Post-Assessment and back to a sane sleeping pattern

Late assessments are never fun. Being surrounded by people telling you tales of horror from their assessments hardly inspires confidence but it went well in the end.

I was told fairly standard stuff to work on:
- Rule of thirds
- Rendering form
- Watch ellipses

But simple things like using a softer pencil and keeping it sharper so started on all that. As for games production the accursed house finally came back to haunt me but once again wasn't as bad as I expected and I'd already being working on the improvements that were suggested. Not a lot more for this really, just to keep it up and keep improving.

And with that all done I look forward to Christmas just for the promise of decent food and sleep, really need to work out a better timetable to get things done.

Virtual Homes from Hell

I’d previously mentioned that 3D studio was being fairly reasonable with me behaviour wise, well for the architectural project it came back with a burning desire to set that straight.

Having circled Birmingham at least twice looking for an interesting subject I discovered one I thought would be perfect out on a green in Bourneville. Fairly small, looked nice and I thought I could work with it, which I could…for a while.

This project basically turned into an n-gon nightmare. Mostly from poor modelling choices on my part but even working through floating polys and shape faces that look like they would be at home in a game of Tetris, 3Ds Max was there to play it’s part too. From crashes that somehow corrupted the file and the backups (twice) to UVs vanishing from the editor completely on hand-in day it really just didn't want to play ball. So not a lot went great with this and with those missing UVs there are parts that aren't textured that needed completely rebuilding which wasn't in the time frame.

But there is good amongst what at the time felt like an endless stream of just plain terrible, I managed to set up a multi-sub object with no trouble and while the n-gons and UVs were an endless toil for this I have gained an improved ability to spot and fix errors but even better, with pointers from the third years and simply not wanting this much trouble again I have a much better grasp on going about the modelling to begin with.

I plan to return to the architectural model at some point to fix it, if anything for my own peace of mind. Though knocking it down and starting from scratch would probably be more productive. 

My Gaming History

My love of games was sparked by a very simple rule of life: My older brother had something so I wanted it.

My introduction to video games involved no actual playing of them for about a year but instead 5 year old me had to sit quietly and watch my brother play on the Playstation One and while his preference was mostly sports and racing games it was sitting there, not actually touching the game (unless he left the room for a moment) that started my love of the series like Tomb Raider and Metal Gear Solid simply because I found these strange cubic attempts at people so engaging even when just watching.

I've never quite panicked so much
as when this whale started chasing me. 

Eventually I was granted permission that I could use my brother’s consoles, usually when he wasn't there to stop me and filled my time with bits and pieces of various games just moving characters and seeing what I could do until I found Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast. Being fairly young, story lines in games like Metal Gear were easily lost on me but I found Sonic easier to engage with and suddenly found myself with a story to follow with levels carrying me to the next step and a thing to work towards. It was probably at this point where the hook really sunk in. 

             

By seven I’d only had my brother’s console to play on but by 2001 by parents realised games tended to keep me quiet and distract me from drawing artwork on the walls, so come Christmas I was gifted my first Gameboy colour and Pokémon Yellow. Pokémon is without a doubt responsible for taking up massive chunks of my life, in the twelve years from 2001 to now and across ten games I've clocked up over 3000 hours of playtime. Despite it rarely changing the game formula the Pokémon series I never fail to enjoy but when I’m asked as I have been many times why I like it so much it’s the one game I don’t actually have an answer for, I just do and it has been the sole reasoning behind me buying consoles twice now, recently with the 3DS and in back in 2004.

After years of opportunistic playtime in 2004 I brought my first gaming console: The Nintendo Gamecube. I put up with a lot of mockery from friends for it but I loved this console, it was small and easy to carry which was handy when I had to move around a lot, Pokémon Colosseum was exclusive to it but more importantly it was mine to play with when I wished. With my Pokémon addiction happily sated I began collecting more games for my new console and found Metroid, Zelda, Resident evil and loads of titles that I love and follow still.

So by 2010 I've amassed every updated handheld console Nintendo has released up to the DS and when you line them up they look like an evolutionary chain. My playable consoles were the PS2 until I took a tumble down some stairs while moving it (I didn't break an arm but I managed to break the console) and the Xbox 360. Over these years my biggest interest in games became story and characters, RPGs were my usual pass time allowing me to imagine and try to create my own individual character within worlds, so Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Dragon age etc.  

