than that now new crazy changes to keep the game fresh, it just kind of seems like the same game as last season.
Summary:
Now that we are halfway through this school year, I'll be using this blog post as a way to reflect on how I've been so far. Overall this year has been a train-wreck, it feels like most everything that could go wrong has pretty much gone wrong. The whole virtual learning thing has definitely not been good for me, sitting down t my desk all day just isn't a very effective way for me to learn since I'm naturally a very curious person and I have struggled without being able to ask immediate questions like I could in a standard classroom environment. I feel like in any other year virtual learning probably would have been a okay solution for me but combined with the fact that its my senior year so I also have a big case of senior-itis where motivation is at an all time low, and it was super easy for me to fall into a hole like I did. I don't really know how deep I want to get into this but since it is MY blog and I can do what I want, I'll go as deep as I feel comfortable about doing so. This year has really taken a toll on my mental health, I won't go too deep into it because it make me sad just thinking about it but it felt like I was letting a lot of things all apart. School was just horrible and I wasn't actually learning anything and there wasn't too much life outside of that that could bring me up. Overall the was pretty much the theme of the first half of my school year, it was sad, but the good thing about being at rock bottom is that the inky way to go is up!
Summary:
This isn't really something that is related to what we are doing in class but I feel like it is relevant enough to this class in particular that I can do a personal blog post on it. I don't think that I've actually ever really touched on it in a blog post but I have always had a knack for computer hardware and building computers. I built my first pc for my 14th birthday and I have just been upgrading it ever since. I have had my current parts for a couple of years now and they are starting to show their age especially while I am playing games, so I want to upgrade my part to better, newer parts that's the bright side of building a PC is that you can upgrade when you need or even just want to. There is just one MASSIVE problem in the PC marketplace right now, and that is there is no parts available anywhere. This all stems back to the beginning of COVID, where manufacturers of parts had to be shut down because of quarantine's around the globe. Even with manufacturers coming back to work there still isn't enough for the high demand in the market right now. Since the world has been shut down huge brands such as NVIDIA and AMD have come out with newer and better hardware but there have been lots of issues surrounding the release of those as well. On launch sites, people would pay for bots to buy as many of the new parts as possible so that they can sell them third hand for a super inflated price (I hate scalpers more than anything). This has become a big issue for people like myself who are looking to buy parts for their computer but can't get a hold of any at the original price and cannot afford to pay way over what the part is worth. The only real way to work around this is to wait it out until these parts become more available so that's just what I'm going to have to do.
Summary:
So for the past couple of weeks in class and leading into Winter Break where we are now, we have been back in the Unity Game Engine. In the past when we were in school and working in Unity we would always be following a tutorial and leading into a final project where we would still be using assets from the tutorial. Now that we are in our senior year and that we are doing online learning we really do have to teach ourselves and have to be a lot more independent, for this project we had to make a third person parkour level from scratch. During this project, I've spent a lot of time on YouTube watching videos to get myself back up to speed on Unity. First I went back and watched a basic unity video to refresh my mind on all the tools, features, and interfaces that I had forgotten. Then after I had gone in and played around with everything making sure everything I was taught was correct I went and watch another video on C# the coding language that allows you to make all the magic in Unity happen. Once I felt that I was confident enough to start making my game I went to the asset store and looked for things like 3D models that I could use for the characters and things that I could use to create the game environment. Once I found some that I like I added them to my unity file and got to work from there. I'm still working on my game but overall unity is not as bad as I remember it being. I know that it's still tedious and the coding can be kind of confusing but all in all it isn't as bad as I remember.
Summary:
For my first game review of the second quarter I'm going to review specifically the new multiplayer of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. This was actually the first game that I pre-ordered since I had a lot of fun with my friends in the last Call of Duty game so I was looking forward to the newest installment of the series. Overall my experience with the game has been fine, I'm playing this game on my PC, the first call of duty game I've played on PC, and my PC doesn't have the best specs but the game still runs at about 50 FPS on all the lowest settings, so the game doesn't look great but if you had a beastly computer and turned all the settings up to max I'm sure it would look great. One of the biggest complaints surrounding Cold War is the skill based match making, and for anyone who doesn't know what that is I'll give you a little recap. When you join into your first game and then play through, the game places you in a rank with players of your similar caliber, this results in bad players playing against bad players and good players playing against good players. The issue that most people have with SBMM is that it completely takes away from the casual aspect of the game, so players always have to be trying their hardest instead of just casually hopping on to play some matches. The consensus that players agreed would fix this issue would be a ranked playlist, which is not new for the Call of Duty series but its common for that playlist to release later into the games life cycle. Another issue I personally have with the game is the map count. The gam only released with 8 maps and two of those are specifically for the 12v12 game mode. Overall the game is nothing new, there are no new flashy gimmicks that change the game, but if you are a casually first person shooter fan tan I'm sure that you will still enjoy the game.
Summary:
Since we turned in our GDD last week, we have been working with the User Interface of games. For one of our assignments in class we had to research three different games, all of different genera's, and take a deep dive into their user interface. For my three games I chose Madden 21, Destiny 2, and one of the hottest games right now, Among Us. The main focus of the assignment was to take a look at the core components that the players interact with and how it assists the player. For my games this was pretty simple, for Madden it shows you the plays you can pick and then if you are on offense it shows you the players that the quarterback can throw the ball to. In Destiny 2 it provides what similar other first-person shooter's UI's provide like bullet count, grenade regeneration, and your super's charge. In Among Us it's very simple, you have your tasks in the top left that you have to complete as a crewmate and then there are your interact buttons in the bottom right. User interface is easily one of the most important aspects to a game because it is what the players directly interact within the game and it's what allows the players to truly feel connected to the character in the game.
Summary:
Most video games are driven by the choices of the players, or so we thought. Lots of games do give the players choices on how they want to play the game, for example in a simple game such as Mario Kart, players get the choices to pick the kart they want to uses then they can pick the track that they want to race on. But in the end, you end up with the same result, you finish the race. This in the game design industry is called convexity, the players have many choices to make it feel like they are moving the narrative of the story but in the end, it all finishes with the same outcome. The purpose of convexity is to make players feel like they are apart of that world, by giving them options like what they are going to say or what they are going to do in certain situations rather than just being an observer of the game. Developers want to make the players feel special, by giving them choices it makes the player feel like they are better physically or morally than the NPC's in the game. The only reason why players would dislike convexity is if it were very obvious that your choices don't matter, it then takes away from the power of the players which easily results in players losing interest in the game.
Summary:
So last week and this week in class we had to do an activity where we got to create our game narrative which is essentially the atmosphere of our game. What I mean by that is the narrative is what drives the plot and storyline of the game. For our game, we wanted to do a racing game but we couldn't figure out how to create a storyline for it like it's just people racing in cars. When we looked a little bit deeper with the help of Mr.B, we figured out that we could create an entire storyline that could surround and drive the game. It could be driven by cutscenes that played before the game actually started where players get an introduction to the characters and introduced them to why they are racing in the first place. The purpose of the narrative in the game is to drive the players into the story and actually make them care about the characters that they can play as this is a big factor for player engagement. The in-depth story makes the players want to keep coming back and keep playing the game. Game narrative is easily the most important factor in the video game, its what brings everything together into one cohesive game and drives the player to continue in the game.
Summary:
|
Details
Author
Categories
All
Archives
May 2021
|