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These are good rules for both sides. As an aspiring creator myself, I do try to remember to get outside opinions from time to time, and I also like to think that I can learn from what I see fans comment on other works as well. Granted, my stories are my babies, and I am a very protective father. I:

It’s kind of sad to see what happened with the Star Wars franchise, but it’s a good cautionary tale for the future.

Relationship between creators and fans

Passion, like all strong emotions, has a tendency to quickly turn venomous when the object of one’s affection doesn’t seem to reciprocate.  When we’re talking about the passion of a fan community, that venom can spread quickly through the veins of the community, infecting others, turning malignant, and building an ugly, sickly army — an army ready to fight nigh unto death, wielding their toxic weapons of Twitter and Instagram and going to war against the creator who dared to make the choices they hate.

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Originally, this movie sounded too cheesy for me, like most pet-based movies tend to be. However, this review makes it sounds much deeper and more interesting than a regular “no risks” family-fun movie. It sounds thoughtful and well-directed, rather than just slapped together to be cute.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I would handle the death scenes very well. I’d probably cry a lot. But hey, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps I’ll give it a watch soon.

Movie Review: “A Dog’s Purpose”

The movie “A Dog’s Purpose”, which was released in January of 2017, is a story of life through the perspective of a dog. When the movie first begins, the main character- a dog, poses the question: What is the meaning of life? Throughout the movie, the dog reincarnates many times and goes through different lives of variating breeds to show the “purpose” of that dog. Some of the examples from the movie are: a small corgi- for the purpose of comfort, a big german shepherd- a police dog for the purpose of working hard, and the last dog that spent its life tied to a fence wondering what his purpose was. Although this movie is rated PG for all ages, many critics argue that this movie is not for everyone. Before each reincarnation, the film shows the dog’s life coming to an end which leads people to believe that this movie is not suitable for small children. Contrary to critics’ beliefs, I believe that the tear-jerking scenes make the movie more realistic and easier to relate with.

At the beginning of the movie, it gives some background on the dog’s owner, Ethan- a tall and well-built football player, who lives with his mother and deadbeat father. Ethan soon forms a relationship with a girl he met named Hannah. Like many cliche movies, they fall in love and spend every waking moment of the summer together as teenagers. Many of these scenes are cheesy, but are often saved with humor as the role of the dog is incorporated. Although some of the romantic scenes are tacky, others become almost too realistic. One example of this is when Ethan’s father, who is drunk, starts a physical fight with his mother. During intense moments, the acting becomes much better and gives you that “on the edge of your seat” feeling.

Some of the greatest parts of this movie are able to be experienced because of the used camera angles. With this movie being from the perspective of a dog, a lot of the camera angles are shot as if the viewers were the dog themselves looking around to see things like the tall humans or being eye-level with the small toddlers waddling around. A lot of these angles are put to good use, but the director also does a good job of not overusing the angle so it doesn’t becoming frustrating or make you dizzy.

Most of this movie’s soundtrack is instrumental, allowing more creativity for the viewer to decide the mood. Many of the scenes are happy-go-lucky with small puppies bouncing around. In these types of shots, piano music is used with many staccatos to emphasize the light mood. In more dramatic scenes, the deep sound of a cello is used to create intensity. The use of songs lacking lyrics and only including instruments help the movie to come alive.

The movie “A Dog’s Purpose” is an adventurous story that takes viewers along in the perspective of a dog’s life. Contrary to some critic reviews, this movie is great for all ages- especially the dog lovers. It has a thrilling soundtrack and a heartfelt storyline that will pull on the heartstrings of many.

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FEZ: An Aesthetic Review

FEZ is a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer game developed by Polytron Corporation and published by Trapdoor. The game stars a character named Gomez, who, upon receiving a new fez from a magical golden space cube, gains the ability to twist his two-dimensional world in a third dimension. However, doing this smashes the golden cube into 64 bits – 32 light and 32 dark – which scatter across worlds linked by dimension-defying doors. Gomez must go on a quest to find the bits and discover the secrets the cube held. FEZ’s unique gameplay, memorable art style, and intriguing puzzles make it a game that many players enjoy.

The gameplay is the forefront feature of the game. It mostly controls like a two-dimensional platformer, akin to early 1990’s games like Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog. The gimmick of the game, though, is the ability to rotate the world around a vertical axis, changing the perspective and layout of any puzzle. If the player is on a platform to the left, and cannot jump far enough to reach a platform on the right, rotating the world to the right can overlap the platforms from that perspective, which Gomez can move over as if they were always in two dimensions to begin with. This mechanic can be mind-boggling at first, but as the player progresses through the game, it will begin to come naturally to think in three dimensions. It may be strange, but that’s part of what makes it truly memorable.

