This week we talked a lot about designing user interfaces. A UI in a game is basically referring to the layout and how players can interact with things in a game. Obviously, this is a crucial piece to game design because it really determines how good a game is. If a UI is bad, even if it's 100% functional, players will get frustrated. Thus, it's very important to design a UI that fits with the theme of the game, is easy enough to use for the target audience, and that doesn't detract from gameplay.
Basically, you want to keep things simple. Most players will get confused if there are too many buttons or icons all over the screen, so simplicity helps. I say most rather than all because it's possible that if you were making a game like a flight simulator for people actually looking to fly planes, you would need many buttons or want to make a complex interface. UIs that fit with the theme of the game are also most successful. Since the UI is basically always on the screen, if it looks off compared to the rest of the game or stands out too much, it can be distracting and take away any hopes of having an immersive game. They should fit with the theme of the game while still standing out enough for people to see them. UIs also should be unobtrusive to the player. For instance, a first person shooter game would be a lot less functional if the weapon menu blocked the player's point of view. In a good UI, everything is strategically placed so that everything that is important is clearly visible and easy to access. Basically, this is what we learned:
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Since the school year is just getting started and I'm a pretty goal oriented person, I thought I should set up some goals for my art for this year. This could be projects, techniques, or other things. Basically, they're just artistic things that I want to accomplish or try to accomplish over the year. So, here's my five main goals right now:
1. Create an animated short film. By short film, I'm not talking end-of-year college thesis film, but just a short animated piece that's maybe 10 seconds long, but has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Or, a longer film that's just sketched out roughly, but tells a story through animation. I just really want to get some practice at this and see if it's something I enjoy doing. This is going to take a lot of time and effort though. 2. Fill my current sketchbook. I started a new sketchbook towards the end of this summer, and I'm hoping that I can practice in it enough to finish it at least by the end of the school year. I'm not very far in this goal yet either, but I think it is definitely an achievable goal, and will force me to put in a lot of practice. 3. Experiment more with line and create smoother lines. I found recently that I really enjoy working with line variation, and I want to continue playing around with this throughout the year. Also, while this isn't as much of a problem in pencil, when I use pen or digital art forms, my lines get very wobbly. I want to practice drawing nicer, smoother lines. A lot of this will just come with practice and trying new things. 4. Move away from just drawing people. While I have started moving away from just drawing busts of people, I want to move away from people in general and broaden out into other subjects, like animals, bugs, and objects. Of course I know I will still draw people a lot since I want to go into character animation and still have a lot to learn about anatomy, but I want to be able to draw other things as well since people don't exist in a void. 5. Have more fun with art. My art turns out a lot better when I'm having fun, so even though this isn't an incredibly concrete goal, this is something that I really want to work towards. Art is something to learn, but making mistakes along the way is okay, and if I can be less anxious about mistakes, everything will turn out a lot better. Before anyone says anything - or takes points off for spelling - it is "theatre." "Theater" refers to the actual building while "theatre" refers to the art. At DSA, we have to choose two art pathways. When I was making the choice, my dad said something along the lines of "well, do you think you'll be doing it for the rest of your life?" With that logic, I probably would have tried to opt out of history class, but he did have a point. As you can guess based on this website and the title of this post, I chose game design and theatre. Game design is pertinent to one of the paths I could possibly take in the future, but theatre isn't quite as much, at least at surface value; I'm not planning on being an actor. Yet, I think that my experience with theatre is helpful with other arts, including many aspects of game design.
The first three weeks of this game design class has been creating infographics, and at the end of the week, presenting them. Well, I'm a pretty socially anxious person, which does not bode well for me doing things in the game industry since pitching games and presenting ideas is a key part of the work. This is one of the main places theatre has helped me. Aside from the obvious things it has helped me with - giving me practice speaking in front of an audience, practice projecting my voice - it also taught me to take risks and be more comfortable in myself. While my presentation skills still aren't great, I think they are getting better, and theatre is a big part of that. In my last post, I also mentioned that animation is a career I am looking into. If this is character animation, then it's clear that studying how people express emotions would be very helpful. However, I've also helped out with many different tech crews before, which also holds many valuable lessons. Set crew can teach a lot about staging objects in your scene, as well as "camera angles" because of how much you have to consider where the audience is. Most recently I've been working on the marketing crew which has helped give me practice in graphic design and advertising. Since animations are basically drawn films, it makes sense that acting and tech that goes into creating theatrical shows would help with animation. In another small way, theatre helps because of the memorization skills it teaches. Learning lines quickly for a show can teach you to memorize other things quickly as well. This is helpful for photoshop shortcuts, or common commands in coding. Even if your memory isn't very fast, you do learn how to memorize better for yourself. Likewise, this, along with doing any piece of a show on a tight schedule, can help improve time management skills. Also, when working with so many people on a show, your communication skills are going to improve. Basically, for me, theatre is helpful to game design because:
Having to single in on just one career is difficult, and this was the first year when discussing careers we had to pick just one. Choosing a career is something most high school kids are expected to do now as they look for colleges, but most of the time it's just in terms of choosing a major or general field. We had to find a game design career that we were interested in, that we thought we would be good at, and that we would like to take on the roles of in an upcoming group project. I chose animator, but it took me some time to get there. We had a series of jobs to pick from, and a series of quizzes to tell us if we would be a good fit for each other them. However, the quizzes were missing animator and game developer, but there were quizzes for sound designer, game writer, producer, and programmer. All of my quizzes came back with the underwhelming result, "You might be good at this, but it's not a perfect fit." Because of this, I was planning to go with producer since I was getting sort of Jack-of-All-Trades results. However, in the end I decided to go with animator, not because I'm great at art, but rather because if I'm honest with myself, it's what I want to do as a job, even if I don't yet believe I'm talented enough to. Here's the infographic I made to represent animation and why I would be a good fit for it. The first box has some basic facts, I used two things that animators need to understand to incorporate graphics, and the last box for qualities that are nice to have as an animator. As I said earlier, I'm not a perfect fit for this career: I'm not great at 3D animation by any means, and my communication and time management skills could probably use some work still. However, I feel like if I do put in the work, my skills can get there, and I already have enough passion for it to make it work. I got information about animation from www.thebalance.com/animator-career-information-525982 .
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AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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