anthonydavisrtvfx-blog

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Usability

Within the time in the Usability class I’ve learned a large amount of things. The most amusing things about usability is that they are all extremely obvious once you see it. Everything I have learned I feel as though it was just camouflaged information in front of me waiting for me to understand it. Learning how to take an emotion and attempt as strongly as possible to validate it through psychometrics and physiometrics is absolutely amazing. In another life I may have wanted to be a User research primary, however I will stick to my art for now unless the tradewinds blow me in another direction.

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First round of lighting tests for Tyro. 

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New Class - New Style

This is the most unique class I've ever taken. Let me explain just a few things here. We actually talked with each other in discussion during lecture. I know that you hear this all the time how each class is supposed to be a discussion but primarily the teacher just talks and sometimes gets asked a question. 

This was NOT the case. I felt compelled to talk, to react and to challenge what he was saying. I approve heavily of this. This is a masters class and without questioning logic in a practical setting, how will you know you actually learned something?

On a note of learning, we were taught that we matter. Holy... what? 

Yeah, that's right. Manly tears where shed during this class. You take people who are expecting to be there to learn just about teams and what to do with them and then you end up literally making an event happen in real life while learning about each other in a group, get to lead the entire class in a leadership facilitation game/setting without being judged for your thoughts. This is deep stuff here and we did this all in a month?!

This class was not what I expected and I have no idea how any other class will amount to what this class pushed me to want to do. Motivation beyond limits... I was taught about the DiSC system and MB system. Though I have known about it for me and who I am, I wasn't really ever talked about how I could use it for my team and make sure I understand who people are to put them to the best possible scenario I could. Epic win. I will be using this information for quite some time. I also plan on taking this information further to be the best leader I can be for the studio. 

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Love the artwork here. 

Hi everyone, here is a little hammer space knight painting. I’ve been having a lot of fun painting sci-fi stuff lately. I hope you all like it :) Deviantart ArtStation DrawCrowd

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Timeline for Project Management

Game Creation for Kids on Dipity.

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The power is undeniable.

Mother Nature

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This is very nice work!

This is some of the spectacular science fiction concept art for Jupiter Ascending.

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Particle Lights?!

I need to take some time out here from all this industry research and really talk about something incredible. Particle Lights. Let me try this again. Lights... on your particles! This is absolutely incredible and needs to be used all over the place. I need to see fireflies lighting up trees. I need to see robots, flying around lighting up the geometry its flying around. I need to see lights everywhere. Why? Well, because before now it was difficult to have lights around things that weren't dynamic that had shadow maps to deal with shadows and the lights needed to be attached to the emitters, there was no way to attach them to the particles themselves without some crazy programming. The particles that are allowed lights on them are only CPU particles. What this means is vector based collisions and hyper particle counts cannot be used with light source, but there are a million locations you can play a nice light on a particle to make it useful on the CPU side.

Just to make this clear on how awesome this is I’ll go over a simple concept that could be really detailed and how this makes it easier. A simple bullet firing and muzzle flash. The bullet leaving the gun will have a flash, this will be outward, but how to you make the light go off to reveal the gun as well? Well, what you can do is program a light to turn on and improve its intensity as the flash happens every time. You could also have a texture swap on the gun itself when the bullet fires. You could just fake it with emmisive and hope no one notices. Or you could just have the particle that emits the nice muzzle flash have a light and it will literally light up the gun itself making it feel even more comfortable, fulfilling your dreams of an impressive first person shooter.

Unreal Documents on Particle Lights.

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Industry Research #4 Psycholog of Gameplay

So, you think I was talking large amounts when I talked about level design? Well, psychology of gameplay you quite literally could get a Doctorate in this alone. So we will do as much as we can to mitigate this and just talk to the main points. One of the topics I personally like to talk about is the Zen Zone. The problem is being able to find what it is that puts you in this Zen Zone. According to Gamasutra's post about cognitive flow in the psychology of games, the zen zone is considered “flow”. I am going to refer the flow as the ZZ to make things easier throughout this particular section of this post. The ZZ is when you are moving through the game, regardless of pacing and feeling as though you are in this game. There are many games I could reference that do this correctly. I will mention League of Legends and Dragon Age: Inquisition. They are both completely unique games, but time can pass you just the same if you play them. League of Legends will take your life away at 30 minutes a pop, where dragon age does a really good job at taking 8-10 hours away at a pop. These are similar  in the fact that time just slips away. If you have played these games then you will know of the time loss problem. It's very X-files on how minutes/hours just disappear.  The reason this happens is laid out quite properly where the difficulty and the skill at in correlation to each other.

The ZZ is an amazing thing, but there is also other areas that contribute and this is the experience within the zone. This is unique for each personality and can be found if research it enough but I will just name a few. Competitive people, Gambling folks, people who like state of mind changes and the fantasy delvers. If you focus your game in the concepts of these four personality types of the ZZ, then you will easily find people flocking to your game in general. It's when you keep the zone appealing and push it further with level design, and proper creation will you keep your audience along your ride

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Industry Research #3 Importance of Level Design

There is something that you mightnotice if you look at my references section of this post. Level Design important. Until you spend a bit of time trying to create a level, you wouldn't think that it was that much of a big deal., I mean yes it's important, but holy cow. Two unique sources, both having to be a two parter? One of these is even considered “beginning” of being able to do this one task. So, yes level design is absolutely massive. There are several unique positions to level design and it can destroy a game. Sadly, there are way too many single point of failures to games, but looking into them can greatly improve your game creation process. Level design is a perfect practice makes perfect type of thing. Before you go just willy nilly throwing assets all around and hoping it just works, take time to read about what will work or not. The first concept I want to talk about is “Fun”. I capitalize this word because it's so important of a concept that its in every section of game development. Fun needs to be used in your levels in navigation first and foremost. The question you need to be able to answer undoubtedly is; Is it fun to walk/fly/punch through this level? This in itself could be a 30 page paper, so I will not kill everyone and just go over what I see is important for now. I may come back to this a bit later, however to make a level fun to navigate you need to provide tension if needed, be aesthetically pleasing while keeping a structure of continuity with your character as to keep immersion while having subtly clues on where to go or what to do next in your game without having massive UI elements trying to clutter your experience silver spoon feeding your every movement.

