I am delirious. Sincerely.
I am beside myself with joy and fear. We have started messing around in the Unreal 4 Engine, and it has been a nightmare of beauty navigating it.
It is such a simple visual structure, to generate blueprints for knowledge and game structure, that our producers could change and alter simple game code, without writing ANY code at all. This is all fine and dandy for them...But as for writing our own code, that is another beast.
We have separated goals for each team-member when it comes to coding. I was given the task of altering the third-person player controller, and implement code to fire projectiles. Seems simple...But things are not as they seem.
We had a lecture remove about two and a half hours from our work time. After that I was downloading the new implementation of Visual Studio 2013. While that was just finishing downloading I was asked to attend a group design meeting, which side-tracked our base game mechanics. I asked the group why we were just sitting around talking about it, and why no one has built a paper prototype and play-tested it, but talking continued. I explained my concerns and issues with the current state of the way design was going, and they agreed.
I went back to coding after this meeting and class had ended. Off to do actual full-time job work, and then off to the last class of the day. I feel as if our classes don't provide us time to work, but provide us "pretend time to work". The program has made me a believer that the actual program is about playing dress-up, but not actually purchasing clothing. It's a bizarre analogy, but that's all I can think of to describe it.
---
As for the last day of the week, I determined that lack of tutorials for a game engine release is frustrating, annoying, and exciting. It is like exploring unknown territory...But when you have a limited amount of time to build a game, you don't want to be exploring the unknown, you just need answers to simple questions so you can fix the current problems you are having.
I digress.
We discussed briefly as engineers that we may need to go back to Unity if our game is still stuck in its current state. We are going to discuss this further during the week and will make a final decision then.
Back to work!
Monday, April 7, 2014
Post 27 - Can't Sleep Games Will Eat Me
You read it in the title, and it was true.
I attended the 2014 Game Developers Conference (GDC) and it was amazing! The number of booths to visit, people to talk to and interactions with other industry groups were astounding.
I was able to attend a two day game design workshop specifically headed by Marc Leblanc. It was an intense hands-on event, involving group discussion, analysis of theme and mechanics, and critique. It was focused on the Mechanics-Design-Aesthetics (MDA) game design approach. We iterated on the base game mechanics of Sissy-Fight 3000, focusing on how the games is viewed as a system, in terms of its mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. We discussed what worked, and what didn't work. We discussed if it was fun, and if that fun helped meet the theme of the game. It was wonderful!
And that was just part of Day 1!!!
I'm not going to describe every piece of each day, but GDC was worth the trip. I met many people looking for jobs, internships, long-term game veterans, start-ups, and general software developers. Hell, I even met the Space-X team who builds reusable rockets, and how they are trying to go to Mars.
---
As with this trip, I have lost lots of sleep and focus. I'm tired, and beat up mentally and emotionally. It was a great trip, but everyone knows that "vacations" are a lot of work. With this being true, then "work vacations" are double, if not triple, the total amount of work.
We came back to our group discussions on the game engine to focus on for our Master Thesis Game: Hostile Territory. During this discussion everyone was very interested if we could make the character run up walls in the Unreal 4 Engine. I spent over an hour at the Unreal booth at GDC discussing with one of their head engineers, and he explained that with the three-dimensional nav-meshes, as they are currently built, it would be very difficult to do this. If we had five engineers and a few months, we might find a way to get it working.
I explained this hardship to the group, so gravity/wall walking is not the main focus right now. There was much discussion as to how the game is changing in design. Lots of "talking" occurred, but not a lot of "testing" occurred. I explained about the design workshop I attended at GDC, and if we are going to change anything, we should playtest it. This includes not just code, but paper-prototypes.
And that was the week back from GDC. More to come!
I attended the 2014 Game Developers Conference (GDC) and it was amazing! The number of booths to visit, people to talk to and interactions with other industry groups were astounding.
I was able to attend a two day game design workshop specifically headed by Marc Leblanc. It was an intense hands-on event, involving group discussion, analysis of theme and mechanics, and critique. It was focused on the Mechanics-Design-Aesthetics (MDA) game design approach. We iterated on the base game mechanics of Sissy-Fight 3000, focusing on how the games is viewed as a system, in terms of its mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. We discussed what worked, and what didn't work. We discussed if it was fun, and if that fun helped meet the theme of the game. It was wonderful!
And that was just part of Day 1!!!
I'm not going to describe every piece of each day, but GDC was worth the trip. I met many people looking for jobs, internships, long-term game veterans, start-ups, and general software developers. Hell, I even met the Space-X team who builds reusable rockets, and how they are trying to go to Mars.
---
As with this trip, I have lost lots of sleep and focus. I'm tired, and beat up mentally and emotionally. It was a great trip, but everyone knows that "vacations" are a lot of work. With this being true, then "work vacations" are double, if not triple, the total amount of work.
We came back to our group discussions on the game engine to focus on for our Master Thesis Game: Hostile Territory. During this discussion everyone was very interested if we could make the character run up walls in the Unreal 4 Engine. I spent over an hour at the Unreal booth at GDC discussing with one of their head engineers, and he explained that with the three-dimensional nav-meshes, as they are currently built, it would be very difficult to do this. If we had five engineers and a few months, we might find a way to get it working.
I explained this hardship to the group, so gravity/wall walking is not the main focus right now. There was much discussion as to how the game is changing in design. Lots of "talking" occurred, but not a lot of "testing" occurred. I explained about the design workshop I attended at GDC, and if we are going to change anything, we should playtest it. This includes not just code, but paper-prototypes.
And that was the week back from GDC. More to come!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)