At the current time of me writing this, I am only one lesson and one quiz away from finishing my introductory course and moving on to 2D game design, and so far, it's been worth it. In all honesty, I would've finished much faster, had I not stopped to help my friends who occasionally stumbled making their own path. Yes dear friends, it has all been very much worth it. From first learning what strings and ints were, to designing my own classes and constructors, it has been a worthwhile journey. Now the real question which remains is, will I be ready for what comes next? Did the courses adequately train me, or will I find myself struggling like how my classmates were in the upcoming challenges and activities? At this point, I do not know. I mean, I've had experience with javascript, unity, and c# script all before in the past, through various summer camps in past years of more true youthful vigor, and even working with more simple and rudimentary programs like gamemaker through camps that my very Game Art and Design teacher hosted and put out to get people like me interested in various careers in game design. Even with all this prior knowledge, will I still have the bravo to continue onwards? The truth is, I am only limited by my own shortcomings and lack of knowledge, which is a good thing in my opinion, as you can teach any subject with a good teacher, but never can you teach true motivation and passion.
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Like with any program that succeeds in giving you nightmares, it will usually succeed in also giving you dreams, and not the kind where you fall asleep and have a weird fever vision of lines of code, but a dream for the future, of what's to come next if you will. During little "ahah!" moments where you realize that you accidentally replaced an 'in' statement with an = statement do I realize that so far C# has been pretty easy to deal with... At least so far. What I am truly worried about is pouring my brains out trying to learn this language and then discovering halfway through that I have absolutely no mortal clue as to what I'm supposed to be doing. As someone who truly wants to get into Indie game design, this is a big issue for me, as languages take time to learn, and time is something I'm fairly short on. My hope for the future is that this language is one I'll be able to master, and in time, I'll be able to create something great with this language. During the early challenges only rarely did I ever have to rely on the forums for unity, and most of my problem solving simply came form my intuition (I guess that's what I'd call it...) To be honest I'm still surprised I've come this far already, and of course with any progress I make in life, I am now instantly worrying about what said progress means. I have an inkling that it's all going to come crashing down to the floor any lesson now, and I'll realize that I wasn't actually the good programmer I thought it was... Oh well, food for thought I guess. All in all, at this point in time, its just best for me to focus on my lessons.
Whenever you're in doubt, visit the help forums, they don't exist for no reason. When it comes to the beginning stages of your first games, once you've got your basic planning phases finished, the most important part is creating a convincing pitch for your peers. So it turns out that while your digital presentation is somewhat important and will help you in what needs to be said, 90% of the pitch's worth is solely based on your verbal presentation. If you do do not show passion for your project while you are explaining it, you are perceived to be lacking excitement completely and therefore do not care about your project's outcome. The best way around this issue is to simply not be a deadpan slice of bread to listen to. It doesn't matter if you have to fake excitement, as even faked enthusiasm is worlds better than a genuine nihilistic tone of voice, and you're better off sounding chippy than downtrodden 99.9% of the time. Another item of great importance is the fact that your audience likes to be recognized and addressed, weather through direct calling or just an occasional glance of eye contact with a few of it's members every now and then. Lastly, but most importantly, make an actual presentation to go with your pitch. It doesn't matter that the real pitch is 90% vocal, having an actual presentation makes you look professional, and it helps you remember what to say when, how to keep on topic, and the points you're actually trying to convey.
Throughout most of my experience with games, the majority of the time I have found myself to be experiencing a Zero sum game, which is a game with a definitive winner and a definite loser. In what we consider to be games, very few games that we play either alone or one on one are non zero sum games, as most people find it enjoyable when they can tell who is the winner and vice versa. However, in a sense, this non zero sum mentality is one that we experience for the majority of our lives where we are faced with decisions that involve choosing the lesser of two evils, falling into Social Traps, or maybe we see it in an add against drug use in which it asks the viewer "Who's more dead?" Simply put despite what we're constantly exposed to, most skill based games that place either a human against a computer or two people against each other don't tend to have ambiguous endings. However, this all changes when you start to get teams involved. Teamwork in some games is essential, and the saying "The chain is as strong as the weakest link." has never held to be more true in some scenarios. In this situation, you and your team functions not as an individual, but a collective where everyone must be at their best performance or risk dragging down the rest of the team with them. With this in mind, you'll be hard pressed to find a team based game which isn't a non zero sum. After all, never have I played a single player game, witnessed defeat and was still left to wonder, "Surely this wasn't all on me?"
Movies have and hopefully will always be an enjoyable experience for all generations, (If Netflix has the public's interests in their mind that is, but then again, it probably won't take long until some new technology like the Oculus Rift or something like that takes over and basically throws films into oblivion.) but everyone once in a while, no matter how talented they are at anything will occasionally have the rare moment of brief wonder as they ask themselves, Just how did they do that? Well just this last Thursday I was able to get a small view into the world of film industry. Now, I consider myself to be an artist, well-maybe not an artist-but at least someone who is capable of creating a pretty good drawing every now and then, so I had my ideas about how special effects in movies work, and aside from a few small things, I had my views pretty much validated by our guest speaker, Richard White.
