I'd like to take this post to really reflect, not only on the past year, but on the past 4 years I've spent in this classroom working on the game design concentration at my school. First I want to talk about what I now understand about the game industry that I didn't before. I used to think that it would be easy. I thought people sat and played games and that they made games just like that, and later I thought that it involved intense programming that I could never in my lifetime reach the level of. These past 4 years I've realized that it's actually somewhere in between the two. First, I realized that programming is far easier to learn than I thought, as I'm even making a game right now, and I made one this year as well. And second, I realized that one skill that you really need in the industry is the ability to work with a team. Now, I had a really good team to work with this year, which I'm very thankful for. Though in other years, I wasn't quite so lucky. One year I even had to do a project with a person that wouldn't even talk to me. But over these years, I've gained the skill of working with anyone I'm grouped with, regardless of getting along, and this will be very useful in the game industry. Another skill that I learned a LOT about is the ability to plan. And by that I mean the ability to avoid procrastination. This class and it's strict deadlines with no exceptions has taught me that there's not really a benefit to adding extra time to assignments, and it also helped me fix my procrastination habits. Although we learned a lot these past couple years, I do wish we had the chance to make a group game like this past year, but before the CTE Advanced Studies course. I understand that there has to be some sort of rubric, but instead of inspiring me to make a game, the preset genres and types of games we were to make in groups kind of just ended up making me less motivated to work. Here's an infographic I made for those who are taking this course in the future and need some tips and tricks: Now I'll take some time to talk about this past year specifically. It was really amazing getting the chance to do what I want to do as a job, and work with amazing classmates to make an awesome game. The project was to make a VR Horror Game that takes place inside the school. My role in particular was the programmer, and the person who implements everything into the game engine. Of course, being the one who puts all of the pieces together, sometimes the pieces didn't quite fit. At the beginning of the year, I was having trouble even making the VR work in Unity. After I finally fixed that problem, I was super motivated and ready for the year to come. A couple other problems I had to overcome were: Various 3D model importing issues, various programming problems, trying to learn complex VR programming, and compatibility issues. All of these were overcome within weeks by communicating with my team mates and using Google. A whole lot of using Google. I think the part of this project I'm most proud of was whenever I talked to my friends about it, they would say "Hey man, can I try it?" or "Woah, that's awesome! When can I buy it?" This was super gratifying to me, as it meant that not only was the game interesting, as my team intended it to be, but when people played it, they even enjoyed it! That was probably also one of my biggest takeaways from this whole project, as well. The fact that, as is surprisingly said best by a state mandated quiz, "Our goal as game designers is to entertain people." I really feel that if I could just work hard to entertain people for the rest of my life, I absolutely will. Outside of the game stuff, some good takeaways and cool stuff I learned about my own work ethic from the Advanced Studies class are that I really can do something I put my heart into! I didn't expect this one, as at school, in general, my work ethic isn't the best, but when it comes to making games, I get stuff DONE! Another little takeaway is that although a year is a long time, I really should have known better than to make those initial goals for our team. We had one 3D modeler, and I expected that by the end of the year, we would have a fully modeled, fully textured, entire campus? That's just ridiculous.
I've been working on making my game the best I can make it. I've been working really hard on making everything tile-able and look good, despite my having no prior skill as an artist. I've been able to make the initial area, as well as the first town in the game, Jestington. Essentially, if I haven't explained it in another post, this town is where you have to save the townspeople from the evil jesters that have become more powerful than they ever wanted. I soon realized that if I wanted to make the game free roam the way it should be, with the camera following the player, I'll have to come up with a map for the world, as well as figure out how to make an immersive, open environment outside of towns. This'll be hard, I feel like. Anyway, I'll update this blog on more about the project later on. For now, I'll stick to working on my game.
As the year is winding down, and the presentations are over, I'll be focusing on moving over work from Schoology, the website I've been using to turn in work, to my personal computer. This'll probably be quite the trip down memory lane for me, as I've been in this course since freshman year, where I reluctantly started this blog. But over time, I think I've become proud. I like this blog. I like the way that it has given me a space to really think and consider each step of the project, and I appreciate the fact that I could make this log for everyone to follow in my journey through high school. Although I've stayed up many a sleepless night stressed out of my mind to turn in the latest blog post, I think it was for the better.
After I finish moving over the work, I'll no longer be using this blog for these classes, because I will have graduated high school. However, don't fret, as I'll possibly be still keeping this blog updated on the work I'll be doing on my personal game I've been working on for the past couple of months, but more on that in the next post. But anyway, here's to the end of a long school year and high school experience! The last full week of this project, I've been working on just function stuff, making sure everything works. I made sure that the player can move around effectively, and I made sure that the game end and flash drives work. Then I got to the chicken. I took about 2.5 classes. I worked so hard on the chicken follow script. But it's just not going to happen. And that's okay. We have a game that works. It may not be a hard game, it might just be a spooky game, but it works. I was able to test and make sure that the chicken can, in fact, see the player using the cone of vision, and it can. I went and made sure that it was sending out a raycast, and it was. But for whatever reason, (And yes, I did check EVERYTHING) nothing would work after that. I saw the raycast go RIGHT THROUGH the player collider tens of times on Wednesday, and yet not once was it detected and not once did the chicken follow the player. So I'm not going to waste more worrying on this, and I'm going to move forward and finish the game as we can have it now.
