Over the past week iv not really had the time to do much in the way of learning or improving my skills due to work commitments. I have however finished building my first website for someone. I hope to have this site published later this week.
I’m quite proud of the website, it is by no means perfect and will continually be refined as my skills improve, but I didn’t use any templates and started from scratch.
Web design was always, to me anyway, a scary prospect. I always assumed that to design a website you needed to be an expert in HTML to make things happen. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
The package I used was Serif Webplus X7. It’s easy to pick up and allows you to do lots of cool things without the need for any HTML input at all. As my skills progress I can use HTML within the package to improve and refine anything.
Once the website is up and running I will post a link to it for anyone who wants to go have a look for themselves. also for anyone interested in web design Serif do have a free starter edition of Webplus which you can download and play with.
This week I’m concentrating in Unity and learning how to use that so I’ll let you know how I’m doing next week.
Gone but not forgotten (honest)
It’s been a while since my last post and in that time I have left college and started working full time (sadly not within the games industry). Over the past few months iv barely had time to switch my laptop on never mind program a game.
Now though I have set myself a timetable to allow me to brush up on various skills and to learn some new ones. Once my skills are at a sufficient level (i.e. I’m happy with them) I intend to start looking into freelance work under my “WinterKnight” banner.
I will be posting every week with updates on my progress as well as plans for the future or with any interesting info from the games world. It’s good to be back 🙂
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming…..
As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the classes I have this semester in college is a graded unit. This involves working with some classmates to design and create a game from scratch. I’ve already written about the problems with working in a team so I won’t go into that too much. My role in the team is that of the mighty programmer (a bit like the mighty Thor but with less thunder and hair), and when coming up with the design of the game I had a lot of input as to what we could and could not put into the game based on my skill level as a coder. This made me think about whether or not, in the real world, game programmers have any input into the design of a game and if so, how much?
Now obviously a lead programmer at a big studio like Ubisoft or Activision will be pretty well versed in most areas of coding. Even if he or she isn’t that strong on a particular area then I’m sure one of the many underlings at their disposal will be. But what about a smaller Independent studio, where there is maybe only two or three coders? Do they get to say “no can’t do that”, because it is perhaps a weak area for them.
For example, our game is a commonwealth games themed game. The idea is to have a main hub where you can move your character to one of four sports to play.
When choosing which sports to include is where I had most of my input. I had to say yes or no based on whether or not I thought I could program it. This, then, limited which sports we could choose from, as well as what else we could do in the game.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m always ambitious with my course work (sometimes overly so), and this time is no different. There are things going into the game which I have no idea how to program, but if these things where left out, the game would be nowhere near as good as it will be with them in. If the game sucks or things don’t work properly it certainly won’t be for a lack of trying and, at the end of the day I will shoulder the blame for that because I had input into the design and still said “ok let’s try it”.
This leads me back to how much input professional programmers have at the design stage.
There are more than a few games out there, for every platform, which have ‘dumb A.I’ or features which don’t live up to their full potential (I’m currently playing Remember Me on the Xbox360 and that game is full of missed opportunities). Are these caused by time constraints, by the designers asking the coders to do something which is beyond their skill level or simply by a coding team saying ok ands over reaching?
It is rare to read an interview, on a gaming website or in a magazine, with a programmer and, even when you do, these questions don’t get asked but the next time I meet a programmer or designer I will be asking these same questions. I’ll let you know what they say.
The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited – Stephen King
Today in college I started to think about what I want to do for my 3D level editing class, and this started me thinking about how people come up with ideas for things.
Before I started my this course, I didn’t really have that many ideas for games. Maybe that’s because I didn’t really think about it all that much, but I did often wonder where game designers, scriptwriters and authors got their ideas from.
Since starting this course I have had to come up with a few ideas of my own. At first I struggled to come up with anything. Looking back, I think this was because I was trying too hard to find the tiniest hint of an idea. What I have found is; don’t think about it. I know this might sound stupid, but, the best ideas I’ve had have come from seeds planted when I’ve been chilled out reading a book, watching TV or even playing other games. My theory on the matter is that your brain knows you are looking for something and starts to store little things from everything you do, see or hear. It saves all these little kernels of inspiration for a time when you, consciously or sub-consciously, think about it.
For me, I’ve discovered, it’s not just game ideas. I recently started writing down an outline of an idea I had for a game, even going so far as to make a teaser trailer using Blender, only to decide that, while it would make a pretty good game, it would make a much better novel. (in fact I’m trying to convince my wife, who’s a journalist, to write it. I’ll put a link to her blog at the end and you can pester her for me 🙂 )
If inspiration is something you are lacking, the only advice I can really give you is this; vary what you watch, read or listen to. I’ve found inspiration in places ranging from Die Hard to The Great Gatsby (the book not the film). The broader the spectrum of things you expose yourself to, the more varied your ideas will be.
Another thing I like to do if I have some random, incoherent ideas floating around, is to bounce them off of other people. And not just other gamers or creative people, sometimes it’s the person with absolutely no ideas about or interest in your chosen medium, who has the best suggestions on how to improve your concept.
One final piece of wisdom I can impart is this; now I know how my favourite authors and film makers came up with their ideas I can safely there are no original ideas left……. I hope I’m wrong
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There is no I in team (but there is a ME)
One of the classes I have, this semester of college, is a graded unit. This runs alongside a class on working as part of a team. These classes involve getting a team together, assigning roles and creating a game, from scratch, revolving around a particular subject matter (this year’s subject is the commonwealth games). For this unit the college partners up with a local primary school where some of the pupils act as our clients.
