This is it. The end of the year. Time to say goodbye to high school. So I'm not sure that I have time to really get into the sappy stuff properly in this post, so instead, I'm just gonna talk about my main takeaways from this class.
1. Anxiety Ok, yeah, this one is a little unfair, because I definitely had anxiety before this class, but let's just say, those photoshop and illustrator quizzes in 9th grade? They taught me what real panic is. But what I really mean by this is that this class has shown me a new kind of anxiety that I'm going to be very familiar with assuming my career goes as planned: anxiety over meeting deadlines of creative projects. And for this, I'm really grateful, because if I hadn't experienced it for the past four years, it would hit me like a ton of bricks in college. Also, providing these stressful situations has allowed me to see my improved anxiety management as I've gotten progressively more on top of projects and less worried about perfection. GAD has honestly been one of maybe three major things in my life that have helped me with anxiety. 2. Mad Skillz When I started out in GAD, I had used blender in a summer camp, but I had never touched ANY sort of programming (other than maybe one day of code class,) any of the programs we use like 3DsMax and Photoshop, or even really thought about what it truly takes to make a game. To have gone from essentially nothing to working in VR in 4 years (especially those years being highschool) honestly is a little wild to me. I don't really think of myself as very skilled since I still have so much to learn, but actually I have developed so many skills in this class that i may not have even tried to learn if not for GAD. Not all of them are skills I will definitely use, but the majority are, and most of the rest are ones I would love to continue using, even just as a hobby. I like being able to make digital art, 3D model, sound design, edit my own videos, manage my projects, and program things, and because of GAD, I can, at some level, do all of these things, and I know where to find other resources online to learn more. 3. Friendship This one is a bit sarcastic but also in another sense very genuine. I don't know if we, the advanced studies kids, will actually stay in touch after high school, but I can say it was really great to work on a team, and it taught me a lot about working with other to create collaboratively. So, it's sarcastic in the sense that, I may or may not take my current friendships with me, but I will take the people skills that I've learned here with me, and that will help me both in professional settings and casual ones. I started out high school being very quiet, not really fully believing that anyone would want to be my friend, and GAD in part has helped me in being a space where I can belong as part of the team, which does wonders for a kid's self esteem. I feel much more confident presenting my ideas to others and knowing that what I'm saying is worth others hearing, and that didn't come from teacher praise, it really came from the unique environment that GAD creates in having such a tight knit community of peers who are, for the most part, incredibly supportive. Overall, I'll glad I was in the Game Art and Design pathway. I had my regrets in the middle for sure, but getting to create on a team this year has been so gratifying, and I really think the class has dramatically changed me as a person and helped me figure out what I want to do with my life. If you made it this far, thanks, Mr. B.
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So as the end of the year approaches, I have come to the realization that, I'm about to lose access to a lot of my files. I'm talking files from up to 7 years ago, they're all going to disappear in a puff of smoke unless I transfer them. This is because I'm gonna be kicked out of schoology, my school google drive account, and possibly even my laptop because it is getting old and I'll probably get a new one before college. Soooo, this means it's time to transfer files, and part one of that is finding old work from schoology and putting it on my personal google drive or a flash drive, so I decided I'd share some of that work from my first Sci-Vis class with you here. That's really all I have to say about transferring files, here's some of my old work: I think it's pretty nice holding on to old artwork so that you can see how far you've improved. I won't save every single piece of art from schoology, but I'll save a few like these so that I can remember where I started, and how quickly I can grow when I set out to learn new skills. Hopefully I'll have enough storage for all of these files.
This post actually comes with me asking for some advice. If you want to comment any below, please do!
