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:
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In this post I'll be reflecting on the year in game design so far, just before we get into 2D game design. So far this year has felt much more challenging than last year, both in the skills that we've been using, and in just managing my time. I'm getting ahead of myself though, so let's go through the year.
We started off just learning video game history, which I personally found uninteresting since it felt as though we were just creating infographic after infographic, and I barely remember any of the material at this point honestly. While this unit is important to learn, it isn't exactly useful for every day work. At this time we were also reading The Art of Game Design which I also found boring since I am much more a hands-on person when it comes to art, and it felt as if the author were speaking only from his own experience rather than looking at the bigger picture. However, the book was effective in teaching some key concepts of game design. None of this work was extremely challenging, other than just trying to find a unique way to create the next infographic. Next, we got into pitching a board game idea, and then executing an idea in a group. Coming up with an original idea wasn't too challenging, but working to pitch it well in front of peers and then work through holes in the original concept were both very difficult. Though I don't feel nervous while public speaking, I am not very good at it. My pitch was certainly not flawless, but I think I did a fairly good job, and learned what I need to do next time (think through questions from others and spend more time on solidifying the art style). Since my team wasn't exactly the best at communicating and didn't really have the best work ethic, I found it very difficult to create a board game that I was content with. Next time, I need to work on my communication and leadership skills. Now, we're working on 3D modeling and animation. While it is challenging work, I'm enjoying it immensely. All of the work that I've been producing, though it has been sort of rough looking, is incredible compared to what I did in the program last year. That being said, I will need to practice a lot more to ever be able to make clean looking 3D animations, but I think it would be worth it. All in all this year has been very good for me. I feel like I've learned a lot of skills that I will need for any career relating to game design, especially in terms of team work, and animation basics. I did say that time management was an issue since I like to take my time on projects, but I think this year is helping me view deadlines more realistically and budget my time better. I hope that moving into 2D design I can learn from the mistakes I've made and the lesson I've been taught so far. This post will be about reflecting on this entire blog. I missed the post that was for reflection on the school year, so I may include some of that in this post as well, but ultimately I am planning on making another post on a bit later.
This blog has been fairly useful. It's given me time to think out what I need to do during the week since I can type out a plan and reflection of what is already done. However, the posts that I liked most were the ones not focused on reflecting on work but rather the ones where we had to watch a video or read an article and talk about what we had learned from it. It was more interesting to learn as well as making a blog post, rather than just saying, "this is what I did this week,". Overall, it has helped me keep track of what we have learned this year since I can go back and read past posts. I can also see my personal progress because of the work I've posted. I think I'm going to try to make some improvements to it over the summer so that it looks better overall next year. Scientific Visualization has been a very interesting class so far this year. I knew we wouldn't solely be doing game things this year, since that will come in later years, but I didn't exactly know what to expect. So far it's been more challenging than my math class, but easier than some other courses too. However, since it's a class I really care about, I've made it a bit harder on myself at times because I can be a perfectionist. However, Sci-Vis has really helped with that.
After our assignment to make a game about careers in scientific visualization, I realized that the assignment had taught me a valuable lesson. I had stayed up really late each night of the project, and by the end I was still unhappy because of the lack of continuity in card format, the information I felt we were missing, and flaws that I thought would make the game unplayable (we didn't have enough time to test it out). We got to play other peer-made games in class though, and I realized that at least comparatively, ours wasn't too bad. The effort my group had put into our game was apparent, and I felt a bit better. Still, when I looked at my grade, I feared the worst. Instead I was surprised to find an A on the project. Mr. B had said he wasn't looking for perfection, but I hadn't expected that what we had done had made the cut. I realized that I had done well enough on the parts of the game I had gotten done, and that if I hadn't spent so long perfecting every little thing, we could have tested and fixed up our game. As the saying goes "Don't miss the forest for the trees." Since that project I've had much better prioritizing skills when working on projects, and I know I can go back and fix the rest if I have time. Time management is probably the most useful thing that I've learned so far from this class, though not necessarily an intended lesson, it applies to all of my other classes and aspirations, and will be useful throughout the rest of my life. I am incredibly excited for the rest of the year, even though I know it will continue to be more and more challenging. I am excited to get into the more creative part of the course. I have been interested in animation for a while because I really like cartoons, but I imagine it is going to be hard. Just learning how to do better digital art of any sort will make me really happy because I have a lot of friend's whose skills greatly surpass mine. I would love to be able to make cool art too. But whatever we learn next, I'm sure that it will be great. |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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