Well to summarize the last quarter or so, I like to use the simple anagram UVW- also known in my mind as "Unwavering Vigorous Work". It's exactly what it sounds like, and in my experience it's been tedious, cumbersome, even frustrating at times, and yet somehow completely worth it and invigoratingly fun. Despite 3Ds Max's chronic tenancy to crash on me given the slightest amount of complexity needed for a given project, most of the projects went rather smoothly, most of them that is. Meanwhile I'm still trying to figure out why my temple is such a mess that the lazy UVW program cannot unwrap it properly. nor can I understand why this seems to be the only project thus far that has't gone along without a hitch. It is bothersome, but I feel as if I'm only going to get into more trouble with our coming unit, as I have barely touched any of Unity's 3D programming capabilities and have solely been doing work in its 2D functions. All that aside however, I truly do appreciate working with shaders, materials, and textures, definitely more than I do UVWs that is. Out of the three listed, materials have to be my favorite, as working with physical materials is just so oddly satisfying, especially when everything comes together and looks all nice, clean, neat, and shiny. It's probably because I just have a thing for materials and lighting effects in general, but I digress, it feels nice when it all comes together and looks pretty, what else can I say? All in all, I did like this section a lot, more than the previous portions of topics/units where we actually modeled stuff probably because this solely focused on the visual aspects of 3D models, which if you know me, I've always been a 2D artist at heart.
An example of a textured cube
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Well I have just decided to venture into the world of animation, beyond that of which I have currently been doing, which has been short animatics and storyboards in Flipnote Studio 3D. Besides not being able to have the time to work on it in school, it's somewhat difficult to learn at home, or rather just tedious. I've always been a slow detailed oriented sketcher, and an even slower line artist, just in general my process does not tend to be the fastest. When working in programs like FireAlpaca, it seems almost impossible attempting to work at the 24fps industry standard. Just 5 sketched frames alone took me approximately two hours, and that was the sketch itself, no outline or anything more complicated than a simple sketch. (I'm not even going to detail the soreness of my wrist and hand.) While I'd love actually animating something of length, no amount of copying and pasting will help me reach my goal as quickly as I want to, especially considering the multitude of unfinished digital pieces I still currently have in development. I know lots about key framing, inbetweens, body movement, onion skinning, the whole nine yards, don't get me wrong! I just need to practice more on my delivery and output times, as I feel that's my true handicap, especially considering I only have about 4-6 hours of energy left after any given school day before I completely collapse in exhaustion. Unfortunately, it almost feels as If my progress is stagnating, and that before long I'll cease improvement all together. I just wish I had more time to develop my skills further than what I'm already doing. The good news is, I've already been following some extremely popular animators within the digital art community, and while it's no college course, watching animation development streams and given tutorials has already begun to help me immensely. I'm tempted to try my hand at keyframing animations, as it seems more and more online creators are shifting to automatic animation rather than frame by frame, but it's still pretty mixed as is and I should aim to learn both methods just so I can have some versatility at my disposal.
On Friday, me and the rest of my game design class partook in a playtesting activity where we critiqued two in development educational games based on economics and finance. The first, "Shady Sam's" which was a game where the main goal was to con people by various means to make them pay the greatest loans possible. The second game was a tabletop game prototype to be made digitally later based on credit scores and paying off debts. Both were legitimately enjoyable, and I walked away with what I presume to be a more economically aware perspective. It's important to playtest with your target audience because no matter what, a room of adults will never be able to see completely into the minds of teenagers, so getting their input is more than necessary. As for the games themselves, I honestly see little to no problems at all with Shady Sam's, if anything I wished it could last longer! (Though then again this is coming from a person who can regularly clock in 100+ hours into most RPGs, so don't exactly trust me on this one) As for the prototype however, I feel like if there was a better explanation at the start, that would have eased me into things a bit quicker, and having an actual counter for the number of turns left, rather than a painted die, would work out much better. As for the gameplay itself, there definitely needs to be a bit of balancing done, specifically if you get a bad start, there's not much you can do as long as your opponent plays it safe. After all, if they never take expensive risks, they're almost guaranteed to win, especially if most of the chance cards only affect the individual, not the whole board or just your opponent.
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Creator InfoThis is a blog for a Game Art Design class. Future programmer and currently an artist and writer. Archives
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