This week was fun, I got to 3D model two inside jokes from our game design class! It was good practice with UVW unwrapping, and while I am still finishing the second one, it feels like this was one of the most productive weeks of the year just because of how much I got done. The first joke, I already made a post about because I started it last week, was Beats by Broke. It's a joke about the crappy headphones that Mr. B has to lend out to students who forget their own. The second is "why do we yellow banana?" a throwback to an exam question that made no sense to anyone. On a more relevant note, I also managed to model a simple bookshelf, so once I texture that, that can go in some of the classrooms (it has less polys than the banana, which is only about 150 polys, so it should be low lag). We also had some people from Microsoft along with a former NFL player come to visit on Friday to see what we were working on, and to talk to Mr. B about what the classes were like. Goals For Next Week:
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I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for almost 5 years now, a few times as a player, but recently only as a Dungeon Master. Since 8th grade when I started playing, it's always been a big part of my life, from being the way I connected with my friends outside of school, to the being the club I go to every other Tuesday, to being a key component in a podcast that means the world to me, to again connecting me with friends. It's helped me develop closer relationships with people, improved my improvising and leadership skills, and has just been really fun. It's also very closely related to game design since it is a game where you get to do a lot of the designing, so I'm going to talk about some things that I've learned from the game. This is the first post, but I hope to make more.
This first lesson is "Who's Playing?" or in other words: Audience is EVERYTHING. Ok so this one might be because I'm a weak little man without a backbone (aka a doormat, a pushover, what have you) but truly, the players that you have can really change the game. A stricter DM may not experience this at all if they try not to be flexible to fit their players needs, but I certainly try (maybe too hard) to be accommodating to the players and the story that they want, so my games do change depending on who is playing them. I especially have been able to see this through running the same (or a similar) campaign twice with two different groups: one composed of my close friends, and the other at tabletop club. My group of close friends are much less combat-oriented than the tabletop group (possibly because they know that I hate running combat) and are more likely to explore and investigate, and MUCH more likely to talk at length with NPCs to ask about what's going on. At tabletop club, intimidation is the name of the game with NPCs, who are often ignored, and no questions are asked as they rush into potentially dangerous areas. This past Tuesday at tabletop was the smoothest combat that I've ever run, and that's because these players are really into it. All (except maybe one) were constantly paying attention to what was going on, and so it moved very quickly. Usually, combat drags on forever and doesn't feel so consequential, but here, they were using high level spells to stay alive, and while some of this can be attributed to me improving as a DM, I also really believe that it's because of who my players were. It's a little bit like how if you throw someone who is bad a videogames into a racing game, they're not going to be able to go very fast - similarly, my friends, who are catching up after being months apart, aren't very good at focusing in on combat. In contrast, the tabletop kids are like pro racers, they have more knowledge of the Official D&D rules than I do, so once their turn rolls around, I don't even have to tell them that it's their turn: they already have their entire move planned and ready to go without any prompting from me. This leads to very different combat scenarios, the first feeling tedious, and the second being a core component of gameplay. I'm not trying to say that the tabletop group's way of playing is better though, I actually typically prefer the way my friends play, as is outlined by the tavern scene. I had set up a tavern with 6 different NPCs who would supply different plot threads so that the players could have a bit of choice in what kind of game they wanted to play (I would develop the overarching storyline based on who they chose to do a quest for). With the tabletop group, after talking to the first guy, they rushed to get a horse and carriage and got outta there! (they went to complete his quest). My group of friends however talked to 4 of the NPCs (we ran out of time in the session to talk to more) and they had a nice scene where they deliberated which quest to follow. It allowed for some good character development, and set them on a path to a quest that they were all interested in. There's nothing wrong with impulsively rushing in, but I personally appreciate careful deliberation as well. Overall, I'm trying to say players choose which direction the story is heading, but also affect the energy of each encounter as well. There's no style of play that is inherently bad, but there may be a style of play that's a better fit for the game you are creating, so you need to take into account who is going to be playing, how they play, and if you can work with that. It's exactly the same with all game designing. If you want to make an FPS, your players are probably not going to appreciate long, unskippable cutscenes, unless you are specifically advertising to an audience that likes both FPS and narrative heavy games. Knowing what kind of game you run, and who your target audience is can really help solidify what challenges and features you create for the game you are making. Although this week was cut short by illness and playtesting (which I will make a seperate post about) I did manage to get the pig textured! Well... sort of... There are some surface issues, BUT! It isn't entirely my fault this time! I went back to the old, fully polyed models, and they still had some weird spots when textures were applied (though far fewer...). Anyways, I don't think it's something worth fixing at this point in production unless I can find an easy fix, or if it really bothers one of my team members. I made all of the textures metallic because I thought it made the pig look sharp and scary, but this may change depending on computer capabilities (lag) and my teammates' preferences. Goals For Next Week:
So turns out the pig is big time goofin' so looks like I have some more work to do with him. He did not transfer over to Sam's computer very well at all, many things were scaled and placed weirdly. So step one is fixing that. However, I did spend this week playing around with textures for the pig's skin. Unfortunately, our computers do not have Unity, so I am unable to currently test those textures out. (Again, Photoshop will not work for this purpose because it tries to texture every single face of the object as having the same texture.) I haven't yet made the textures tileable either, because I want to see which one I like on the model the most before doing all of that work. However, I don't think texturing will be much of an issue, I am more concerned about the export issue. This is the end of the quarter though, so I have to get moving on to modeling classroom assets. I also need to make sure that I have a plan to finish everything within the next 9 weeks so that we are able to actually finish the entire game in time.
