Homework 7

A written description of what I have done:

I've created a simple animation that shows a refrigerator with a pistol hidden inside, with a functioning fridge door that rotates or opens and closes around its hinge. The doors and racks inside are parented to the body of the refrigerator, and both the fridge and the pistol have been appended into the present file where the animation is applied. The gun has a black metal surface, and the refrigerator is a reflective/mirrored white.

How what you have done fits into the larger picture:

In my team's game, the main first-person character has to explore through an enemy establishment, gun down enemies under the pressure of time, and achieve objectives along the way. Whether it's a reward for exploring beyond the linear pathway or necessary checkpoint to proceed, he's going to need to poke his head into places to see what he finds. A refrigerator is a perfectly reasonable place for a pistol in a building full of baddies.

Link to .blend files used in this animation: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/88kvm1y6ou5cle5/XSaiwPP0aT 

Homework 6

Four each of the four elements of the Tetrad, explain how it is addressed by your game. If one of the four elements is not used, please state this. 

• Aesthetics: Our game's aesthetic is driving towards a fun mash-up of stylized, polyagonal figures and more literally (but still not photoreally) crafted models.
• Gameplay: The gameplay is also a sort of mash-up. It slips between mouse-driven point-and-shoot sequences and keyboard-heavy (and hopefully educational) "hacking" sequences with a terminal.
• Story: The game is fairly story-driven, with the main character (the player) motivated to infiltrate an enemy organization under the direction of his superior officer, so that he might achieve an end goal (could be "save the princess" or "bankrupt the terrorists," not certain that's been settled yet).
• Technology: The technology present in this game is fairly 007-future. Whether you look at it as a single, contemporary company that is more technologically advanced than the rest of the population, or as a 20-years-in-the-future scene where technology is slightly more developed over all, the environment in this game is techhy without breaking into the realm of cyberpunk or retro-future.

Do the four (or less) elements work towards a current theme? 
Why, yes, I think so!

In your own words, describe the meaning of a "theme", and how does it differ from an "experience" (see book for examples in Chapters 2 and 5. 
A "theme" is the overarching idea behind a game; it's the representational metaphor that the game suggests, whether that's "get the block into the cup" or "go on a harrowing, four-year adventure that takes you from small farm boy to world-crushing demigod." An "experience" in a game, then, is how a player interacts with the game; it's the presentation and the interface and the feeling that the player gets from engaging with the game regardless of the specific story.

What is your game's theme? 
A hacker-spy infiltrates an enemy organization, taking down opponents and breaking into secure data.

What are the elements in your game that are meant to reinforce this theme? 
The heavy inclusion of typing in gameplay, the first-person shooting of (dapperly dressed) enemies in gameplay, the heavy-espionage story driving activities, and the bond-esque approach to technology and story.

What is it about your game that you feel makes it special and powerful?
The main character is a solo agent taking on an entire organization with nothing but the instruction of his boss, his guns, and his clever mind. He fills the role of a one-man army on a hero's mission.

Homework 5

What have I done?
I have a character model that (hopefully) will be included in my team's game. The game motions I have applied to him are:

• W moves the character forward 
• A moves the character to his left 
• S moves the character backwards 
• D moves the character to his right 
• Q rotates the character to his left 
• E rotates the character to his right 
• Left arrow turns the character's head to look left 
• Right arrow turns the character's head to look right 
• Down arrow turns the character's head to look down 
• Up arrow turns the character's head to look up 

How will this relate to my game?
Because this game involves first-person navigation, these sorts of motions are going to be very relevant to the main camera's perspective. It will need to be able to travel forwards, backwards, rotate, etc. as the player explores his surroundings.

Homework 4

1. Do you love your project/game. If not, how can that be changed? 
I wouldn't say that I'm in love with our game, but I think that's largely because I'm not completely sure how much my team will be able to actually accomplish with Blender in our time-frame and the whole thing is still pretty amorphous. However, I did get a little excited about the madness-referential character design direction my team might be going in.
2. Does the team as a whole love the project? If not, what can be done? 
I think for the most part, my team feels the same way as I do. We're all fairly comfortable with it, but it hasn't gotten exciting yet.
3. Are the team members communicating with each other?Yes. We speak regularly in class and are setting up e-communication to happen regularly.
4. Does the team have a regular meeting schedule? What is that schedule? 
We're arranging to meet via video conference once a week for an hour, and more or less as needed.
5. Describe the modes of communication between the team members. 
See above.
6. Regarding game documents, what must be remembered while designing your game? 
To communicate well, conform to the task constraints, and stay on time, I think, are all very important to going through this game design process and using our game documents.

Homework 3

     Description of what I have done with Blender

For these models, I've played around with most of the basic tools for manipulating objects. Primarily, the work involved subdivision, extrusion, rotation, duplication, and scale. Happily, I got comfortable with the major keyboard shortcuts (GX, EY, EZ, SX, etc) and found some interface settings that worked well for me in addition to having some things go hilariously wrong with manipulating objects.

     Description of how these objects fit into my team game

Here I made a model of a laptop, a shotgun, and a dummy character. Because my team game is a typing-based FPS that sees an armed main character infiltrate guarded facility and hack into computers to complete a mission, the roles these models could have in the game are fairly straightforward. The dummy, though, is probably not a final version of a character - it follows the stylized, simplified aesthetic I've encouraged my team to lean towards for character design, but in its current incarnation will very possibly be just a placeholder until we finalize a design for the actual characters.

Two Games and an Image

This is Ptolemos. He is a character designed for a game by a friend of mine, who then paid me to paint the dude's face. For those of you who are saying "pix or it didn't happen," I can be seen working on it in the video about my cat. Sillies. If you couldn't guess on your own, Ptolemos is magical.

Games

• This is a simple little game (cute, I thought) where you build your own treehouse.
• This is a sort of farmville-esque game where you build your own resort island and balance profits with expanding your facilities.

Video with Voiceover

This is a short video wherein I tell you about my pet cat, Lily. It's about a minute long and features one non sequitur.
Link to video is here.