Big Update! I haven't been posting on here as much as I should, I thought I would be able to log my experiences in Germany but creating one blog for a grade in the class was challenging enough. Although I enjoyed the whole experience - like traveling in Europe and touring studios and visiting Amsterdam and Sweden after the study abroad trip had ended - but I would like to focus on putting my thoughts down about the week we spent in Paderborn and meeting the German students who worked in the game studio.
None of them were actually game design students because they didn't have an official major at the University of Paderborn, but that lead to a very different dynamic for their games lab. I thought I would be met with all computer science students, but they actually had media studies and sound majors as well. Because there were so many students, they could afford to have dedicated designers, developers, sound techs, and producers. This would mean a completely different type of game jam for me. Unfortunately they didn't really have any dedicated arts majors, so what little they knew was with free 3D programs (blender) and a basic knowledge of 2D work. Even then they didn't have any dedicated artists in their studio, so I was kind of disappointed I couldn't nerd out over Maya and 3D films and art with any of the German students.
The first day we met them they introduced us to their past and current projects. In comes Q. What seemed like a very underwhelming and simple game for something they worked on across an entire school year, completely enraptured the American students. Even as the night started winding down we all stayed later than anticipated - we all watched and took turns playing and the game design students picked apart all the nuances and techniques, learning more in a couple hours than what you could get from a couple weeks in a classroom.
Q is a MASTER CLASS in game design. Although it features simple art, the style of the game lends itself well to the game play and overall feel of the game. Don't tell anyone I admitted that; as an artist, the idea of art being dumbed down to the most simple and basic designs is a no go for me.
Anyway, one of my favorite YouTube videos about game design is a video from former animator Egoraptor - now known as Arin from Game Grumps.
The first five minutes or so is all about avoiding long text boxes stopping your progress to explain a mechanic and taking you out of the game play. If you give the player a safe, controlled environment and introduce them to a mechanic or enemy in a simple way, there's no need for explanation. Q did just that, allowing the player to learn new mechanics and then combine those mechanics later on to give players a different kind of challenge using the same ideas before they got too stale. The short but challenging levels appealed to gamers as they progressed through harder and harder levels; each time they completed a level, the environment would change color and prompt more exploration. It was really impressive. My boyfriend even asked for a copy of the build so he could play the insanely difficult secret levels and get all the collectibles that presented an even more difficult challenge with an even greater reward. He played the game all through the night in our hotel room, and I could hear him lamenting and celebrating while I was trying to sleep.
After a few days with the Paderborn students we started the game jam. I like to think I have a good understanding of game design from my experience playing, studying, and making games, but during game jams I'm usually both the game designer and artist. Because of my obvious interest in art, game design typically fell to the wayside - I would stick with what I know and throw some stereotypical mechanics and game play elements in there so I could work on the stuff I would rather spend my time on. Having dedicated game designers coming up with levels and mechanics and story progression was not only an amazing addition that brought the game up to a new level of polish, but it meant I could slink away and just work on the art. I loved meeting up with my team periodically, and I was blown away by how talented and hard working everyone was. The other American students seemed to have problems with their team mates (not speaking english, not listening to their ideas, writing over their code, etc.) but my team worked so well together and every time we met up we had mechanics and design elements and sound that made the game that much better. They listened to me and my ideas, and I worked with them on the models they needed for testing and development.
Onto the game itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_iHwP0FWeU I created this animatic for my final in Animation Storyboarding and Scriptwriting. I'm not very proud of it actually, it's slow, has too many arrows, and the composition is flat. Making this blog has allowed me to step back and look at my skills, and if you read any of my posts through my sophmore film you'll know that I had some major reality checks. I thought I inherently knew all of this stuff because of how long I've been an artist and how much exposure I had to the concepts, but I hadn't paid enough attention all these years to be anything more than mediocre. That's hard to admit, and even harder to internalize. I'm still working on my perfectionist complex and my need to be better than everyone else (probably a result of childhood trauma and how I was able to consistently be top of my class in high school), and I am making a lot of progress. I don't cry and shut down whenever something doesn't go right the first time, but I still have a lot of the way to go. Until then, I am determined to be less narcissistic and listen to those with more experience and knowledge, as well as work through assignments for experience instead of just getting them done.