I recently committed to NC State with the intended major of Art + Design, hopefully so that I can concentrate in animation. Of course I am stoked! It's going to be amazing to be going to college - especially NC State with how nice the Design School is - for something that I love. However, I know a lot of students, and especially students in artistic majors, experience burnout. I'm currently feeling the highschool burnout that people term Senioritis, so burnout has been on my mind a lot lately and I want to do my best to avoid it from here on out. So, I'm going to post some of the plans that I have to attempt to avoid burnout, but if you have any suggestions, again, feel free to comment them below. First, I'm going to try to make lots of friends outside of my major, and maybe take some classes outside of my major too. I think that if I am constantly surrounded only by people talking about art, I will get tired of it. I've always been someone who has enjoyed more interdisciplinary stuff, and luckily NC State is a great place for this. There are so many other majors like ecology and engineering that I'm also really interested in, so taking courses on them, or at least talking to others who do, could keep things fresh and keep me inspired. Secondly, I really am going to try to be way better about time management. I think that's the biggest source of my burnout right now: it feels like I have no time because I am not managing it well. To be fair, I am having 3 hours of rehearsal after school and I am in the throes of AP review, but I could definitely be keeping my schedule a little tighter and that would help me find more free time. I'm not sure if Trello is going to still be my method for this since now I am not time managing for a team, but it might still be helpful for me to just have my own personal boards. I know I will use some sort of planner if I want this to work. Finally, I will try to have some hobbies that help me recharge. It's a little weird to think art may not be my hobby any more, but maybe just drawing silly stuff or fanart still will be. Otherwise I'm thinking singing/playing an instrument and potentially coding simple games. I know a lot of people say having a hobby helps, and though, yeah, it is another activity that you have to make or leave time for, it's worth it to not be low energy and unable to create efficiently later. That's about all I have for today, but I bet I will find better strategies for myself as I actually get to college and see what's manageable. I'm really excited to be pursuing my passion, and I'm going to do everything I can to avoid bust. It's Game Review Time! Long story short, after the two breaks that we've had lately, I wanted a way to disconnect from reality, so I returned to a game that I used to play: Awesomenauts, a 2D multiplayer online battle arena by Ronimo. My brother and I got this game during a steam sale a few years back, but it has since become free to play, which is really exciting because it means more players which means quicker match ups to be able to play. It's a really fun game that's pretty easy to learn, and I just really enjoy the way that it looks. Basically though it's "2D League of Legends" (credit to Sam for such a good summary), so there isn't a ton to talk about gameplay-wise, so I'm just gonna talk about some of the characters I like and how the games sort of play out. [All pictures included come from the game's official website] The Basic Game Structure So basically, each team has 3 players who are trying to defend their own base, and the destroy the other team's base. However, there are also turrets, which act as a strong defense (the big mech machine gun looking thing above) and droids (the two little guys on the left with buzz saw arms) who function as meat shields when fighting against the turrets. It's pretty simple over all, but there's a variety of different characters who all play a little differently, and there's a lot of strategy that goes into it. It also really requires full engagement on the part of all 3 team members, or it really will be a struggle to have a fighting chance (basically it's really frustrating when someone goes inactive). One thing I really love about this game is that it's not about the kills. While yes, these stats are recorded, and it is helpful to kill others and not die, there's so much more to the game than attacking other people. A lot of it comes down to defending and attacking other turrets, and following waves of droids in order to be able to do so effectively. I'm not very good at any PvP game, but I've gotten a lot better at this one than at any other and even gotten a kill streak a few times, because I can actually use other strategy and skills to still help out my team, especially using characters that fulfill a more defensive or support role. Which brings me to... The Characters Awesomenauts has over 20 characters, and they all feel really unique, which I think is really impressive. A few of them do play a little similarly, but the character designs are all so vastly different, and they do have slight differences move-wise that set them apart. They all have their own theme music and voices too. The characters fall into a few different categories, some of them being fighter, tank, support, harasser, and assassin. I haven't unlocked all of the characters, so I'm only going to talk about a few of them who I've had fun with lately (2 of which are starter characters, but they're honestly still my favorites).
So, that's about all I have to say about Awesomenauts! I can foresee myself wasting hours on it over the summer, and I encourage you to try it out if you want! It's free to play and matches usually are less than 20 minutes long, and it's just such a charming game.
If you look at my art page on instagram, it's clear that I go through periods of doing a lot of traditional art and then a lot of digital art, but they aren't really interspersed anymore. Lately I've been starting to more towards a lot more digital art for a couple of reasons.
This is sort of just a reflection on my recent art, and a throwback to an old blog post I made a while back, with a slight variance. This week has been extremely busy, mostly because of my involvement with theatre, so I only have a very small amount of time for art, which means I either have to make slow progress, or...
I can make fast art! This simply means focusing on hitting deadlines is a higher priority than quality (though, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to throw quality out of the window). Doing this wasn't actually planned on my part, instead, I had deadlines approach much faster than I had anticipated and was forced to work this way if I valued my sanity. However, this also meant that I have produced 6 gif animations and another digital art piece in the past 3 days or so, most of them being very busy days as well. Sure, they aren't perfect, but I hit the deadlines I needed to hit, and I actually learned a lot about how I work/ what I need to improve on. For instance, the unanimated piece of art showed me that I'm better at lineart than I thought, but also am still struggling with making distinct shading. The gifs proved to me that animation, while it can be a lengthy and arduous process, can happen even in short bursts of productivity, and thus, even if I don't have much time, having even a little time means that I can work towards larger artistic goals. For the rest of the school year, I want to try to do more fast art, this time with self-imposed deadlines in order to improve faster. As I talked about in the blog post linked above, I strongly believe that not being so meticulous and just getting in a ton of practice definitely helps me improve more quickly. Below are two of the gifs I made. There are lots of aspects of both that could be HUGELY improved, but they provided me practice in animation, and allowed me to see what I need to work on in the future. 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. I don't know when this happened (or it may have just always been there but I never noticed) but Weebly now has an Alt Text feature that allows you to easily write image descriptions on any images on your website! This is very cool, for a couple of reasons.
