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:
0 Comments
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:
These past couple weeks in class have definitely been some of the most interesting in my game design career, mainly because we have actually started to make digital games. About a month ago we started in the Unity game engine, we started with a brief introduction to the Unity interface and some of the assets that we would be working with them we got straight to work. We aren't doing a tutorial made by the state or made by Mr.B, we are actually doing a series that was made by some of the people who work at Unity and its actually quite good. They started out with a basic introduction to the course and what we are going to accomplish, then we jumped straight in to the Units. Each unit consisted of a couple of lessons which would have about 8 or 9 videos where you would watch then do what they did. Each video would be 5 to 7 minutes and it would consist of them telling what they were doing, how it would affect the assets, and tell us how to do it. My only complaint so far is that those 7 minute long videos are just to demonstrate a thing that takes about 30 seconds to do, but I get that they have to explain everything so we know exactly what we are doing. I'v only just now completed the first unit and overall I have already learned so much, I learned how to import, assets write code, and even understand the code I'm writing. In the first Unit we started with a vehicle and a road and then we had to place objects in the road, find a way to have the vehicle be controlled by the player and then adjust the camera to get it to follow the vehicle. This was all done by writing lines of code in C# in VisualStudio 2017 which is a program that was connected to Unity where we would write our scripts. Now we still have a couple more units to go in the tutorial but I sure can't wait to see where this road leads.
Summary:
Now that we are almost done with our game development process, we are starting to write our postmortems. For those of you who don't know what a postmortem is, first of if you don't what a postmortem is why are you here, but a postmortem is a reflection essay that is written by game developers after they have completed the creation of their game. The postmortem is split up into sections like, "What went right?" and "What went wrong?" with lots of little sections within those outlining the specific parts. After reading a bunch of different postmortems from lots of different game developers, one thing that I noticed that was a constant between them was that they all mentioned the dates of what was happening. When I say this I mean they would mention that in fall of 1998 they brought on a bunch of new assets to focus on the servers and they would do this all throughout the postmortem and its crazy to me that they remember all of those important dates over a three year long game development. There are lots of reasons for people to write a postmortem, people may like to see the progression of their game and look at how far they've come. Looking at it now, about to begin my own postmortem, them most important part of writing the postmortem is look at what went wrong and learning from it. If you made the game the certain way and it turns out to be not the result that you wanted, you learn from that and whenever you make your next game, you don't follow that same way you did your last game. But overall I'm excited to begin writing my postmortem and I'm going to follow the same ways that the game developers do theirs.
Summary:
So our last assignment in class was to storyboard our game that we have been conceptualizing in class and that got me thinking, "Why do game designers even need to storyboard it just seems like a waste of time and effort?" I asked myself. Well after I created my own and did some research I got the answers to my question. Storyboarding is part of the pre-production phase of game development, where the designers brainstorm, sketch their ideas, decide on their target audience, and Storyboard! Storyboards help game designers plan out their game shot by shot, but for my storyboard I just drew big general sketches of things like the user interface, player interactions with NPC's, cut-scenes, and transitions between things like outside and inside. Another thing that is big in storyboarding is creating the flow, something very important to games. A game with no flow isn't fun for anyone! The storyboard shows how the players progress through the game and the challenges of the game and how they increase in difficulty as the story continues. With all of that being said the biggest thing that the storyboard shows is the games story. It can show early stages of the story, with the biggest plot points being highlighted in specific sketches and as the development of the game continues, the game developers can change the boards for new ideas that they may have come up with later. Overall, storyboarding is one of the most important parts of the pre-production phase and I can see why game developers put lots of time and effort into it.
Summary:
Creating a video game seems like it would be a hefty tax with all of these nice graphics and fancy controls, but actually its not that hard. The first step most game designers make is not even on a computer at all, its with a pencil and paper. Game designers have a lot of decisions to make even before they jump onto a computer, they have to conceptualize the game, pick out their target audience and pick the software which is both available and suits their project. Then if a developer has the availability of a team they would get the artists to design the characters and environments, and even if they don't have artists to do that they can do it themselves. Both the characters and environments play a huge part in the game, they give the game the aesthetic that the designer was hoping for and the charters are what drives the storyline and wha keeps players engaged. Then after all of the art stuff is complete its time to start writing the story (if the game has a story). The story of a game is one of the most important parts, it's what keeps players coming back and wanting to continue playing the game. After the story, it's time to get into the nitty gritty of the design process, the coding and implementing all of your assets into your game. After lots of time and lots of trial and error, you have created a video game! Good job you keep up the good work, I hope you learned more about the game design process and proven to everyone that anyone can do it!
Summary:
|
Details
Author
Categories
All
Archives
May 2021
|