The next concept is boundaries. This thought was strange and extremely foreign to me until I had to develop my first world in D&D. Cities needed to have a boundary structure that was apparent but still able to see the outside world. Now, up until this point I had just been the average gamer and didn't look into this much because my little gamer eyes didn't care about boundaries. Since then I have noticed that every building is right next to each other and you can't get to the side of every building. Games just aren't real! This is now a understood concept and making a few small games I see why the way it was built back in the day but with emerging technology, now level design is needing to push the boundaries and consider how weather will be dynamic, and have sky boxes to create the illusion of the world being available further then your gameplay section. Now the norm is using unclimbable walls or sections with big rocks mountains, water you can't swim, insane storms that won't let you go this way to create boundaries instead of invisible walls to stop you from going somewhere out of bounds. Pushing the concept of game to real is creating this solid immersion where the game can play the game even get turned around because the “sudden storm” made it impassible because its a grey area we can't explain versus a wall I just run against wondering why I couldn't go that way and then getting pulled back into the real world breaking my immersion.

Bunch of Refernce:

GamaSutra 1a, Gamasutra 1b, Gamasutra 2a, Gamasutra 2b, Digital Tutors.

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Industry Research #2 Being an Indie Developer

Everything that I’ve read on thesubject of becoming your own company, an amazing indie studio making only the games you want the world to play, is some scary information. The problem is, that there are now two bazillion indie studios out there competing with you. This is obviously exaggerated, but the concept is understandable. Being an indie studio is freeing, but how do you do it properly?

According to Everyone, but most importantly Gamasutra and Digital Tutors, you have to know your budget. You have to understand what you are capable of creating within a certain amount of time. You won't be paid to make your game as you are creating it unless you get a publisher deal previous to getting your studio started. Let's be honest here, no one has the money or time to deal with your ideas right? So let's just assume you are a nobody for now. Now that we have that out of the way, don't get discouraged. Be empowered and move forward as this is the first day of the rest of your life... specifically if this is what you want to do. If not, then you may be in for a surprise. Game development isn't simple, and it will take you over if you don't stay on top of it. This may be why you are here?! Regardless, I digress to topic here, understanding budget will set you up to know what game engine you can use or should use, which is detailed in the previous section of this post. After you have your budget in line, and set up which game engine you may use, you need to do just a couple more things. Look into efficiency, user created content and premade content.

Efficiency is difficult to define, however we can use the simple concepts we've started to outline to describe the first sections. User created content and premade content. User created content is when you have the users literally create the content for you within your game. One example to define this is Line Rider. Users create a track for your character to ride downward using physics as your gameplay mechanics. Simple and the user created the game for themselves! The other sided of it is premade content. Specifically if you need to use this, then I recommend the Unity asset store as they have so many assets for you to use within your game you could spent $100 and have a fully unique art asset list for an entire RPG. Although it may be used more than once, your game mechanics may be the turning point for the RPG scene we all need! If everything you do is following the budget perspective, your ride as an Indie studio will be quite clean. Don't get me wrong here in thinking I am saying focus on the money, as this is not the case. However focus on what your budget allows to you to create. Nothing is worse then having a great idea die because you over budgeted.

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Industry Research #1 Unity3D VS UE4

There are strong differences within these engines. These articles from Gamasutra and Digital Tutors Blog go over the main points quite heavily. These points are price, usability and extension availability. Obviously pricing is going to be important and its why I put it up on the forefront of this information. How much should we or do we even want to pay for a bunch of tools? When you pay for tools for your house such as a shovel, pickaxe or a laser sword do you wonder what would be the cheapest one? Of course you do! Otherwise we would all have a bunch of awesome tools... but no projects to use them on. So, as a studio we use “budgets” to work with the prices available. In this case, Unreal works off a simple $19/month model with a 5% fee for any money earned on said project to include crowd funded money or any other way you got money at all, ever. They except forms in cash, credit, legs and newborn children. All joking aside, 5% is not a bad deal. However, Unity is more geared towards full licenses or a high monthly fee. $1500 total or $75 a month. So who is really willing to say which one is better? It all depends on what you are expecting to do with your license.

The next section to go over is the usability. This is where it goes to where you are as a studio completely. Are you the solo indie company where it's only you? Are you the studio who is going for something a bit more heavy and you have a couple employees? These are all things you need to consider when looking into game engines. If you are looking into making something quite simple that you don't have to worry about particularly learning a difficult programing language, then Unity3D may be that place for you as its ran through C# which is known be just a bit easily to work with vs C++ which is the “Hardcore language”.

Lastly, extension availability. This plays a big role on if you will need some assets for your game because you may not be able to art or may not have the time to learn it. Unity's marketplace is absolutely massive and open. There are thousands of assets for decent price on the Unity asset store. On the Unreal side of things, the marketplace is quite small as they go through a hefty submission process to get anything approved. This isn't a problem because they also have an absolutely massive tutorial section for pretty much everything Unreal has to offer in the current build.

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Mastery Timeline on Dipity.

Timeline!

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The Logo.

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My Diigo page

https://www.diigo.com/user/anthonydavis33

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FEEDLY !

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My LinkedIn Profile

http://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonydavisrtvfx