Extra hours Pt.2 "Northumbria Water"

In my group we have me, Tawhid and Davey. We are working on a game  for Northumbria Water which needs to be designed to help their employees delight their customers. So we have decided on making a game where you are sent out to a customers house because their water has stopped working. a big screen will pop up with lots of pieces of pipe in a square grid with the water supply in the top left and the customers water pipe in the bottom right, you will have to rotate the pipes until there is a path made for the water from the top to the bottom without any gaps then you will win and the customer will be happy.
It is still in early development so it hasn't beem fleshed out completely but I'm thinking about making it a cartoon style so it appeals to all workers, is easier to make concepts for (as it is Davey's favourite style) and allows for more creative ways to use the visuals.
              Davey is going to work on the concept art and is currently designing the pipes that will rotate and guide the water in the end game.
           

I'm thinking of calling it pressure pipes as there will be a timer so you get different customer satisfaction levels as in poor, average, good, excellent depending on how fast you are.
                   This will allow me to have a highscore board that has the person at the top of the scoreboard on a yellow star that stays star employee.








This will be reset everyday so everyone can has a chance to get it and could lead to some friendly office competition.
The competition also leads to getting a year contract with them worth up to £38,000!!!

Group game work

In "The Motherland" team game that I'm helping to make I have contributed with some code for a flickering light in the game it was hard to find but i got it in the end so here:

I am really weak on my coding skills so to improve I am going to give it a go on a solo project game but for now I am going to just work on models and texturing for my group game while i self learn at home.

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Extra hours Pt.1 "Data Movement"

I have entered a competition to create a travel app for Data Movement called "Busy Buses" the first part of the competition is just the idea so i tried to explain mine the best i could below:

The people who come first, second and third place receive £5,000 each! and are moved onto the second part of the competition which is to create your app for real with some help from people at Data Movement then put it on the app store.

              The thought of having a chance with a big company like that brings a smile to my face as i'll be able to learn so much from them as well as earning some serious money in the process, can't wait for December 31st when they will choose the winners. If your reading this and have entered I say good luck and have fun.

Gaming VFX and Animation

VFX industry
The VFX industry is booming at the moment and I have been reading into the Warcraft movie they are creating a 3D epic movie based on Blizzards behemoth of a game World of Warcraft. seeing as it's converting from video game to the big screen it is going to be heavily SFX and animation  which gives me an in depth view into the industry which I am seriously thinking of pursuing a career in as it seems so vast and interesting. Legendary Pictures and Universal pictures are producing it with Duncan Jones directing and have released some great screenshots that really show the detail and SFX components behind the motion picture:

Games Industry
This year some great games are being released such as Fallout 4, Halo5,  and the one and only Star Wars Battlefront. Before I would look at these games and only take in the gameplay and how smooth it played etc. but now after seeing how complicated basic code can get it's mind boggling trying to think of all the lines of code in Fallout 4 for instance, and helps me appreciate the developers more, seeing how much time and effort is spent with each great release. It also made me realise how vital VFX and animation are in gaming:

Animation Industry

I have been watching The Simpsons for as long as i can remember but recently i have been binge watching the series, this has given me a detailed view of how animation has changed over the years. You see as the image becomes sharper and the movements of the characters more fluid, You also see more complexity in the animations and a LOT more detail:

Democracy

Democracy

Democracy, or democratic government, is "a system of government in which all the people of a state are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assembly," as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary.






My view on democracy is that it is vital in society if we want to make change for the better because it shows the majorities opinions and views. It does not always work as a lot of people don't vote and the political parties deceive the people sometimes with empty promises and poor planning. So it is broken in some places but democracy is the fairest system to elect people to speak for the people.

Although some people are not happy about who is elected it is about the majority vote, and the needs of the many against the needs of the few.

The EA Pitch - The Motherland

Stephen Hey came in to give us a talk on his role in the games industry and how he had been an influence in EA for marketing and advertising.
          He explained how he had just started out small in a company called OCEAN software which worked on the hugely successful Worms game. He carried on working there until he left and joined EA.
       He explained how there were game genres on the phone such as: core, Casual arcade/Puzzle, building/harvest, casino and racing games, and how players are categorized into these as such.

After the talk we were ready to showcase our games, we stepped up to the front, one group at a time and tried to sell our games to Stephen. We were last, so the nervous feeling was building for us after seeing all the great games before us.

         When we finally went up, the presentation was a great success, my group all clearly conveyed "The Motherland" and did a great job, my role was to talk about the story, character and what the game was about. When we had sat back down Stephen went over our presentation with us and gave us advice on pitching, telling us where our presentation was fluent and well executed and where we needed improvement.