The first, less important reason, is that if your alt text contains keywords, your image may be found by these keywords, but the normal description doesn't have to include them. It could help images or entire websites get a little bit more exposure. However, what's even better is the second reason: accessibility. Alt text will be read by screen readers, so people who are blind or have any sight problems who use screen readers (programs that will read online text to them) can also understand what is going on in the image. This is something that a lot of people never even think about when creating content, so I am very glad that weebly has brought this technology to an easy to edit place on images (the same place you would click in order to write a regular caption). I learned a lot about this as I've been doing fan art for a podcast, because as a completely auditory medium, there's more hard of seeing people in the audience since it is a media form that is more accessible to them, and so many people in the community have been encouraging more image descriptions. There are people who aren't completely blind who can definitely enjoy visual art, but may just need a little bit of extra description in order to figure out what they're looking at. For instance, telling someone who sees a blob in the middle of the screen, "hey, that's a face!" might clarify it enough for them to be able to see the face you drew, much like how when we look at clouds, if someone suggests what the cloud looks like, it becomes much easier to see. If you include an important image or diagram that is crucial to understanding a blog post, an image description means that there is a better chance that people who have trouble seeing can still follow. It's also helpful if you took a screenshot of some text to transcribe it to alt text, because a screen reader wouldn't be able to read that. Personally, I think, from both a business and humanitarian standpoint, the more people who can enjoy your content, the better, so even if this feature would only help a few people, it's still very worth it to use. Of course, it is a bit more work, but image descriptions should be less than 125 words (this is so that people with screen readers don't have to sit there for a long time as each image is being described) so it shouldn't actually take that long, and it's a really great thing to do. I've been thinking a lot about social media lately. As someone who wants to try to make a career out of being an artist, putting my artwork out there and networking are both super important, but social media can often distract me from work. I thought that it was motivating me to make more art so that I could post more, but I reviewed my entire art account at the start of 2019, and I realized that there were entire months where I didn't make a single art post! Most of my posts came in bursts of like four pieces at once and then radio silence. I spend most of my social media time on my personal account instead of my art one, but am I really gaining anything from that?
So I'm trying to make some new social media goals for this year. Unfollow Everyone (Personal Account) This is an exaggeration, but I have been gradually unfollowing everyone who is
Post Schedule (Art Account) I don't want to have months of no content, so even if it's posting works-in-progress all of the time, I want to start having specific days that I'll post on, and I think this starts with creating an art social media trello board. This way, I can have deadlines for when to post things, as well as what I want to post (progress on project A or project B? Finished piece C?). This will also help me stick to deadlines for completing pieces since I want to be able to post. However, as a trello board, it's also flexible enough that I could always move stuff around and post random doodles if I need more content/ want to post more often. Comment on Other People's Posts More (Art Account) If social media feels more like a community and I potentially make some more art friends, I think I will feel more motivated to post. And if not, well, at least I'm letting other people know that I appreciate their work. Anyway, those are my goals, if anyone who reads this has any other tips, comment them I guess! I'm writing this post 1/14/19, but it will be posted on 1/16 because that's the day that I'm actually presenting this work to the whole faculty and I didn't want any spoilers (Hi Mr. B). So I've been one of the officers of the GSA (Gender Sexuality Alliance, or Gay Straight Alliance) at school this year, and another club was created called the Student Equity Leadership Team. I've worked a lot with the latter this year, and that has lead up to what I'm about to do in two days: present to the entire school faculty about respecting transgender student's pronouns. As a semi-closeted trans/nonbinary kid who is only closeted because they're too scared to come out (ie not because of any danger, just fear of judgement) it's a little terrifying to know that in less than 48 hours, I will have spoken to over 100 people about respecting trans kids. However, it's also incredibly exciting to know that I'll (hopefully) be impacting future trans students at school, hopefully for the better. Anyways, in order to do this, I also made a handout in the form of a zine (a small booklet), and it was a lot like making infographics, so I'm counting it as art/graphic design for the purposes of this post. We wanted to have a handout that wasn't just another piece of paper, but that was still something that teachers could keep for future reference. It was kind of scary to make, because whenever you speak on behalf of a community, you don't want to get things wrong. The artistic aspects were fun to make though, and I think that they make the document much more interesting, especially now that it's in small booklet form on lavender paper. I want to open this post up to the larger description of activism in art though. While DSA is a very liberal school, there are definitely places where this zine - and any art with an activism undertone - could be considered propaganda, and that's another reason that it's so scary to create in this way: I don't want to be seen as some extremist who is too serious about politics. This project has really helped me learn that you can create without coming off that way: sharing your opinion, even in a biased way, doesn't mean you're extreme, it just means that you have an opinion, something that you're totally allowed to have. Respecting trans people is something near and dear to my heart that affects me and my friends, I should be able to make art about it, and express my opinions about it without feeling overly political. I can't keep being so ashamed of who I am that I hide it from my creative work. Anyways, here's a digital copy of the zine. |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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