Artistically, the game at first appears to be yet another “retro-revival” style, where everything is pixelated and simplistic, which is a style that’s frequently considered unimpressive. FEZ, though, uses the simplicity to its advantage, giving each area extremely unique color palettes and organic details, but still blends them together into one natural, cohesive world. The first few areas are islands floating in an ocean, and while pretty, they are not necessarily outstanding. The deeper the player dives into the game, the more variety is added, taking them through dense forests, a rainy graveyard, a brick-built city, and a dark sewer, and each new addition is more striking than the last.

The game is also non-linear; a player can beeline to the graveyard first and then go back to find the lighthouse and smoggy city, or do it the other way around. Whichever way Gomez goes, he will almost inevitably be coming back to those areas again to find bits he missed or previously gave up on.

Giving up on a puzzle in FEZ is not uncommon; the challenges in the game can be mind-boggling, to say the least. Some of the hardest puzzles are actually, completely, literally impossible to get right without knowing exactly what you’re looking for. One puzzle, for example, gives its solution through the blinking of two stars. The blinking translates into a binary code, which can then be translated into a string of commands to enter into the game, which finally completes the puzzle. Very few players will know binary upon entering that puzzle’s room, and even fewer may realize that they need binary. For many puzzles, the solutions can only be found online, which can be a bit disheartening. However, only 32 bits need to be found to get the main ending of the game, and the 32 light bits – called “cubes” – are much simpler and intuitive to obtain. The game itself even calls collecting those 32 cubes the 100% ending, giving casual players the ability to stop and appreciate what they’ve already done. Only players who really love the game need to collect the 32 “anti-cubes” for the second, more confusing ending at 200% completion.

Despite the insane difficulty curve and bare-bones plotline FEZ holds, it’s still a good game for people looking for either an intriguing puzzle game or a cutesy platformer. The more a player is immersed in this game, the more inspiring and beautiful it becomes, making it highly reviewed and one of my personal favorites.

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Making Art for Cheap: The Current Cost of Game Development

Gamers tend to complain that gaming has become more expensive in recent years. In actuality, gaming is becoming somewhat more accessible. In parallel, game development also used to be far more expensive to get into, but in recent years, many resources have been made available to make development easier and cheaper - often even free. While originally too expensive for common hobbyists, game development has become inexpensive enough to be accessible to all, and is on the verge of becoming a popular art form, much like music and painting.

Game development is usually seen as expensive by default. Even in the 80’s, when video games first started to become widespread, they would cost a few-hundred-thousand dollars to create. Steve Theodore, a developer who worked on games such as Half-Life and Halo 3, says that nowadays, triple-A (aka “blockbuster,” but for games) budgets can reach the hundred-millions, and predicts that those numbers will continue to rise. Due to the steadily improving speeds of processors and capabilities of hardware, games are consistently expected to become more outstanding and amazing – and thus, more costly – every year.

As a result of these larger budgets, these triple-A games are also fairly expensive for gamers to play, currently selling for about $70 a copy, and not all of them live up to the demanded quality for their scale. Reviewers like Caddicarus on YouTube state in many reviews that a lot of high-budget games are “not worth the price I paid,” and players on social media tell others to “wait for a sale before buying this game.” There is almost an air of entitlement as to how much a game should cost when compared to how much a player enjoys it, and, in many ways, that makes sense. Paying $70 to a triple-A developer for a poorly-made game does not feel like a fair trade to most people.

But not every game is $70; PC games on the online distributor Steam average at around $6 - $10, and there are multitudes of games on sale for much cheaper. On the “Free to Play” page alone, there are 1,415 games listed. Players don’t need to pay a dime to be able to play even a large selection of games, and this is becoming the norm. This makes the steadily rising cost of mainstream triple-A games look a bit pricey in comparison.

But even in that case, while those prices have indeed been rising, they have not been keeping up with inflation. In 1990, the average cost of a new game to play on a Nintendo Entertainment System was $50. According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, that would be around $96 as of the time of this writing - a fair chunk more than the $70 for high-end games of today. The actual cost of video games hasn’t risen at the rate they could have - and that’s still overlooking the waves of sales and discounts that games often go through.

