Damn. Your. Eyes.

2012-05-09

Some concept audio for our major project. Only took a few minutes to put together. Pro Tools makes things like this so damn easy. I love it.

For game engines we had to remake a classic arcade game using XNA 4.0. It was quite a challenge. Myself and Chris decided to make the original asteroids. However while importing the 3D model for the asteroid, I made a mistake with the alpha layer and they were coming in way too dark. After a bit of photoshop magic, I accidently made the asteroid far too bright and it ended up looking like a piece of shit floating through space. No stranger to thinking on our feet, myself and Chris decided to roll with this new aesthetic and rename the game “AssTurdz”. We learned so much in this game engine class that it’s hard to even begin listing the new skill sets. I really enjoyed it and the finished product ended up smooth and fun.

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What we learned in Modding

Modding sure itllbegta

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The Little Acre

Littleacre

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2012-03-27

Video Tease!

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Horse Outside!

I’m in the middle of re-making the classic Grand Theft Auto one but with a distinct Irish Rubber Bandits twist. I’ll have plenty to post about this as the weeks go on but for now, you can download a beta from our facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/HourseOutside?ref=ts

ENJOY!!!

2012-03-03

Tragedy!!!

As the year goes on, my attention is consistently being drawn towards our final year project. This will of course be a computer game and at the moment we’re looking at creating a standalone PC title. While I won’t go into the full details of the game in this post (mainly because I don’t yet know them myself), one aspect of the game has been on my mind of late.

Endings in computer games have always excited and interested me. Not all players actually play games to their completion, so when one does, there’s a certain sense of camaraderie both with other players who’ve reached the end, as well as with the designers of the game themselves. As a designer you want to both thank and reward the player for sticking it out to the end, hopefully for more than just the achievement points. As a player you expect to reap the benefits of your hard work.

Endings must also make sense within the universe of the game. The emotional impact of an ending can often depend on the style and context of the world you’ve created. For instance, if your game involves a lot of trial and error learned through the repetitive death of your character; any ending where the main player dies as part of the story seems somewhat weak. The player has died plenty of times up until this point, so why is this particular one so much more important? While I wouldn’t want to spoil anything for you, there are numerous incarnations of this problem in many modern games.

Unhappy endings in particular offer an interesting conundrum. For literally thousands of years the forms of human crafted entertainment have fallen under the loose titles of tragedy and comedy. From Sophocles to Shakespeare to Stephen King, audiences have fallen in love with a bitter and devastating ending through the downfall of a protagonist. However, I’ve often wondered if games are allowed to do the same. With books, films and plays the audience is merely a spectator to the art, observing the plight of their hero. With games, the audience is forced to manipulate and guide the hero through the world relying on their own personal skills and ability to reason. Thus an unhappy ending can often create a bitter resentment towards the designers of a game, rather than an appreciation for a well-crafted tale.

If you haven’t guessed by now, our game may potentially end badly for the user and we’ve been struggling with whether or not to stick to our narrative guns or to simply chicken out and reward the player with an ending that would be fitting to their achievement. I must say I’m looking forward to attempting the tragic approach, if only to make the user feedback forms far more interesting to read.

2012-02-18

GTA PRESENTATION

Gtapresentationone

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2012-02-06

Semester 2!!!

Okay so it’s been a while but in my defence, we’re only back in college a week. The course options have been explained to us and I believe I’ve already settled on my options. I’ll be taking Game Production as my core subject. In this we will go through the develop process of making a game, and will eventually end up with a demo of something we work on. At the moment we’re getting used to working in teams by developing our own version of Grand Theft Auto (one) using the GameMaker engine. GameMaker makes life incredibly easy when it comes to getting the basics working. However, in order to get the game to a level where it resembles the original GTA, a little more coding and tricks will have to be used.

I’ve spent the last few days getting the character to look normal while walking around and shooting a gun. The traffic was a headache but I now have some nice AI and audio that brings the city alive. Luckily the original game is now downloadable for free legally off Rockstar’s website.

The next option I’m taking is Game Asset and Design. We haven’t had this class yet but when I heard it will be using the Unity engine, I quickly started going through tutorials to familiarize myself with how it works. I’ve actually come to really enjoy the interface and methods it uses. While I’m sure I’ll be using C# to program any game I’d be making with it, the fact that it also allows JavaScript means I can run some basic events quite easily. I’ve basically gone about designing a room packed with a million well labelled events that occur in it and I’m going to keep it as a reference on how to do almost any of the major things a game needs.

Finally, my last elective module is Game Engines. The first class was a baptism by fire involving making an analogue clock interface using C#. While the coding parts were a little taxing, the major problems I had was with remembering my geometry. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Sin, Cos and Tan and I can’t say I’ve missed them. While we were assured that the subject would get easier, the next class wasn’t a huge decrease in terms of difficulty. We made a program using the companion cube from portal and a button where the colours of the ‘game’ changed according to the position of the cube. Not as much maths as before but the lack of an introduction to C# makes it feel like I’m being left behind a little. When I heard we were doing C# a month ago I began some online tutorials in order to learn it from a game perspective. While it was coming to me pretty easy back then, this seems far more advanced than those tutorials were willing to go.

Oh well! At least I’m able to run over people in my GTA game. I might rename one of the pedestrians ‘C#’.

2012-01-22

My Machinima for Ludology!

Enjoy! And a big thank you to Bert Kreischer for the retweet. Views are still piling in.

ASsTurdz