Week 10 - A Day in the Life

As this is my first day back to school in a month, I thought I’d chronicle it for my blog this week.

8:50 – Awoken by alarm.

9:10 – Awoken by mother.

9:15 – Had to eat breakfast to take medicine. I thought to myself that it’s strange how bread isn’t considered a meal until you toast it. I hate it toasted.

9:20 – Took my medicine. As I did, I remembered having it as a kid and spitting it all over the floor the first time I took it.

9:21 – Cleaned my medicine up off the sink. Some things never change.

9:55 – Left home. I listened to my iPod on the way to the bus stop. I’ve listened to this song about a hundred times; I’m starting to think what I was told about it being full of satanic messages was false. Then again, there’s no way to listen to it backwards.

10:05 – Boarded the bus. The last bus ride I took lasted almost seven hours, but at least I didn’t have to stand.

10:45 – Got off the bus. I found myself getting oddly nostalgic over the route I generally dread taking. Mind you, I didn’t have time to listen to A through G of my music this time.

11:05 – Sat down in class. I felt a negative energy.

11:45 – Lunch. Being here is emotionally draining. I retreated into the wonderful, never judging arms of my sandwich.

12:08 – Couldn’t get on MyCampus in the game lab. I didn’t even really need to access it, but it frustrated me that I couldn’t. I think I may have ADD.

12:22 – Still trying. I made it as far as the Personal Information tab before the website crapped out on me. Also, people in front of me were having a heated discussion about which generation 1 Pokemon starter was the best. It was the most engaged I’d been all day.

1:07 – Squirtle. The answer was Squirtle.

1:19 – Struggling to maintain a tense, as I’m now writing this as it happens instead of recalling the morning.

1:33 – Went for a walk. The fresh air felt good. It’s surprisingly warm for the end of November. I also realise I have eight more hours of this before I’m done for the day, perhaps I should start spacing these out a bit. On a side note, the MyCampus portal is officially down. I WILL gain access before the end of the day.

2:33 – I have clearly missed a lot of animation classes. Why does something need two skeletons…? I must inquire during the break.

3:34 – The extra skeleton provides more points to animate.  MyCampus server is still down. Good thing I haven’t been trying every 15 minutes since lunch, that’s the kind of thing that’d really irritate a person.

3:55 – Apparently the character rig should take upwards of 40 hours to complete. I may be in trouble.

5:23 – Just got back from eating dinner, and finally logged onto MyCampus.

6:37 – In the GDW room.

7:03 – GDW has begun. Group members are looking slightly defeated. I’ve never heard so much cursing over infinitely spawning bouncing balls. Although in fairness, I’ve never even really considered that situation before.

7:23 – Did some course surveys. Turns out I strongly agree with astronomy. I also did a survey for Mario’s marketing class. I don’t drink coffee so I hope I didn’t screw up his data.

7:51 – GDW is over. The game is due next Monday. Huh.

Week 9 - You Can't Take Me Anywhere

Luckily, a totally unrelated stream of consciousness made me remember that I have a blog to maintain, or else I would have forgotten about it for the second week in a row. As of the day I got back from MIGS I have been coughing up lungs left and right. Not helping matters was the research paper I had to do for one of my electives, which I worked on 10ish hours a day for 4 or 5 days. The resulting fatigue coupled with my inability to go 30 seconds without a coughing fit had some adverse effects on my health, which after a quick trip to the ER was revealed to be a fairly serious case of bronchitis. Unfortunately, I was on the wrong kind of medication for about a week before said trip. All that being said, this has probably been the least productive two weeks I've experienced since before the term started (save for the lengthy paper). Later in the week should be interesting as I shift into catch-up mode, which will be daunting to say the least.

Week 7 - MIGS!

My week was dominated by the MIGS trip. We left on Monday at 9am and arrived at the Quality Hotel a little after 3. The name of the hotel was a trap. Nonetheless, we had a few hours to ourselves to enjoy the city and soak up the Montreal culture, by which I mean we watched cartoons dubbed in French before we stumbled on the English-speaking channel and enjoyed 2 or 3 hours of Cake Boss. That brought us to what was possibly the biggest obstacle of the experience: food. Never in my life have I consisted almost solely on Tim Hortons for days at a time, but given the rigid schedule of the summit there wasn't much of a choice. At least we had WiFi.

