Year 2 & 3 Presentations

I liked watching the year 2 and 3 presentations. First off the year 2 presentations, straight away they all made an immediate impact on what is expected of us on the 2^nd year of the course. The quality of the 3D work produced was amazing; at the moment I’m not as good as what the 2^nd years produced but not far behind! So far I’ve built up a good library of the basic skills, but if I am to become better I need to work more and they showed how much you need to work in order to become better. It was the sight of actually seeing these fully playable levels right in front of me first hand which made it more exciting to watch. They all explained about how they went about coming up with the ideas for the Queens building project. They went around taking photographs first which is self explanatory why but I liked how they used these images to create some concept work of how the final thing may look and each part of the level will look like. Actually being there and seeing this done first hand was very interesting, I’ve seen videos of old games that I like and how they went about creating the concept work and making variations of what scenes may look like in day and night etc and how what levels may look like once they finished, but never have I once seen it being produced and sitting around the labs, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of it but to see it actually work was awesome!

I know that working as a team isn’t easy; it may think it looks easy but trying to keep everyone happy in which no one is doing all the work sure isn’t, I’ve even seen arguments around the labs because of occurring problems. Thing is, I think it’s a lot more like designing a game; you don’t just have one designers but a few or LOTS! You’ll find it better to pool together all your ideas and then form that pick out what you all like and will work and what you don’t like and may not work, it’s like deciding on what people think maybe a risk and what they think may not be because it’ll come good, or at least is should come good...

Communication is key, obviously, staying in contact, knowing who is doing what and when it must be done by and just generally keeping it all in order managing your time you have. If one thing isn’t done it can and will throw the whole thing out of place and require you to re-do the whole time planning process which should be done at the start so it’s kind of having a step back to the beginning before you can continue again.

The year 3 presentation we’re even better than what we saw in the year 2 presentations, the thing is just because you’re in year 3 doesn’t make you better than anyone in year 2, even first years have gotten comments from third years on how good their work is, but to me in Art there’s really no right or wrong answer, you’ve got to be creative and just create things how you see them and then create the image in your mind of how you see your concept working out? I think the biggest impact of seeing the year 3 work was the fact that they was making work that I'd consider better than the year 2 work but there is only one person doing the job.

There work was stunning, everything right to the last detail, but the thing was that everyone wasn’t going for same style, in year 3 it looks as if you get to chose what you want to go for, meaning you don’t have to create something realistic just something you would really like to do. You can set your own triangle limit which makes it interesting to model things as well as texturing them I don’t know what my final project in the last year would be, but I know that I’ve got a lot on my plate now before I can start thinking about that.

Finally we talked about how adding things into your levels makes it more rewarding for the player, like adding photo's of your friends faces. Here's a video of how Crash Bandicoot 3 was made, in here they talk about that exact same thing for example when a player dies the animation of the character dying in all kinds of different ways really "softens the blow" as they put it to make losing a life a little more fun. They talk also about how the Art within the game can be changed etc to gain an outcome of how what it may look like when the final thing is finished. They sort of say what target audience they are going for and how really try to engage their audience by taking what they like and challenging them with it.