Personal Task: Getting into Immersion

I'm a huge fan of stories, in books, in film, in comics, via poorly reconstructed charades whatever the medium I enjoy storytelling and as medium of storytelling I think games are really good for it and have a lot of potential to be better. Good stories are immersive and video games have the power to be one of the most immersive media out there, I've lost count of the number of times I sat down to play a game in the morning to then realise it’s midnight and I’m sat in the dark. I've said this opinion to number of people and the replies range from agreeing with it to looks of pity for my clearly disillusioned mind.

I’m an avid reader but I find a game can a lot of the time be more successful at getting information across to me simply because it uses visual communication. While reading A Game of Thrones I constantly found my immersion breaking at parts were the author was adding a lot of heavy details to set a scene. There would be a tense confrontation between to characters when suddenly focus would shift from them completely to describe in detail the dinner the servants had just brought in and books are stuck with that issue, since they usually have no other way to get the image across but with more words. Games are a lot simpler, a quick visual image and your brain registers there’s food there and with that done you can quickly get back to the characters. 

Yup. Bread, cheese, fruit, Done. Now let's move on with our lives.

Of course that’s the kind of thing that film and television has over books but games also have another dimension to that since you can actually interact with the scene. Unlike a film where you watch the scene as some kind of invisible floating spectre with no input but usually with a game not only am I going to watch this dinner scene I going to knock over all the wine goblets, because I can!
The use of multiple endings and choices is also a bonus that games have. Everyone I have ever met has had a moment where they’re screaming at a movie protagonist to not go outside to see if the coast is clear after there was quite obviously a psychopath nearby a moment ago. Naturally the actor on screen does not care about your wise and sage advice because you have no control over this pre-recorded person, but that does not have to be the case with games. This protagonist is bound to the will of my directional pad so there will be no heroic, death wish antics on my watch, I’m going to crouch behind this chair until the madman goes away.

Though games are by no means a perfect tool for the job and they bring a lot of issues especially with content size, the capability limitations and the amount of freedom and control you can give a player before they inevitably mess something up. As technology develops games are gaining more and more potential to be amazing storytelling devices and while some aspects are doing a wonderful job I’m of the opinion that a lot of it is being handled nowhere near as well as it could be.

The Good, The Bad and the no longer so ugly Architecture

Bad News

Starting off with the bad news, my digital painting needs a lot of work. Up until now my graphics tablet was really more on a novelty for quick doodles but with our first introduction to digital painting I realised I have a bit of a hill to climb, possibly a mountain.

Two days to illustrate a joke that
really wasn't worth the effort.

I've attempted painting in Photoshop a lot but for small things, usually a quick illustration for a joke a friend makes but they've never had to be visually correct or have correct lighting so when it came to trying to include that I was having a tough time. 

Given enough time I think I can produce digital work to a possibly acceptable standard but it's a case of producing much better work and a lot faster.

Five minutes to make, all day to
texture.

Good News

Things are looking better over in 3D. Looking back over work it's nice to see clear improvement especially with the initial modelling, I found I was able to model a lot of simple street furniture in under five minutes also re-made and improved the phone box from the texturing lesson way back at the start of the first term but this time multi-sub, bump and spectacular maps included so it's not just a red box. 

But the biggest stand out for me was returning to the architecture project. I finally got around to starting to remake it from scratch and it was nothing like the nightmare it was back then. Modelling took two hours as opposed to two days, cut the tri count down by 1000 just through competent modelling and not a n-gon is sight. It's not finished yet but it's leaps and bound better than the original and how I ever got it done without layers the first time round is a mystery to me.

Welcome back now back to work

2013 2014
I've only written the wrong date twice so far, I'm impressed with myself.

With my long lie in's back in 2013 it's back to it. Probably didn't keep as busy as I should have over Christmas but the next 2D project means I'll have lots of sitting around Birmingham, most likely in the rain to make up for it.

Pen, inks, war artists and an excuse to watch Ridley Scott films. Ok maybe not an excuse but I'm using it as one. I'm normally hesitant with more permanent and less controlled media but it's actually nice to get away from pencil now and again. I'm finding this to be an interesting project especially since it's two weeks long meaning I have time to head home and work from locations in cities other than Leicester.

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