The convention itself was great. My only real issue was trying to decode some of the finer points of the Montreal accent, but I feel that I got the full potential out of each lecture regardless. My favourite lecture and what was undoubtedly the most important for me was the screenwriting lecture given by Alex Epstein. He outlined some ways to get your audience to be emotionally invested in your narrative and expressed the importance of a "pull" narrative as opposed to a "push" narrative. In a "pull" narrative, the audience asks questions and wonders about what will happen before it does, whereas a "push" narrative simply gives the audience things without any build-up. On the other hand, there was a lecture that I went to that turned out to be a pitch for a funding company, so I ducked out when the lecturer turned to get her laptop. All in all, I had a great time and am looking forward to attending again.

Week 6 - Titles Are Hard To Come Up With

This week we had the best GDW session ever, which was fairly easy to top, but nonetheless was nice. That being said, it involved us being trapped naked in a medieval prison cell, our only hope of escape being two years of dried urine (or so we came up with). In terms of work, I got my model UV mapped fairly quickly and to an acceptable level of quality, meaning that my time spent brooding in the sterile grey shadow of Maya was, at the very least, minimal (for this week). Project management was as confusing as ever, leading to us accidentally doing our next due assignment on top of what we handed in on Tuesday. I got a 70 on my astronomy midterm, meaning that I probably know more about the rest of the universe combined than I do about my major (yay..?).

On a positive note, I've done a lot of independent writing lately, so hopefully I'll collect a few email addresses at MIGS so I can start sending out for some work.

On a less positive note, I've started playing Dark Souls and am more confused as to what is driving me to continue than ever before. After getting through its predecessor, Demon's Souls, without much trouble, I'm stunned at just how little progress I've been able to make. The game is emotionally devestating to play, every crushing defeat chipping away at my faith in humanity, for why would a human being with any love for his fellow man do this to me? And yet, every single time, I dust myself off and head back out to face the openly malicious 1s and 0s that so happyily stomped on my face mere seconds ago. But you can't stop, because every time you get sent back to the beginning you get just a little bit better. The monsters never change their starting positions so once you've played through a section 80 times (and you will), you not only know how and when to dispatch what lies before you, but also what enemies to avoid completely, giving you an ounce more of a chance to make it through....to the boss section that will flatten you.

Week 4 - Dear Maya

What happened to us, Maya? We used to be close. First when we met, you showed me all the cool crap you could do and I thought you were like Flash on some sort of computer based steroid. Even when you showed that you weren't the most reliable one in the world I looked the other way. I thought, "Hey, I too sometimes quit working for no good reason, this could be the beginning of something beautiful." Now look at us, squabbling over what you will and won't do peacefully. I feel like I have to constantly be on my guard with you. I do the same things that I've done a thousand times before without hassle and all of a sudden you throw a fit and refuse to move. Acting a tad childish, aren't we? I don't think that I can live like this anymore...It's a shame, look at what we managed to come up with when you'd co-operate.

Do you see that? That's a connection. Crashing in the middle of a vertex drag and making me lose all my work? That's not love. Goodbye Maya, I'll remember the hours we spent together the next time I hurl my mouse across the room in frustration.

Love

Your Friend

Best Wishes

From,

Ryan

So yea, that's what I've accomplished this week, along with some things for my elective classes. I'll be starting my game engine homework tomorrow after I get my astronomy assignment done, here's hoping that next weeks blog isn't titled "Dear WildMagic++"

Week 3 – Maya Head Hurts

                This week had been dominated by two assignments. The first assignment we completed was project management, in which we had to come up with three separate projects, one being our game, and then support why we would develop our game over the other two ideas. We came up with a completely over-blown MMO, a text game for the kindle (which I think is a great idea, but we had to make it seem bad for the sake of the work), and our game. We then filled out our project’s charter, and the projected financial information for the project over the entire semester.

                The second assignment is the modeling of our designed character in Maya. This project has been a trial, as my Maya experience was pretty limited when I began. As I’ve worked on my character, I have become much more proficient with the tool, but the time spent floundering with the different functions and controls have hindered my progress somewhat. What 15 hours of modeling time has yielded is….unfortunate, but I’ve since sped up after learning some hotkeys and shortcuts. All I have left to do is the head; I’ll post a render once I’ve finished.

Week 2 - The Tale of Another Nameless Protagonist

I’ve had yet another busy and productive week. Mid last week I finished my 3 pose drawing of the female main character for Pivotal, as seen below, as well as a few brief paragraphs detailing her backstory. From there, the group discussed what kind of mechanic s should be featured in our game, and how the basic structure of each puzzle should be designed. We all had our own opinions as to what the game should include, so we tasked ourselves with coming up with a few puzzle designs each for GDW.