Next week I will:
As we're making our way into these final couple of weeks, the pressure is really on to make sure that the game is at least beatable. I'm still waiting on the final version of the map from Julia, but it should be done soon. After that I can start to fix the enemies (the pig and the chicken). For the last week I've worked on making the game beatable, in that I made it such that if you collect all of the flash drives and place them in the recycling bin, you get a "Congratulations!" screen, as well as confetti coming from above. I also added into the game a worldspace canvas with text on your left controller, which displays the number of flash drives you have left to collect. After this the only thing I can do now is make sure the main menu and credits still work, and make sure that you can restart the game once it's been completed.
Next week I will:
For the last week in game design, I've been working on fixing the current version of my team's game. The problem we initially had was that nothing regarding VR worked. But now most of it works properly. Sadly, I really had to tone down the lighting SIGNIFICANTLY to get the game to an acceptable framerate for VR. At this point, a lot of the map is broken and needs fixed, but the only thing keeping me from fixing it is that Julia has the final version of the map she's working on, and I just need that copy of that once she's done to finish the map. In the meantime, we need a means of finishing the game, which should be easy, by creating a space you put the flash drives in, then creating a dynamic array for them, which when it reaches a number, you will have completed the game.
Next week I will:
Things aren’t going particularly well regarding the project right now. The project is due in a couple of weeks, and we’ve hit a pretty significant bump in the road. We updated all of our software. This, in turn, made it impossible to use the versions of SteamVR and VRTK that we were using. So I, being logical, decided I would just update those (as hard as that can be on the school internet). I did successfully update the tools, only to find that the newest version of SteamVR isn’t supported by the newest version of VRTK. Great. So I went and found the newest version that is supported, and replaced the other version. Now all I have to do is actually change everything in the scene to match that, replacing scripts and such.
Next week I will:
I've been working really hard in my spare time recently on my personal game. When I first came up with the idea, I was sitting in class, and I said "I wanna make a game". I'm much further along now then I would have ever thought at the time. I've created a whole random dungeon generation system, a small roster of items to spawn in the dungeon, a collection of enemies that match the theme of the dungeon (circus), and the enemies are all completely functional. But the while time I was working on all of this, I was thinking about the original The Legend of Zelda. Now, this was the inspiration for the style of the main character, and would have been for many other things in the game, but then after building the first dungeon, I decided to start working on the beginning cutscene of the game, and it struck me. The game I want to make just doesn't fit that style. It wasn't a sad realization, because I immediately knew what art style would. The art style of the Mother series, also commonly known in the states as the Earthbound series. Now, I'm no artist, but I certainly can try to replicate the same style as something else, for lack of originality. I made 100% new sprites for the player character, and his human counterpart, and I wanted to go the extra mile, so I even gave them both diagonal animations. And I'm really glad I did. I'm also very glad I chose Earthbound for inspiration. I feel like it has just the right silly, zany, and sometimes just downright odd vibe that I'm looking for my game. I can't wait to start to see it coming together.
This review is long overdue. I originally bought Enter the Gungeon back in 2016 the day it came out. It's really a one of a kind game in that way and many others. I don't think I've ever played a game that's come up with two cool themes, combined them, and then stuck with them for the whole process, and with the whole game. Every single item in the game is just the right kind of gun related pun or joke, and it really shows the effort the development team put forth, not only in coming up with funny gun puns, but putting them each to use in unique ways, gameplay-wise. For example, there are regular shotguns, but there is a weapon called the "Shotgun Shell", which is a giant shotgun shell that projects shotguns! But I am really getting ahead of myself. Sorry, I just can't gush about this game enough. Anyways, Enter the Gungeon is a roguelike which surrounds 4 main playable characters, each attempting to brave the mysterious "Gungeon" to find a weapon that is rumored to allow you to fix your past. As you progress through the floors of the Gungeon, you find various weapons, enemies, and gear that will help you on your way. However, in the roguelike fashion, every floor, enemy, and piece of loot is randomized. Personally, I found that there could be endless numbers of hours of replayability in this game because of this, and now that their last update, A Farewell to Arms, has been released, I look forward to what the community will come up with next for this game, as is the cycle for most popular roguelike games.
|
AuthorMy name is Ryan Hiemenz! I currently go to East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina! I love to program, but I also really like to do level design, writing, and animation for games! Categories
All
Archives
September 2019
|