The Hero's Journey and 3D R2-D2

I've had a lot of projects during my time here at Flashpoint Academy, but my two favorite projects by far have been the Kit of Parts (create a board game) project for my Intro to Game Design class and my 3D modeling project for Intro to Game Developer Tools class.

With the Kit of Parts project, I had the awesome opportunity to collaborate with two brilliant minds that are Sean McNamara and John Hayden (the latter I would go on to work with in Bluejay Games on Little Folk).  We stayed after school most nights figuring out the design of the game and what exactly we were going to shoot for.  We knew that we wanted to create a game that drew inspiration from tabletop pencil-and-paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, but we wanted to simplify it to make it accessible to somebody who had never played a tabletop RPG.

After we finished with the game's general concept, Sean and John started creating the games battle mechanics while I started writing the game's story and designing the board and cover.  As the project deadline approached, we realized that we had to go into crunch mode to create all the assets we were going to need to create a polished finished product.  We kicked it into high gear and I wrapped up the writing and design, and John and Sean were finalizing the mechanics by simulating combat to see if it worked.  The night before the game was due, Sean and I organized all of our files and took it into Kinko's to print.  Over the course of the night, Murphy's law came into full effect as everything that could have gone wrong started going wrong.  The templates weren't lined up correctly, Kinko's said they don't print after 5pm, we couldn't print from our Illustrator files, we had to pay by the minute to use their computers, etc.  We even had to resort to bribing the Kinko's guy to print our project!  Sean and I stayed up at his house until 4am cutting and pasting onto card templates.

The whole experience was an invaluable lesson in problem solving.  For all our trials and hardships, however, we came out with an excellent product that I feel was unsurpassed.  I'm extremely proud of all the hard work the we put into it.  Our classmates were able to play the game and immediately found ways to break the game.  We iterated our design as a result the game was better for it.

Yesterday, I wrapped up my final 3D project for Intro to Game Developer tools.  Our task was to find an object and take orthographic photos to use as a template to create the object in 3D.  At first I planned to model my Xbox 360, but I wanted to do something a little bit more interesting.  I finally decided on modeling a little R2-D2 timer that came with a Star Wars Trivial Pursuit game I have.  It took me about 3 weeks or so, but I learned more about 3D modeling from this project than I did in over a year of using 3DS Max.

I ran into a crazy glitch when I tried to unwrap my textures.  After hours and hours of frustration, I ended up going to my instructor to see why it wasn't working.  He found that me version of 3DS Max had some sort of weird bug.  After he fixed it, I was able to apply all my textures to R2.  Instead of grabbing the textures directly from the object, I decided to paint my own.  I also used textures I found online to simulate wear-and-tear on R2's body.

I'm really happy with the end result, and I hope to keep working on the model to make it even better.

It's been a good semester, and I can't wait to expand and further my skill set in the new year.

The Future of Gaming and the Death of Consoles

Could the death of videogame consoles be an inevitability? Set to be released this winter, OnLive is a service that will change the gaming landscape as we know it and turn the industry completely upside down.

Imagine that instead of having to buy the latest high-end PC or videogame console, you subscribed to a service that took all of your inputs, processed all of the games computing on their servers, and instantly streamed a video of the game play back to you. This is the future that the cloud-based computing revolution spearheaded by OnLive promises.

This completely revolutionizes the gaming industry. Cloud-based computing would help to rid the industry of pirating, which has been the primary cause of the decline in PC gaming, since users would not have direct access to the games files.

Another inherent benefit of this system is reduced distribution costs, as publishers will no longer have to deal with the high costs of physical distribution. The benefits also extend to the developer as they will not have to worry about the technical specs of user-end PC’s, allowing them to have greater technical dexterity when building games.

And of course, hardware will become completely irrelevant to the consumer, as all the emphasis will be placed on software and the quality thereof.

There also seems to be widespread support of OnLive among both developers and publishers, with companies like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Atari, 2k Games, Epic Games, and many others poised to release games on the service upon its release. The service will most likely become the platform standard for publishers to release their games, because the positives of such a service outweigh the negatives.

But with any revolutionary idea, there are going to be initial hurdles and drawbacks.

It seems the majority of consumers are still attached to the idea of owning hard copies of their games. Consumers might not be fond of the idea of having their games housed on machines not even owned by them.

There are also concerns that high-speed connections won’t be fast enough to handle streaming the high definition video. But with the high adoption rate of broadband, and speeds constantly increasing, this is most likely a concern that will wane over time.

Personally, the thought of never having to buy a new console or upgrade my PC is one that fascinates me to no end. Could it be that ten years down the line, consoles will be entirely irrelevant? Only time will tell. But OnLive is definitely something to keep your eye on.

The Genesis

Let me be honest with you for a second.  I've had a lot of blogs over the years and I've hated every one of them.  Most of them were lame attempts at trying to make myself look like a really cool person who had really deep thoughts.  I think every person tries to make themselves look slick and intelligent on social networking sites and blogs.  I mean, nobody wants to look like a jackass, right?  But no more of the shameless posturing and crafted attempts at making myself look like this generations version of the Fonz.  Well, aside from the blogs title.

What I hope to do with this new blog is share my thoughts and opinions on news and events in the game industry as well as share my own trials, tribulations, failures and successes on my road to becoming a game developer.  Sounds interesting, right?  Maybe?  Maybe not?  Eh.  You'll like it.

Another pitfall I'd like to avoid this time around is not updating often enough.  A couple of the many traits I'd like to cultivate in myself is consistency and persistence.  If you see a sizable gap in between posts, feel free to give me a kick to the tukas.

With that being said, thanks for visiting and taking time to read this.  Come back again soon, as you're bound to see me be overly-cynical overly-enthusiastic about something videogame related.