I thoroughly enjoyed having Stephen at our college and hope he visits again as i found his talk fascinating giving me an insight into what my future job may be like. 

Roles in the Games Industry

Creative Director

 The Creative Director is a fairly new role in the games industry and it is ensuring the quality and style of the artwork, music and gameplay within a game. Not all companies have a Creative Director so they share out the responsibilities to the Lead Programmer, Lead Artist and Producer.

 If you are to be a games Creative Director you have to be able to inspire artists, programmers, producers and marketing staff to create the best quality game that they can. You will have to decide how the game feels and looks and also understand that there is a limit and to work inside a budget. To also look at the bigger picture in game development and really have a passion for playing games as well as recognize what is appealing to different audiences. You must own an amazing sense of creativity, imagination and have a good puzzle-making ability  in which you can apply to the game and have excellent communication and presentation skills to convey your ideas and sway people to decide to make your game.      

A creative director is not an entry-level route, you will usually need around 5 years experience in a senior game development position to even be considered for the job, or you could acquire a similar job in special effects or animation to move up to creative director which gives you time to form links and contacts in the industries. Some more well known creative directors are:Peter Molyneux, Neil Druckmann and  Shigeru Miyamoto responsible 

for such games as fable, The Last of Us and The Legend of Zelda.

The average pay can range anything from £48,000 a year to £73,000 depending on the company so it is a very well paid

job and is rewarding in the sense that you can make something that can stir feelings in someone or keep them engrossed for hours at a time.

Examples of Creative Director job advertisements:

  

Coding with Ant

did some more coding with Ant showing us how to organize our code and make it easier to read and detect errors, we were taught some code through the legendary game pong, starting out small we pieced together the game until it was complete:

                                                                         

i can use the code here to make games such as platformers and click an point games.

3DS Max just starting

I was assigned models to design in my sub group group 2 in which I have designed scrap metal:

i used a multitude of cylinders and boxes to create the scrap metal i used extruding to create the indented sheet metal, i have also created a box of cleaning products:

as im newer to 3DS max i took on the easier models such as this and a tobacco box:

these models lay the foundations for my skill in 3DS max so i can go on to create more intricate models. we havent textured them yet as we are being taught that very soon  in which i will upload the finished models.

starting with the basics - walls

in the last lesson we learned to make wall segments these are the base for pretty much any game so are vital to make.

 we then assigned ourselves models to create in our groups, seeing as I'm quite new to mia and 3d max so i took on more simple models such as a table, cleaning product box and tobacco box.

basic coding to animation to level design : long day

Have been working on basic coding with the class to produce trees, sky and floor. as I have done coding before it was familiar to grasp.

we have started simple but we will move onto more complex things such as designing a level using only code.

the end product of the code:

I also finished my self portrait on flash I used only the paintbrush and fill tools and am very pleased with the end result:

i used a picture of myself as inspiration for the portrait as it would be a lot harder to draw myself from memory.

in the afternoon we were left to create a mood board in our group with no help, it started with mass confusion as we felt we had been thrown in at the deep end and we made slow progress but eventually we got ourselves sorted and realised that structure is key and having set targets.

we sorted ourselves into 4 groups to make 4 mood boards in which we eliminated the useless images to show only the most useful ones. we then came up with ideas for our futuristic street such as what shops to have in it, we brainstormed then gave each group a set shop to design, in my group we each designed a fruit shop and then only used the best qualities from all our work to create the perfect one.

This is my idea in which many aspects were used in the final idea:

The final design was:

all in all i felt i had learned alot and started to understand how to work in a huge team.

environments to create

Today we have been brainstorming ideas on environments I came up with medieval interiors to pitch as there are many interesting things within it such as in a ruins there would be smashed and broken items with cracks of light shining in to create some great effects.

We took a vote and the most popular was futuristic city so we did some research on these Futuristic themed cities to get a better idea of the environments we are designing:

Focusing a lot on the neon blue .

My personal favourite.

maybe a bit dark.

I like the idea of a giant spaceship or maybe another city on top of the city.

maybe need a bit more range of colours other than blue.

coding myself

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working in a group with other game designers. In this group I was picked to do the coding, seeing as I had little to no knowledge on coding I decided to watch some how-to videos on youtube and started to learn.
           after a couple of days I had a better feel for coding and started learning the different codes for gamemaker studio, the index was a lot of help.
           I have learnt to code movement, 1 way platforms, shooting, enemies and enemy behaviour as well as using portals and physics.