It seems to be a common theme with my game reviews and its doing games that I never thought I would do, and this is another one of those. Fall Guys Ultimate Knockout is a battle-royale platformer which I think is the first of its time. Players go through a series of four to five different maps where more and more players get eliminated each round and in the final round players compete to win a crown. I've actually really enjoyed playing this game, not as much by myself, but when its late at night and I can hop on with my buddies its just so much fun, I can play with them for hours on end while maybe still getting a little bit mad but wanting to comeback in the next game for redemption. I found out about this game after watching some of my favorite game streamers play this game and I thought that it looked really fun, then luckily for me I found out that the game was free for PlayStation plus members which I had so I got the game for free which is so much better than paying 20 dollars for it. One of my favorite things about this game is the art-style, players get to play as little jelly beans running around and its really funny to me, the map style is very similar where all the colors are really bright and playful. As childish as the game may look it can be so rage inducing! Some times when all the players run into one area your character will just rag-doll and it will let other players pass you and that just makes us super mad but then that just makes you want to ply another game to try and get that elusive win. Throughout my short time playing this game I've had a lot of fun, I really like the fun art-style and different cosmetic outfits that you can buy with easy to earn in-game currency, i would highly recommend this to any gamers who are just looking to have fun with a game.
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So last week was our first real week of online learning (with our first week being orientation), so I figured for my first blog post of the year I decided to give my thoughts on it. So this year is my first real year in school while having a kind-of block schedule, let me explain, so on Mondays and Thursdays we have 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th period live classes and on Tuesdays and Fridays we have the rest of our classes. Now we don't have any live classes on "Wellness Wednesdays" which is where teachers can assign work but can't have zoom calls. This has been so great where we can just get all of our work done in the morning and then just have the rest of the day to myself to relax and recharge for the next day. But for normal school days We have an hour call then we have an hour support period where teachers are available to help students but its just for us to get our work done for that class. Now I actually really like this because depending on how fast I get my work done I can just chill until my next call similar to Wednesdays. Now one of my big issues these past weeks has been having to go on and do our attendance manually which to me has just been a pain in the butt just going and filling out 7 google forms per day but I understand why the teachers have to do it. I do feel like teachers this year have been put in a really difficult position, having to teach a course that is mean't to be taught in a classroom but I do feel like they have been doing the best they can with what resources they have. A note on the resources we have, canvas is a little bit annoying, I remember on one of the first days of class zoom was overloaded because student all across the country pretty much overloaded the app so teachers had to find a work-around for that. Overall I thing that these things are going to definitely take some getting used too but I think that I will be able to adjust just fine.
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For my last blog post of my last summer assignment in the game design pathway we were asked to take a look at the upcoming school year and talk about what were are excited about.
So I'm back again for my second summer assignment blog post. When I was reading the guidelines for this assignment I realized that I had never really tried any pure audio based editing software. When I say that I mean I have worked in Premier pro where I've had to trim audio and cut it, but never anything like Audacity which is what I decided to try. Now I went into this completely blind and lucky for me everything on the user interface is super simplistic so if I can figure it out on my own I'm pretty sure anybody could. So the main tools are in the top left of the program, pause, play, stop, skip to beginning, skip to end, and most important record (there are some other tools to he right of that but I will over those later). These tools are your best friend so going through each of them one by one, the pause button will pause your recording instantly and if you press record again after it was paused it will pick up right where you left off. The play button is mostly for listening to your audio after it has been recorded. The skip buttons are for after it has been recorded you can either skip to the beginning or the end of the audio track. Finally, the record button is for starting and stopping your recording if you are using a microphone. Another thing that I found out was if you record a second audio track it will go at the same time as the first one similar to the different audio channels in Premier. This is useful for a song producer if they wanted to import the beat to a song and have the lyrics go over the beat. Now there weer some little tools to the right of the big ones but the only one that I found really useful was the selection tool that would allow you to highlight a part of the audio track. The other tools that I mentioned before are the cut, copy and paste tools which can take bits of the track and allow you to move them around through the audio channels. So once I started recording audio bits, I found myself adjusting the volume of those track by the designated volume slider to the left of the track and it let me find a good balance between the track so that one wasn't overpowering the other. Overall, I found that Audacity was super simple to use and I actually really enjoyed making fun little song with it, I would definitely recommend it to people who want to get into music or audio production as it's free and super simple to get into.