I think the thing I love most about games is their potential for interactive storytelling, particularly ones with decision making mechanics. Games engage me more than films since I have a part to play rather than just being along for the ride. I thought that the Mass Effect series did it well, presenting interesting and likable characters and providing reasoning for why you’d want to help them. For me it made the world seem bigger than just the main quest line but as it’s my favorite game I could just be completely bias.

I already tried to sum up best I could but I feel like I could trail on forever on games I've played and games I liked and there would never be a natural stopping point so instead I’ll just slam the breaks right about here. 

The History of Computer Games 50's-70's

It took 130 years to get from the theoretical design of a device to automatically calculate mathematical problems to the first example of modern consoles.

Charles Babbage’s Difference engine was one of the first examples of a computer as well as one of the very first and most certainly not the last, examples of a machine being better than most humans at maths. Unfortunately due to engineering limits at the time the Difference engine wasn't successfully built until 1991 when Babbage’s designs were proven to be valid.

With the problems the Difference engine had that leaves the title of ‘example of one of the first programmable computers’ to go to a device like Colossus, used by British code breakers in World War II. Colossus was developed to decode the German ciphers to their submarine Captains. It was developed by Tommy Flowers and mathematicians Dorothy Du Boisson and Elsie Booker though both women received little or no mention in computing history, much like a lot of the women involved in computer development through the years.

Hitting the late 40's the groundwork, technology and ideas behind games start to appear which a lot of it surprisingly was developed from military technology. Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Settle Ray Mann made the first interactive electronic game in 1947 called the "Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device" (Cohen,  nd) and was the first missile simulation game.

With the computing prequel over with let's fast forward to the 50's.

In rolled the 1950's and with it 'Tennis for two' in 1958. Tennis for two was played on a screen and with a hand held controller much like Mouse in the maze in 1959 expect this one used a light pen to guide the mouse.

Swinging to the 60's we really start getting somewhere with the
appearance of Spacewar! created by Steve Russell, Martin Craetz and Wayne Wiitanen (Bellis, nd). The most interesting thing about Spacewar is that unlike Tennis for two, it brought forward the concept of a game being an original idea not a recreation of something that already exists outside the computer.



Finally hitting the 70's we meet Maze Wars, with a disk the size of a pizza and a design meant to be connected and played with others via the ethernet it is effectively to blame for Call of Duty. Maze wars was the first concept of a first person shooter and was the beginning of the idea of player avatars. Despite it's 1972 release Maze Wars was a clear starting point for more modern games considering through the years the idea has remained the same while the pictures get prettier.

Left to right: Maze Wars, Wolfenstein, Metro 2033

Cohen. nd http://classicgames.about.com/od/classicvideogames101/p/CathodeDevice.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube_amusement_device
Bellis, nd http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blcomputer_videogames.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War

Summing up so far

So a fair few weeks into the course now and all still seems to be going well, in fact this has been the only form of art education where I've really been enjoying myself and my work. Having come from an foundation course which focused on you using as many new techniques and media as you could fit into a year I eventually had next to no time for just drawing but with the visual design projects I’m happy to be rediscovering my love for it. 

A few of the various thumbnail drawings from the work

Perspective is proving a pain as it always has but it just seems to be a case of getting back into it. 

As for less familiar ground, despite the horror stories I've heard 3D Studio Max has behaved itself on my end apart from a few cases of a selective undo button and some evasive toolbars. It's surprising how fast you can pick it up with just a couple dozen remodels of the same accursed wheelie bin. Overall I'm really enjoying working with the program and apart from a new perception for noticing wheelie bins within my surroundings and a vendetta against Frank Rotherham Mouldings for the introduction of the modern wheelie bin, 3Ds Max hasn't succeeded in crushing my soul just yet, though I have been repeatedly informed that this is very likely to change. 

-Insert title of your choice here-

I'd just like to point out I hate writing about myself, always have. Applications and CV's were a nightmare but it seems to be time to get over that, or at the very least make it less evident. 

So to sum me up: I’m Sharnleigh, 19 from the outskirts of Birmingham and having finished a year of Art Foundation am now studying the first year of Game Art Design at De Montfort University.

In a way choosing an art based course was a gamble for me thanks to A-level art shattering any artistic confidence that I had but I’d always loved art and making things so took one last shot at turning it around with foundation studies and sure enough once free of what I found to be very linear limitations of a-levels my enjoyment resurfaced, so all that was left was finding an area to go into which I already had in mind.