Now I guess I've kept my audience waiting long enough, it's about time I got to the main question, which is how does the process of special effects in movies work? Well, the process is pretty simple (Notice how I didn't say that the job was easy, movies take years to create for a reason.) The first part of any movie is technically brainstorming an idea, but for your sake I'll skip to the first step of creating special effects, which is story boarding. Story boarding is the act of drawing out practically every scene of the movie you're working on, and usually the finished movie won't look exactly like the storyboards either. Once the storyboarding is finished, the next step is creating your draft of the scenes you're supposed to produce. The drafts are usually all roughly animated, and will evolve from the notes that the story board creators give. Once the draft is made, then you get into the actual shooting, and this is where things truly start to shake up. Entire scenes will be deleted, edited, scrapped, reshot, and otherwise change. Maybe the changes were for space, or perhaps a last minute decision on the writer/director's part. However, when it comes to special effects, now people are using special effects to encompass the majority of the film, unless it is strictly live action, and in that case, it's probably a cheesy romantic comedy or something like that (But if you find a really good one with like tons of special effects, then like hook me up because that sounds either amazing or a good movie for one of those bad movie nights that some people have where you mainly are there to mock it.) Sci-vis is pretty essential to the film industry, and there are probably as many specialties as there are people still trying to figure out how many programmers it takes to screw in a light bulb (To save you the trouble about 2.35798, because you got to account for possibility of error, however just because you know how many it takes to screw it in, that does not automatically mean you know how to get them to do it.) Sci-vis teaches the importance of planning, graphic design and even a look into business procedures, and while this alone does not mean I'm automatically a specialist, I am exited as to what is yet to come. The road to success is probably the most difficult road to follow known to man. It has more twists and turns than The Tail of the Dragon. There's a smaller window of chance to complete it than the Passage De Gois. More thieves exist than there are terrorists on Luxor-Al-Hurghanda road. To top it all off, it's longer and takes more time to finish than trekking along Highway 1.
However, to those who have been born into success, it doesn't take much to get where you want. For those in the upper class, either they have worked hard to get there, (Which only happens to very few out of many) or have inherited it from those who actually did the work. (Or perhaps their father gave them a small loan of a million dollars.) However, this idea I have presented to you only covers the monetary gains of success. It is really up to oneself to decide on what success is, and while I am perfectly fine with great friends and family, that in itself won't pay the bills. Well, I have delayed you enough from what this blog post is truly about, so without further stalling, let's delve deeper. Throughout my experience in elementary school, I was taught that the important thing to life was enjoying it, so I did. I worked hard in school, yes, but it wasn't my number one priority. What I put first was having fun. I hung out with friends, wrote some stories, invented adventures, and drew my dreams, however, once I got into middle school, things began to change quite drastically. The closer I got to eighth grade, the more teachers stressed the importance of grades, and aside from the little voice in my head still telling me about the importance of fun, the only thing I really focused on was my grades. I mean, can you blame me? I began to think that success was good grades, high marks, and getting the best paying or most beneficial job. I was starting to lose the idea of success of having a happy life, and it didn't help much that most of the adults and teachers around me were miserable. (But to be honest, even I hated my class, I mean, I don't even know how the teachers got sleep dealing with a class like ours. Rabid chimpanzees would be better behaved and easier to teach than my class.) By the end of seventh grade, I had basically turned to art for my comfort. I had been stressed to the point of insomnia, pushed to the brink of hopelessness, and the only thing keeping me gong at that point were my friends, (Both real and imagined) my art, and the horror of having to repeat a grade. Now I'm not saying that my life has been horrible, I have been quite blessed to have the privileges I do. Nor am I blaming the school either, I actually think it was because of multiple things that all revolve around my mental state, which hadn't really been explored at that time. What I'm saying is that what happened to me has made me into who I am now, and what I want to be in the future. And to be completely honest, I think that the best way I can use my talents to help others is to be the next big indie game designer. Heh, I know, even I think it's pretty silly at first glance, but hear me out. For starters, I have always found peace in fantasy, and rarely in the real world. TV shows like Gravity Falls, and Steven Universe were my go to feel good shows. Why? Well, these fantasy worlds weren't perfect, and they each presented themselves with real world problems that myself and many others were probably struggling with at the time, and they teached the viewers how to fix them as well. (Something that many schools don't.) Same thing with games like Undertale. They present the viewer/player with real life problems/morals and then present to them the answers and the good ethics one should have. So in response, I have decided to create my own universe and will learn how to program it into a reality. I have a love for writing, artistry, and programming, so those aspects won't be to terribly difficult, but still, looming in the distance is a challenge I will be faced with in the close future. You see, I want to create a fantasy world for everyone, no matter the age, race, gender, or sexual orientation, and I would like to do so without the sugar coating most other fantasy worlds put on. There are dangers in this universe like our own, whether they be poor legal systems, discriminating laws/people, a judgmental society, or harmful actions from single individuals. The problem I'm faced with is finding the good in all. Weather someone is being blindly lead, has an unorthodox moral system, or simply does wrongs in order to benefit themselves, (Weather or not they actually need to do so) everything must be presented. What I'm trying to accomplish is to have all who play this game look through their enemy's eyes and walk in their shoes before deciding if they are truly evil, or just a good person who does bad things. If I can accomplish this, then I would feel truly successful. My end goal isn't to become rich, (Although financial gain would be a necessity to pay for its production.) all I want is at least a good part of America to become a better place, (And for people to stop playing the victim in every problem and actually take some responsibility every now and then.) And if I can have fun doing so, then all the better. (Oh, and if you're wondering, I have almost solidified the plot and I am beginning to intertwine all the complex stories that are yet to unfold. So expect the entire project to be completed somewhere within 2018-2020.) My DeviantArt holds more information so click here for more details and information art wise Contrast for the win! |
Creator InfoThis is a blog for a Game Art Design class. Future programmer and currently an artist and writer. Archives
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