Goals For Next Week:
It's fitting that as the quarter draws to a close, I have finally, FINALLY finished simplifying the pig. Finished may be an overstatement since there is always the chance that I'll have to go back (that's still a lot of vertices) but I feel good about how it looks and I don't think it will cause too many problems, especially now that our computers are working better. But I used a lot of smooth modifiers, greatly reduced the detail of the hands, and feel pretty good about how it turned out, so I'm saying that I'm finished for now!
The next step is to move on to texturing it in photoshop and unity, and then I'll pass it over to Sam so he can animate (or I could animate it myself depending on what he needs to do, because after texturing the pig, I'm pretty much down with all I've needed to do for a while). Goals for Next Week:
Short week. Snow days. Pig Eyes. Poly Simplification. Nuff Said. Seriously though, there was very little progress on my part this week, but I did accidentally learned about a cool feature of 3Ds Max. I was trying to merge vertices, and while this feature was unable to help me because of some really funky geometry stuff going on, it would be really useful for other situations. Basically, you can figure out how many vertices are overlapping, and then either manually or automatically, combine all of said vertices. This is a pretty basic feature, so it's probably a wonder to anyone who has ever used 3Ds Max that I didn't know about this before, but I somehow didn't. Anyways, it will certainly help me out as I continue trying to simplify 3D models. Poly simplification has also proved to be very necessary because the chicken was still too complex to animate without crashing the program multiple times. Our computers are very bad, so our polygons must be few. Goals for Next Week:
For the past half year, I have not really touched any bit of scripting in game design. As someone who has been primarily pursuing art both in and out of class, it makes sense that I wouldn't do much coding, but as someone whose second choice of career would be programming, it does not make sense at all.
And I can genuinely say I miss it. My current work in CTE advanced studies is - while pretty fun to me - pretty time consuming but simple work. I mostly simplify polys of models Julia has made. There's no art in that. But I do enough art outside of class to still be creatively fulfilled. However, though poly simplification often is like a puzzle, it's an easy one. I am not fulfilled with challenges involving logic. Obviously I can not expect this fulfillment to come from class at this point though. That would mean asking people who are currently way less rusty than me to sacrifice the quality - or at least speed at which said quality is made - of the game for me to just have fun. Then, though I would have enough logic-based work to be happy, the lack of progress/working game would make me unhappy. So, this means it's time for independent, outside of school coding time. I haven't decided what I want to do for sure yet, but I think I'm down to three options
Basically, I'm hoping to get back into coding, and though I don't have an exact plan for how to do that just yet, I want to get there by Christmas so that I can start working on a project to sharpen my skills again.
This week was literally just the chicken simplification. Need I say more? But seriously, I did make the file size much more manageable and found the smoothing tool to be very helpful, and the chicken is now as done as it's going to be (unless there are major problems). My other teammates also moved to getting scripting done! Moving forward is kind of scary because I have to texture a complex object. Either it will be UVW unwrapped in Photoshop (hopefully) or each part will be individually textured with Unity and exported as a Unity asset package (back up plan). Either way, it will be a challenge but it will get done. Goals for Next Week:
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AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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