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For my final summer assignment in the game design pathway, Mr.B has asked us to download at least one free software and I chose a video editing software from Adobe called Premier Rush. Now I am someone who has been fortunate enough to have the full version of Premier Pro and I am quite surprised by the similarity between the two. The user interface looks kind of like a watered down version of Premier Pro while still having some of the same tools like cut, duplicate, and delete. It has a timeline on the bottom that in the beginning that is very simple but users can expand it to show the different channels like in Premier Pro. To me the app isn't very useful but i can totally see the audience that Rush is made for, like beginning film makers who are balling on a budget and want to have a software that is more advanced than iMovie. One thing that I actually really like about Rush is the templates that Adobe gives you, where you can add in multiple transitions that aren't on Premier Pro or you can add cool looking text that already has a transition applied. Another this that is really emphasized is sharing to social media, after you have finished your project it gives you the option to upload directly to YouTube or Instagram. Overall the app is great for the people who want a Premiere Pro like experience but may not have access to a powerful computer for processing, and Rush is a great substitute for just that.
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Now this is a game review I never thought I would be doing, so yeah here it goes. So it started when swim practice was closed, I didn't really have an outlet to use my energy in so my mom suggested I go on YouTube and do a Zumba class. That to me felt pointless because there was no way I could be judged or win anything, so I got to thinking and then it hit me... OMG I need Just Dance. I had played Just Dance in the past at friends houses but I had never owned a copy for myself, So I went tho the Switch E-shop and luckily for me it was on sale. After waiting for the game to download, which took a long time because its a decently big file, I finally fired the game up and I started playing. The user interface was super simple, it had a list of all the songs and you could sort them in ways like, alphabetical, easiest to hardest, or which songs took the premium membership (I'll touch on this later). So since my family was all sitting around the house being quarantined they had nothing better to do than watch me dance. At first they laughed at me but then later they wanted to play it for themselves. It was actually a lot of fun, we laughed a lot and had a really good time. Now to touch on the actual game, its just like every other dancing video game, there is a list of songs that you can pick from and then you do the same dance as the avatar on the screen. The game isn't original at all since Ubisoft has been making the Just Dance games since 2009, but every year they slap a fresh coat of paint on it and I guess suckers like me buy it. Now to some of my complaints, at first the song selection is very limited, maybe like 15 songs for you to chose from but for those who buy the premium package you can get like 70 more songs. This is one of those ways that Ubisoft tries to get a ton of money out of their customers, give them a little bit of taste for the game, but still hold back a bunch so they have to purchase it later, it just gets on my nerves. Overall the game was actually a lot of fun, after dinner one night we had a round robin tournament in my family, where everyone had to dance against everyone and it was hours of laughs, sweat, and spending time with each other which isn't something we get to do all that often.
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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.
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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.
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I know what you're thinking, "But Jay, Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee was on the Switch!" and I get where your coming from but give me a minute to explain my thoughts. Yes the Let's Go games were released on switch but A they were just Gen 1 reboots and B the game was created to tie into Pokemon Go. But now to onto the real topic of this blog post, Pokemon Sword and Shield! Pokemon Sword and Shield is the 8th generation of Pokemon and the first NEW NEW Pokemon game on the Nintendo Switch. When Sword and Shield were first announced, it was announced that not all of the Pokemon were going to be in the game which created lots of disputes among fans. Personally for me this only created one issue, MUDKIP DIDN'T MAKE IT, but all jokes aside (not really) this didn't have a huge effect on me, I was just excited to see the new Pokemon. The biggest new mechanic of the game is the wild area, where players can encounter wild Pokemon up to level 60 which can be pretty scary when a level 12 Grookey is your best Pokemon. The biggest new mechanic about the wild area is that players can rotate both joysticks to move your character and to move the camera following your character which is new to Pokemon games. Other than the wild area the gameplay is just like any other Pokemon game, you progress through the towns earning gym battles until you can beat the champion. My only complaint about the gameplay is that the first hour and a half were so stupidly easy and boring, I don't want to do all of these stupid tasks, just let me start battling Pokemon. Another big issue with the game is some of the visuals in the wild area, you can tell that the devs just wanted get the game done and released and you can tell by the trees in the wild area. You can tell that they were reused assets from another game and its very obvious because its copied and pasted all over the wild area. But other than the tree the game does look really good, like the towns that were created specifically for this game all look really good and they all have a special charm to each of the towns. The interface is just like any other Pokemon game with subtle changes like you can access you Pokemon box from anywhere. Personally I have really enjoyed this game so far and would definitely recommend this game to Pokemon fans old and new!
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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.
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