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Final Project reflection

so my final project did not go as planned. I set up the equipment for the showcase and left for class. I return after an hour later to check on it to realize that the timeout on the computer was short and could not change it. So on one could get on it and play the game. The premise of the project was to get people work on little pieces of art like how I did in class. If I had more time, I could improve the challenges and the speed of the game. If I can figure out how to post it, I will.

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photoshop gif practice

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Ball bounce assignment practice

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Rise of the Videogame Zinester Chapter 8 Response

Anna Anthropy discusses her feelings about the video game industry and how it has affected her life. She tells us that she has been playing video games since she was a child and imagines her own versions of popular games. She gave up her dream of making video games to writing fiction because it was creative but got sick of it, dropped out of college and rediscovered her dream of game making. She then talks about how the game industry is making games just for money and not for the experience. She wants zinesters to find new creativity ways to tell stories.

As a child, i have always played video games. Since I was 2-3, my first video game was Donkey Kong Country for the SNES. I remember it vividly, playing through the game and especially getting a game over where Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong are hurt and depressed; I would hide under something. If there was nothing to hid, I would bring a chair and hid under that. It still creeps me out to this day. That was the day where my love for video games began. I loved being inside another world where laws and regulations are different than reality. I never considered how games work, I would just play them and be in awe of the world’s art. That is something I did not consider until college. I am a beginner with no experience. In my hometown there was nothing about making games so I did not know about the hardships and knowledge needed for games. So college was my stepping stone for games. As I grow older, I want to create something different than the games out there. I always wanted to work at Nintendo, but that is an unrealistic dream. They way I am right now, I should be dreaming small such as working on my own games and improving my art.

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Blender Ball Bounce animation

Here is my ball Bounce animation made in Blender 2.78a. It was really fun to make. So basically what it is a golf ball falling to a golf course and is being hit by a club. I wanted to make it endless so that when the ball enters into the hole it will go back in the beginning to restart the animation.

https://vimeo.com/219566962

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Rise of the Videogame Zinester Chapter 7 Response

This week chapter discussed how to make a video game. Anna Anthropy explained how to make games in 11 steps. She made it sound easy as she has experience creating games. But I had trouble understanding the steps as I also attempted to make a game.

I had experience trying to make a game for another class. The premise was a character entered into his video game console and to get out, they need to go through his video game library play through different game from different eras. I was working with a partner with this assignment and we had trouble programming the game (well, it was mostly me as my partner had “other things” to do). I had trouble programming the character jump in a Super Mario style and spend so time trying to make it work, I forgot to make the rest of the game and only did 1 era with Super Mario and the Legend of Zelda.

Creating a game is way more difficult than you may think. I thought it was simple, placing objects and its done. I did not think about the technical side of make video games which was not my strong suit in college. Since I could not handle the programming, I decided to change my focus to making art for games.

Reading this chapter has helped me understand what I want to do with my final project. I am making a twine game similar to games in the 1980s, but a little different. I was thinking of doing a character creation screen where the player can “create” their character similar to Dungeons and Dragons, and post it online. The story will be about a student who changed to an art major and in order to catch up to their classmate, practice creating art everyday. What I want to accomplish with this game is to get people to make art and practice. I want them to see their progress and to tell them that through time, your art evolves. You evolve. They will see the flaws and finds ways to get around it.

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archive.org Movie Assignments

For this week project, I have to a 2 movie using clips from archive.org and created a story based on a topic. My topic for this project is the same from the audio project, is college worth they money. I show that it is up to the student if they want to succeed. 

the first video shows a student focused on studying but falls asleep and little by little, the focus starts to deteriorate and wakes up finishing a test. https://vimeo.com/218109608

the second video shows a different take of the previous film. Instead of a bad ending, it is a good one. The student fall asleep while studying and dreams of dropping out and decide to as for some people college is not for everyone.

https://vimeo.com/218107506

This project was fun to make. It was tedious to find footage and with the topic I had, it difficult to find what I was looking for so I had to improve what I wanted. With my topic, getting a college education is a good and a bad in this world. Good in a sense that it helps people find jobs in the real world and bad that it is not for everyone but the media always pushes students to college making some people unhappy. 

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Ideas for the Final Project

For my final project, I am thinking about doing a combination of what we have done so far in class: making a zine, Photoshop, Audacity, and movie editing. The way of using all these methods is making a twine game. Twine is a open-source tool for telling non-linear stories similar to computers games in the 1980s. With all the skills I’ve learned during the course of the quarter I plan to make a game similar to Where’s Waldo except using pictures, gifs, and video as the media. I do not know what will the topic, maybe something similar to the assigned readings. What I need for this project is access to a computer and time.

 The timeline for this project are:

week 1: figure out topic 

week 2: implement ideas and play test

week 3:  finalize

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Rise of the Videogame Zinester Chapter 6 Response

Anna Anthropy talks about her experiences creating games.  Her past games include Gay Sniper, Box Pushing Game and Find Shit. Her games are weird and she encourages people who to design their games weird to be different than other games as nothing is original; everything is already done but you put your own personal style to make it unique. Making an original game can be difficult be she explains not to be scared as this is a learning experience. You will fail but it is part of growing.

