Today marks the end of week 7 of term 4, next week will be our final week before term 5, where we go blasting off into the exciting realm of our final project. This past week or so has given me a taste of what it is going to be like for the next four months; sleep deprivation, strict deadlines to meet, coordinating and working within a group as everyone's rushing around like chickens with their heads cut off.
I cannot wait for this insanity to begin.
As stressful as it may be, it is also an incredible learning experience and one crazy ride, one I thoroughly hope to enjoy. Our first landmark we need to hit is a small, playable version of our game (nothing fancy, only the basic features and simple blocks comprising most of it) which will help us work out very quickly what problems we may have when it comes to gameplay experience, the idea is that if it is fun to play as an incomplete game with blocks acting as substitutes for all the shiny graphics, then we're on the right track.
Speaking of gameplay, though I've mentioned that my final project is going to be a collaboration with my fellow future Game Design students to create a game, I believe I have yet to actually mention what said game will be about.
The working title for our game is FPSSCRG, which stands for First Person Shooter Survival Comedy Racing Game. Think Dead Rising meets Resident Evil meets Mario Kart and you start to get an idea of how ridiculous our game is going to be. The main point of the game will be to move around a racetrack, killing zombies and completing laps. As you play the number of zombies increases, making it harder and harder to complete laps quickly and survive (yet another goal of yours). Killing zombies and completing laps quickly nets you points towards your score, the ultimate goal being to get your score as high as possible. As you move around the track there will be powerups which you can collect to more effectively kill zombies and complete laps.
Yes, we are absolutely insane, but if we an pull off combining all these disparate elements into a smooth, irreverent, hilarious gameplay experience, well....
well...
...well my brain is fuzzy as mentioned earlier, but the words EPIC WIN come to mind.
Anyways, I shall talk more on that at a later date when my mind is in a more coherent state. Onto other things...
Today my Life Drawing class had it's exhibition, throughout term 4 everyone had to go and create an individual piece of artwork that somehow related to life drawing, with the end result being showcased towards the end of term. For my project, I chose to take an idea that I had many months ago at one of VFS' drawing parties (Font Licker, back in term 1 or 2 I believe) and develop it further. Basically the original concept was to take my classmates names and replace the first letter with an animal mimicking the shape of the letter. For this revamp, I decided to impose stricter rules on myself:
1. Must do everyone's name
2. First letter must be some sort of myth or folklore
3. Myth/folktale used must begin with the same letter as the person's name
So began many weeks of scouring the internet and my book of mythology for figures, stories, places, creatures that suited each classmate to some degree, sketching long into the night, and discovering that my class has a highly disproportionate number of 'J' and 'M' names....
All in all, I'm more or less pleased with how they all came out. I had to pull an all nighter the day before the exhibition to get them all done in time, but it was worth it. The artworks we shown as a digital slideshow projected onto a wall, and it was nice seeing them up there, nice and shiny and done! Finally done! My gosh, so much work! I nearly bit off more than I could chew with this project considering there are 29 other students in my class!
If you want to take a look at all the completed names, I have them up in an album on Facebook here.
In other news, Dragon Age II is coming out next month and I cannot wait. I absolutely adored Dragon Age Origins, and while I have yet to sink my teeth into the copy of Dragon Age Awakenings I got for Christmas, I have high hopes for it. It may be a while before I get a chance to play it, but I am still eagerly awaiting it's release date.
One issue I do have with Dragon Age II so far, however, is the lack of promotional material featuring the female version of the protagonist. Normally I'm pretty forgiving about this sort of thing but.... from all the promotional stuff, you'd think you can't play as a girl at all. For Male Hawke we have numerous screenshots, kickass videos, in game footage, promotional artwork, an iconic piece of artwork in which he is walking towards the viewer with the Dragon Age blood dragon rising behind him; what do we get for Lady Hawke? a few screenshots, you can find a small clip of gameplay footage online if you look, but that's about it.
Seriously? Release date only weeks away and that's all we've got? I mean, I'm not expecting a beautiful cinematic trailed featuring Lady Hawke-- they did one for Male Hawk, sure, but those things are costly and time consuming to make, I don't really expect them to make two of them just to please everyone. I'm perfectly happy watching Male Hawke be all around kickass and accepting 'that will be my character'-- but... not even one trailer with maybe some mixed gameplay footage? No? Okay, just a little bit of promotional artwork then? No? Maybe just some concept art? I'm not asking for much here, just a little bit of validation. Heck, I'd be content if they did a version of this iconic piece of promo material featuring Lady Hawke. Yet nothing, or at least nothing that I've found.
Perhaps I'm nitpicking a bit.... but with so much out there showing how awesome and cool Hawke is in his male incarnation, it would be nice to have female Hawke be acknowledged just a little as well.
Well enough with the depressing stuff, while I am waiting for Dragon Age II to come out, and wishing I had the free time to actually sit down and get start on Awakenings, I have been able to get my Dragon Age fix through a certain closed beta on facebook... Many thanks to my friend who gave me one of his beta keys were he got an invite. It's something I can sit down and play for a little bit when I have a spare moment and just need to relax for a bit, so I can get my gaming fix without having to sift through my games for something that doesn't require hours of investment (I have a bias towards long, cinematic games as opposed to casual ones...)
I should probably wrap this up... but first.
Freaky 13 was edited and screened in class; it was far from perfect, but it was a wonderful learning experience and we got some great feedback from our teacher on how to improve it. Our group's director is re-editing it with the feedback we were given in the hopes of making a stronger portfolio piece for himself.
Though our blood effects were pretty good if I do say so myself :P
I think that's about it for this post, there's so much more I could write about, but I'll save that for next time.
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