 I was surprised how quickly I was able to come up with some ideas, but their more realised designs took time. For example, the third puzzle was particularly tricky because I had to work backwards, determining each block’s end position first to guarantee that a solution was possible. Looking back I wish I had planned out my first puzzle a little better, as there was no room to write the step-by-step instructions on how to solve it, and certain elements seemed superfluous in the later stages of its design. The second puzzle is probably my favourite, as the spinning blade should show off the game’s 3D capabilities, but I also like how there is a quicker solution to puzzle 3 if the player can figure it out.

I also began to model my character, though the process is slow going. I think I may have made my design slightly too detailed, and it’s impeding my progress. I think it has potential to look good when it’s done though, so I’m pressing on.

Samples

The following is the character background I provided for the female main.

The female main character of our game is a nameless protagonist, to suit her role. She is a factory worker at a plant located near her hometown, a small, dirty place made of iron and cobblestone. Like the never changing tide, its generations come and go, all seeking refuge from poverty under the unforgiving weight of the metal press. She has been beaten down by reality, her mind growing stagnant from the monotony of everyday life at the factory. The factory itself produces metal. It’s hot and humid during the day as the bodies within struggle to quench the world’s never-ending thirst for gears, piping and bullets, and bitterly cold at night, as the wind moans through the empty, iron halls.

The main character is 25, though her birthday hasn’t been acknowledged, much less celebrated, since the stress of their lives took her parents from her; her only family. Her childhood was a modest one, spending her days playing with the other local children and seizing any sort of education she could out of her father’s collection of books. She enjoys bright flowers, pale-blue brooklimes mostly, the colour of her late mother’s eyes, and her favourite treats are the tiny chocolate cakes sold just down the street from her home. But above all else, she values fresh air and sunshine, a luxury not oft afforded to those who toil in the factory to earn their keep. She’s shy, keeping to herself mostly, although some days that’s more from lack of amiable company.  Having succumbed to her fate, and knowing little of the world outside her own, her ambitions are mostly day to day. Her dreams are of short, quiet days where she can relax and be happy, as opposed to seeking the now forgotten freedom that she once craved.

Pictured below is the completed 3 pose picture of the female main character.

Week 1 - It Begins...Again

                We’ve had quite a productive week to start off our new project. We assimilated into a group early into the first full day of classes and immediately begun working on an outline for our game. We quickly settled on a horror/steam-punk aesthetic and a gravity based puzzle-platformer with Metroid style exploration elements. With the huge influx of ideas coming from all members, the scope of the project seemed unlikely to succeed. This in mind, we reined ourselves back and took an objective look at what we wanted to accomplish in the given time frame, and decided to cut a few features right off the bat to avoid spreading ourselves too thin. We left our first meeting satisfied that we’d created an accomplishable framework for a game we could be proud of.

                The next day, our team grew with the inclusion of Mario, and another meeting was imminent. With the inclusion of another talented programmer, we were able to re-include some of the previously cut aspects of our design, as well as rework some of the mechanics that we were less enthusiastic about. Our scope reached its zenith, but we realised what needed to be done in order to succeed. We declared then that we would push anything deemed to be “frill” momentarily to the side and focus on getting a solid base of functioning mechanics working first. We felt that this would give us the strongest possible start, and the best chance at achieving our ultimate goal. At the end of the meeting we convened to come up with a name for both our game and our group as a whole. For our group, we decided on proTesters, and for our game we went with Pivotal. The game’s logo will emphasise the word “pivot” in the title, as most of our puzzles will be based on the gravity and physics capable through Havok.

                As it stands, our game is about a worker who has fallen into a rotating factory. In order to escape, they must solve a series of puzzles in order to find the machine parts necessary to rotate the factory 180 degrees, at which point they can fall out of the hole from which they entered.  We will focus on instilling a sense of fear and isolation while presenting our chosen theme, despair. As the game progresses, our main character slowly begins to feel the intensity and hopelessness of their situation, and descends into madness. Apparitions and figments of their imagination plague them as they struggle through the torturous factory, transfiguring into horrendous beings as the main character’s mind erodes.

                For our first assignment, we were tasked with designing a character that would eventually be modeled for our final product. We had to draw the character in the traditional “T” pose from the front, side, and top orientations. Along with this, we had to include at least 10 images that were used as inspiration for our design, as well as a couple of paragraphs describing the character (things that could not be represented visually). The following images are what we came up with, along with some preliminary drawings.