The point of this class is 2 fold. One, to evaluate how well we work together with little or no direction and two, to give us a rough idea of what it will be like when we join a games studio. Now that’s all very well and good, however, over the 4 weeks we have been doing this class, it has become clear to me that I really need to work on my teamwork skills.
Don’t get me wrong , it’s not that I don’t play well with others (I play team sports), the problem I have is finding a way to get my ideas / point across without looking like I’m trying to take control. This is most likely due to me wanting to get a good grade and I feel slightly uncomfortable with the fact that the actions of other members of the team can affect that.
The same can be said for working in a games studio. The success of a game depends on a number of different factors, some of which are out with the developers control, but how good the game actually is depends on every member of the development team doing their job to the best of their abilities. This again makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. It’s for this reason that I, one day, want to set up my own studio.
In the mean time however, I will just need to do my job as best I can and help out in other areas of the team when its needed……I’ll let you know how I get on.
Blenders next top model
It’s been a while since my last post and this is mainly because of the topic of this blog; 3D modelling and animation. One of my classes at college is 3D animation and the assessment for this class was to make a 30 second teaser trailer for a game using Blender. That’s fine you may think, however for the past few years the college hasn’t taught blender for its animation class but instead has used another program called Anim8or. This ment that our lecturers where having to learn how to use the software at the same time as us, the students.
So let’s fast forward a couple of months to the animation and the software itself. Blender, as a program, is deceptively simple to use. It contains just about every feature you will find on any autodesk product but when using it you have a choice of different rendering engines. This is where the problems arise. There are certain things, smoke particles for example, which work in one engine but not the other. So a lot of forward planning is needed before starting a project. Most of what I learned to do with blender was through YouTube tutorials. If you are looking to learn blender I would recommend following the videos uploaded by Andrew Price and stick with it. As I said in an earlier post about programming, repetition is the key to mastering this software. Just like the show on which the title of this blog is based, there will be tears, there will be laughter but in the end you will have a top model
Single white grunt
Ever since characters in video games began to have a recognised gender there has been a debate about sexism in games, due to the lack of strong female characters. Over time this has begun to be addressed with game such as Bayonetta, the reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise and Beyond: Two Souls.
There is, however, an area which still needs to be addressed and that is the lack of strong gay characters in games. Most characters who are depicted as gay are either stereotypes used for comic effect or are treated with hatred within the game narrative as if homosexuality is somehow wrong. Now don’t get me wrong there are some games out there which treat homosexual characters the same as any other character which, in a time of legalised gay marriage, is as it should be. There are even games such as Fable or Mass Effect which allow the player to create a character of either gender and have relationships with Non-Playable Characters of the same sex (Fable even allows you to marry them).
When I decided to write a post about this subject it got me trying to think about this from a designers and a coders point of view. From a coders point of view it makes no difference what a characters sexual orientation is, they would be coded exactly the same, but from a designers point of view there are a few things to take into consideration.
The first thing is something I’ve been guilty of when designing games for my course work, and that is focusing more on the features and story of a game than the characters so, when the time comes to create your characters (especially player characters) it’s easier and quicker to go with a stereotypical muscle bound hero.
The next thing to consider is the people buying and playing the game. One of the reasons people enjoy games is it gives them an escape from reality. Games allow people to immerse themselves in another reality and be someone else for a few hours. Sometimes it is easier for a designer to give the player a blank canvas to imprint their own personality onto than it is to create a character with an original personality or beliefs, or a character who, for example, is gay. In my opinion sometimes designers worry that a game won’t sell because the people buying it would struggle with playing as a gay character or a female character and this leads to a lack of both.
Hollywood doesn’t help either. Go to the cinema on any given week and 99% of the protagonists are heterosexual males fighting to avenge their wife/girlfriend/country/ planet (delete as appropriate). This has lead to a certain expectation in society of what a hero should be.
I, myself, am a heterosexual married man, with many friends who are gay, and certainly wouldn’t feel uncomfortable playing as a gay character or allow the fact to put me off buying a game. That, however, is just my personal opinion but I think that as homosexuality is becoming more accepted around the world designers and developers need to broaden the range of characters in their games.
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If you want to read a bit more about sexism in games then check out the link below:http://idealisticjournalisttobe.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/female-leads-can-kick-ass/
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Rinse and repeat
So after doing some coding for my course work over the past couple of days I have realised that when learning to program, like learning any language I suppose, repetition is the key.
As part of the course I have to make clones of 3 classic games; pong, breakout and space invaders. In writing the code for these I have found that large sections of the code can be re-used in each game. This is a good thing, it means that learning the correct syntax and commands happen as you create the games instead of just writing the same lines over an over like you would when learning a foreign language.
I know this revelation might seem obvious to some but it’s not until actually doing it and then taking a step back that it has became obvious to me.
On a completely different note I was sent the link to quite an interesting article on games and capitalism (link below).
About the author…..
Just a wee bit about me and what ill mostly be writing about. First my name is Nick Farman and im currently studying an HNC in computer games development at west college Scotland in paisley (that’s near Glasgow for anyone who doesn’t know).
After attending lecture on getting a career as a programmer in the games industry today it was recommended that I blog as much as I can about things I find interesting (particularly programming) and tweet, answer questions, comment on posts etc to get my name out there to help build a profile. This will be what most of my posts will be about however iwill also be posting about my progression through college and then university and any projects I do on my own.
Also if you have any interest in programming for games then I would recommend you follow andrewfray.wordpress.com who gave the lecture I attended.
And if you have an interest in journalism then follow idealisticjournalisttobe.wordpress.com (shes my better half)
nickfarman 