Man, third quarter has been a drag. The good news is it's almost over, finally. I feel like almost nothing new has happened but we did get into lighting. I thought it'd be easy but for some reason I keep messing it up. This should be really simple, so why am I struggling? Still, it's definitely far from the hardest unit we've done. You know, all this 3Ds Max work is really making me wonder what game design is going to be like. I would've thought that we'd be making 2D games first, because I'd imagine those are much easier to make as well as program, design, and create art for. If we're doing all this work in 3Ds Max then maybe it will all be 3D? That would be a complete pain, so let's hope not. But if it really is going t start off 2D, then what's with this formatting? In fact, why did we even have to get through digital design at all? I can't imagine using Photoshop very often in a game unless you're going for an incredibly weird art style. Heck, I don't even think Illustrator would be used that much. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking. I'm not complaining at all, I'm glad I learned those skills and it was a fun class, but how exactly does it relate. I mean, yeah, they both use computers, but they should really be separate. Anyways, that's enough rambling for one post. Cole out.
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I've been using Adobe Illustrator to create playing cards for a game I came up with. Using Illustrator is a breeze after our lessons, the real challenge was designing the cards. First I made the card outlines by taking a rectangle and rounding the edges. Then I established an area at the top with a line and larger font for the name. Then I put several multicolored circles in the remaining area for stats (pink underneath the name for health, red for attack, purple for intelligence, and blue for persuasion and dedication). Leftover white space can be used for a picture. For the back I kept the area at the top for name. Underneath that is a large area for abilities. The triangles that meet in the middle were created by the line tool and contain a list of allies and enemies. The area below the triangles is used for drawing from a deck holder so that it doesn't reveal the card before it is drawn.
I think it's pretty obvious what this drawing is supposed to represent. I'm not invested at all in politics or anything like that. I can say however that people started acting stupid as soon as they could. I am absolutely sick (no pun intended) of people being stupid. Argument after argument, contamination, its an endless cycle of terrible ideas and dumb suggestions. All this panic over something that's probably going to be forgotten within the next ten years. It wasn't the deadliest outbreak or the scariest, it was just another blip in history where an outbreak happened.
So we've got the basics of animation down, although I still have no idea how most of animate works and it seems very janky. This new idle animations project is very exciting for me. Finally we're doing something related to video games and its character based. But I have no idea what software I'm going to use. I still think that Illustrator isn't an effective arts tool (or I'm just bad at it), Animate is new grounds that I haven't fully mastered yet, and Photoshop is frame by frame. Not to mention the pens are still not quite registering with my brain. I think the problem is the pads, they're too big and don't fit anywhere on the desk. I don't even know if smaller pads exist though. Maybe digital art will never be my forte, or normal art for that matter. It feels like I'm getting worse at drawing rather than better.
Mr. B certainly set us up for this one. Our first animation project was the most annoying thing I've done all year. I can't imagine the people back in days of yore to put so much effort into something so unimpressive and bland. No offense to the classic Disney movies but they are the most basic, bland films. Watching Cinderalla nowadays is like putting on an hour of static. Luckily, this last project was much more engaging. I'm still looking forward to making something more advanced, but knowing this class, it's probably going to feel like less of a milestone and more like a curb stomp.
In game industry news I've been looking into uses of motivation in video games. That's probably not very interesting, but I think it's fascinating how incredibly bad the triple-A developers can screw up their new titles. Motivation is the only reason people play video games, so if you mess that up then you should probably quit your day job. One of the most notable uses of motivation is a nice little sound effect everytime you do something exceptional. A good example of this is getting a coin in Mario. A bad example of this is pretty much any game that uses a voice line instead. Even if you have multiple voice lines for things like this they are very likely to be repeated and players will absolutely hate it. I felt like my last month of school has been way too controlled. I finished everything so fast I thought for sure that I'd messed something up. But everything seemed to be fine. I had an entire week to chill. I worked on extra work and work from other classes but I still had plenty of time left over. I hate to jinx myself, but I think I've gotten the hang of this. I really disliked Adobe Illustrator when I started but it has a simplicity to it that I can't deny. Now that we're moving to animation, I'm pretty sure the struggle will resume in full force.
In the games industry, the hype for next year is boosted to an all time high while people have pretty much completely forgotten the games of this year. It makes me sad that the games that were so popular in the last couple years were uber simplistic and completely multiplayer, meaning that when they fade away they won't be playable anymore. This was the first year that a Star Wars video game came out and not only was it leagues better than the last two but people didn't care anyway. What a sad year in the games industry. Vector graphics could be extremely useful. I think they could be used for logos, storyboards, graphs, basic outlines for things like comics or menus, or even simple animations. I wonder if you could make convincing professional illustrations. Despite it's uses I feel like I don't see many things that could be designed by vectors but maybe the people who use it make extremely complex graphics. Or maybe I'm just being ignorant from my lack of experience. Personally I prefer vector graphics, but I have only had limited experience with it and I do not know the full extent to which it could be used. I prefer style over substance and, unlike bitmap, vector graphics could certainly be used to make interesting and stylistic graphics. One thing I can not deny is that the complexity that I found annoying and perplexing with bitmaps makes it easier to control and offers more variety with how you create and manipulate objects. Perhaps we should have started with vector graphics since, at least currently, they seem simpler and easier to understand. If we had started with vectors maybe bitmaps would have been less perplexing to new users. I don't know what much else we can do with vector graphics. It seems that their usefulness ends with simple graphics that are only useful in prototypes or things that won't be seen by many (unless it's logos). It may be a necessary step in learning how to illustrate things digitally but I can't imagine it taking up an entire unit.
Layering may not be my strong suit but I'm really enjoying coloring and blending. Something about it makes it easy to use and accessible. I've never liked coloring in real life; it's too easy to mess up and I'm no good at it. But colorization in Photoshop practically does itself.
In my opinion the game industry will always be the most creative and expressive medium. All movies coming out these days are sequels, reboots, or something based off of a preexisting property. With games though your property has to be original or creative to stand out. The consumers are slowly edging away from the endless first/third person shooters that come out and realizing that games should be something new and fresh. Not to mention the accessibility it has over other forms of media. Unlike the other popular easy to access market, social media, games are less likely to be judged on popularity, creator's attractiveness, or background. Game critics are unforgiving and aware of the medium and how it works, to the extent that critics who are basing their reviews off of popularity are quickly pointed out and collectively ignored. In the past month we've been working in Photoshop and it's been tough. Due to my absence in the past week I've been pretty behind on all my work. But all that aside I don't really enjoy Photoshop. I find that when I work on something I prefer to have something that's a little versatile. That's not the software's fault though, I've only ever seen it used in one way.
To me Photoshop's reliance on a preexisting photo makes it stifling and limited. But that's the whole point of it: to edit photos. It also doesn't help that I don't take a particular interest in photo editing. I found that the coloration parts of the projects are easy but the cropping never seems to work out for me. It's also very time consuming. Sometimes it feels like I walk into class, hit start, and then the bell rings. One thing I can certainly appreciate is Photoshop's simplicity. None of it is difficult but it takes getting used to and a little teaching. This week has been a nightmare with all the work to do, but Photoshop wasn't so bad of a thing to return to, especially considering how much work I had to do in other classes. I hope that the other software we'll work with in this class will be as easy to learn and use. In conclusion, despite not enjoying my experience with Photoshop I hope the other things we work on in class will have it's user interface. |
Cole ThomasInto video games and the likes. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools. Archives
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