She believe anyone can make games and it is true … to an extent. To fully make games, you have to know how to code which can be a difficult language to master. I tried to learning code to create my own game but I could not get the hang of it. After several attempts over time, I grew wary trying to create a game and took a break. During this period, I reassert my life on what I wanted to do. Irealized that I was never interested in the technical side of video games. I do not go to games with the intention of dissecting it, for example Super Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS, I play for fun but other students in my college community practice the hell of it, finding hitboxes and perfecting combos which is fine but takes away the fun away. I play because I put myself in the character and interact with the world, not a outside force breaking the worlds laws.

After this experience, the reason I loved games was the art. The way the world was design is what hooked me into games. Since I was younger, about 2 years old, I  played my first video game, Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. As a kid, seeing a new world inside a television was magical. Look back now, the way it was design for a system that is not powerful was impressive.

Anthropy tells one side of designing games and it is a way, not the only way. Games need art to trap the player into the world.

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Rise of the Videogame Zinester Chapter 5 Response

Anna Anthropy tells her story of how she became a game designer and how she struggled to continue making games for a living. She always wanted to make video games but as a child never thought she could do it. She has created many games on Game Maker, a program with an easy and simple interface for creating games. She went to college but dropped out and went to Southern Methodist University in Texas to study game design. But when she got there, she did not realize the struggle of creating games as she had as she had to work in groups and atop of that homework and left with little time for sleep. This mimics real life as big game companies will “crunch time” or unpaid overtime in order to finish a game. She could not take it and left school. She continued to make games based on her experiences and selling them in order to survive.

I understand what she is feeling as I was in a similar path. I came to UCSC because the school had a game design major. I loved video games so my mentality was I like to play games… I could work on games; it was a perfect match for me. It was not until being in college that I realized just could not handle the lifestyle to make video games. I, too worked on a Game Maker game for a project. During the day, I did homework and at night, was at a computer lab working on the game and only having 1-2 hours of sleep. Atop of that I could not handle the math and programing so I left the major and changed to art where I focused on making the aesthetics of games rather than the technical side of it. I did not understand the process of game making as I originating in a poor area; there was no resources for game design so I had to rely on my knowledge of playing games to survive.

After Anthropy stopped going to school, she continued creating games at her pace, making it less stressful and fun than working in a big game company. I agree with her choice because some people can not work if stress is holding them back. We both did not know the fate of working in a game company as we thought it would be magical and easy since we both love games but did not consider the hardship when creating them.

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Pencil Shaving Zine

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This is mine and Miguel’s collaboration for the Audacity assignment. Our theme is if education worth the money as the people do not see that though getting an education is worth mentally, financially it is really difficult to pay off. With this audio project there is someone speaking about her experience in college where she has a question but the professor does not answer and begs the question if students are paying for school, they have the right to have their questions to be answers but instead they are left with no knowledge and struggle.

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Rise of the Videogame Zinester Chapter 3 Response

A game delivers an experience and a set rules to follow. For example the game Tag, the rules are if someone is IT, they can touch others players to become IT and if other players are in a safe location, they can not become IT. If there is no IT,  then players are aimlessly running with no end goal. Without an end goal, the player’s experience will become stale and less fun. When it comes to video games, it is all the player’s experience and if it does not convey it then they are uninterested playing.

There are many kinds of video game genres that give different experiences. “Games have lots of room for improvisation, for every play of a game or scene to unique, and digital games in particular have easy access to a great degree of chance” (65) Anna Anthropy points out that not everyone has the same experiences as they can interpret games differently.

Digital Games back in the days were different as they had a game master controlling the player's experience by setting the rules and roles than can do. Digital Games nowadays are automatically and in them are hidden rules players can find to enhance their experiences.

Through the many genres of video games, there is a game for everyone. What you play is your own experience; No one can take that away from you. In the fictional (or real) world of your game, your actions have an impact on the surrounds, say throw a ball, you can throw it to get minimum distance or you can kick it to get maximum distance. It depends on the game and how you want to interact with it. For me, my game genres are mostly kid/ family family games. I am not into the realistic and simulations types of games such as Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. Games should avoid being realistic because we deal with realism in our reality. Rather than play a game that simulates real life, play a game that is cartoony; a game where our connotation of reality does not exist and to explore a new world with different rules.

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Tool experiment GIF animation 2

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Zinester Response 2

A computer “sees” lines of code to simulate a world displayed in the computer so the user can interact. The first major home computer was the Apple Macintosh where it was affordable for people to have computers in their homes while was revolutionary at the time. The games at the time were very primitive and were text-based but transported players to new worlds such as Zork.

Games before home computers were in arcades, game cabinets where people pay to play, classic such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc were people’s gateway to another world. Games nowadays are have their dedicated home console where it began to become more affordable for people. They also improved from arcade cabinets and home computers. With arcade cabinets and home computers, there was a limited amount of power for games to run, causing very simple actions. But those simple actions created a new reality players can enter. Power increased with home consoles as they are dedicated just for games. Graphics and game functions have become more powerful making games immersive as ever.

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Tool experiment GIF animation 

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Zinesters Response 1

Anna Anthropy explains that she has not been interested in any video games because none of them is similar to her own experiences as a queer women. She questions the video game industry as they push for an masculine audience. She believe that a zine can help fix this problem as anyone can make their own content.

Computable means that it can connect to something. If something interests you then your mind will only focus on that. Things that are computable are considered art because it is people can relate to it. In the sense of video games, people get invested in the game’s story, characters, etc. because it is a fictitious world with relatable topics.