That aside, this was what I showed my partners during the creation and decision process. We first met up as partners, then came together as four, and then eventually eight because there were so many people (around 50, but I feel like it was closer to 60). My first partner was a sound guy who seemed to really like my idea, and he was surprisingly very excited to work on it. The next people weren't as keen, and I wish the animatic I had was more concise and didn't lose people's attention so quickly. Even so, my idea went onto the board for the final rounds of decisions. I had to go up and present it, which is always nerve wracking, and I kind of regret not being as prepared. It managed to just avoid elimination by one vote, but during the team assignments people still weren't very interested in working on it ( even through my speech of "It's really cute and I'm really fun to work with guys!"). Alex and I were the only true artists and animators, so I think people wanted to work with us. I said I could do all the art on my own, which upset Alex because he knew I always took on too much, but I ended up being the only artist on my team anyway. I was excited to get Tobi on our team, who was supposed to just be assisting and tech support around the lab, but was there as a back up coder in case there weren't enough. There were surprisingly few coders; we ended up with three sound guys but only Tobi on development (though he was said to have the strength of two coders in one, which excited me). The other two students were game designers, and I started a friendship with one of them where I still talk to him over facebook. I enjoyed myself so much that I was actually pretty disappointed to have to leave for Frankfurt after the game jam.
My team was able to take my idea to new lengths and allowed me to get a lot done. The otter companion code that allowed him to swim around the player and be played with secondary controls was exciting enough, and Tobi was able to get it done in a few hours instead of a few days like I expected. They also managed to implement a grapple to pull environment elements together, bubble streams to push players to new areas, and even more impressively set up a mechanic where the otter could swim through tunnels in rocks to grab power cells. The last mechanic wasn't very polished, but they managed to get it working well enough that we could showcase it at the end of the jam.
I got a lot of modeling done, and I even surprised myself at how well they all turned out. The rock pile was the hardest and I ended up spending too much time on it. I also wasn't able to texture such complex models, so they ended up not having any textures at all. I also animated our main character, but he wasn't actually rigged so I was only animating with joints because the time I had didn't allow me to learn how to rig a character. I had to do a lot of counter animating, which didn't give me a good idea of how it would look in game and ended up being very clunky and slow. The other team members weren't really concerned with it, so they didn't set the values correctly for the animation to look good anyway. Because of my narcolepsy and traveling, I was very tired and disappointed that I couldn't work longer and harder - I was having such a good time.
In the end the game looked and played great for how little time we had to make it, and I would even say it was the best game that came out of the jam. The music enhanced the experience so well, and the coders and designers added in a last minute Easter egg that turned the otter model into Tomas the Tank Engine which everyone else really enjoyed. Side note: I had seen some discussions in the group chat over sounds and coding that didn't really make sense until after I saw that, I had just brushed it off and ignored it to keep working and was just as surprised and amused as everyone else during the showcase. I knew I should have presented the game during the showcase, because the game designer wasn't very good at explaining any of the mechanics or story and didn't bring attention to the right things happening on screen. Her english wasn't very good so I'm not upset or anything, but it still was a little sad to see all that work not properly presented.
After the trip I realized that I wanted to continue working on the game, and there was a good enough foundation in the design and code that someone else could pick up the project and continue where the German students left off. I started planning for the game to be my junior film requirement, and I'm now trying to recruit and set up the proper organization so that everyone can get credit through various classes. I'm so excited to work on this and the developers I have recruited so far seem just as eager to work on it. I plan to put my all into this game; Last semester I had pushed myself to the breaking point and even further than that with my film. This semester I want that to be barely scratching the surface of how hard I work on this game. I'm more interested in the concept and now that I don't have to focus on film aspects I can do what I love doing and get what I wanted out of my time at RIT. This blog will be a continuation of last semester where I document my progress through the project, so I hope you follow me on this journey and enjoy seeing what I come up with!
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