The lower costs of games is a result of the lower costs of game development. While triple-A budgets are obviously still rising, much of that cost is being directed toward marketing, rather than actual development. Plus, there’s many more small, independent companies making games for cheap than there used to be. Minecraft, one of the highest-profiting video games in history, was started as a hobby project, costing the developers next to nothing. While the game was in beta, it was $12 to play. This comparatively low price tag was due to that lack of a large budget. Another popular independent game is Undertale, still available for most systems at an outrageously high price of 10 whole dollars. Again, the creator of Undertale, Toby Fox, did most of the work himself, with a bit of help from friends, not expecting much of a return. Yet, because it became the source of many memes and the inspiration to countless creative projects, the game sold enough that Fox earned far more than he invested in creating it. Not all independent games get as popular as Minecraft or Undertale, of course, but that doesn’t matter much when a $5 game still results in profit.s

That’s not even touching on the 1,415 free games available on Steam. Many of them are free to download and get into, but offer upgrades or DLC as microtransactions. While a company can make a good chunk of change from these transactions, the games are still playable from the start for free, which shows that the development was at least cheap enough to suffer some sacrifice for the initial release.

Additionally, a lot of those Free to Play games are free forever. Often short and, again, independently developed, these games are made solely for the sake of the art. Some of the developers of these artistic games may have sacrificed some cash to bring them to fruition, but the majority of them were made for free, put together from homemade code and art and music.

[Bad transition, fix later] Even then, there are also many free resources available to create games with. Unity and Unreal are two of the most popular engines to start with; both are powerful, professional-level systems that let creators dive in without too much training – but they have plenty of in-depth training available as well. Aspiring creators can jump in and begin practicing with the available tutorials and tips, getting ready to dive into the advanced aspects later on. There’s also Blender 3D for making homemade assets, and plenty of cheap image editors for making 2D assets; aspiring creators do not need to purchase a pricey copy of Photoshop or Maya anymore.

These inexpensive resources are what’s making game development more popular and commonplace - and from that, even more artistic. The same rise seen in pop music, painting, and even filmmaking as popular forms of art is happening now with games. Folk music was born to poor singers playing cheap instruments, and that begat blues, and then blues begat rock ‘n’ roll, which begat pop and hip-hop and rap, which are now omnipresent in modern media. The music of the poor has always been more popular than the grand orchestras and symphonies of the rich, because anyone could pick up a guitar, raise their voice, and sing along with the folk songs, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll. Everyone could join in, and that made it popular. Now, game development is turning the same direction; almost anyone can join in. And, as more developers do join in, they pave the way to make it even easier and more accessible to an even higher number of aspiring creators.

An example of this evolution of accessibility is a hobby called “modding” – short for “modifying.” For years now, gamers have been taking games that already exist, reverse-engineering them, and then changing them for their own enjoyment. These reverse-engineered techniques are then passed on, allowing more creatively-minded fans to use those resources to make their own changes. These modifications – “mods” – have been around for decades, and have been the jumping-off-point for many fans into becoming game developers of their own. For many fans, modding is what gets them into game development as a hobby. It’s an easy way to learn the basics of game logic and asset creation without being overwhelmed by deep code and project management. These fans then transform into hopeful game devs, wanting to create their own artistic projects using what they’ve learned.

Of course, some might argue that paying for these more expensive programs and professionally-produced assets makes for a better quality game in the end, and that can be true. However, more and more affordable resources are being created and developed constantly. Even for someone who can’t draw or compose, there are still plenty of good-quality stand-ins for little to no cost, and the selection is still growing. [examples]  And, as always, practice makes perfect; with enough time and effort, someone who can’t draw well can learn to, and then create their own assets.

Yes, sometimes you can still tell when a game was made on a low budget. Shovelware games - named for the way they seem to be “shoveled” out of a failing developer’s back door – are usually horrendous. But most of the time, these games are also extremely cheap, or even free. They may not be diamonds, but at least they don’t cost as much as diamonds. In contrast, triple-A games are far more expensive, but are also frequently criticized for not being worth their price. Shovelware games are criticized for being bad, but are inevitably waved off with, “Well, you get what you pay for.”

In fact, many of these games exist almost entirely due to the fact that game development is more accessible. Hobbyists can get their feet wet and find out where they fall short without dropping too much of a budget into something that may flop. Additionally, many hobby projects turn out to be outstanding for what they are. Accessibility can surely breed low-quality content, but high-quality content will shine through and last longer. Gems hidden in the bog of ugly messes stand out and become popular, just as many artists and musicians do. When every song on the radio begins to sound the same, one that genuinely sounds new and fresh will overdrive a musician to the top of the charts. The same thing happens with these small-scale indie games.

Indie games are becoming increasingly popular in the eyes of most reviewers. Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, Celeste, and many more have all been praised for being beautiful, fun games, and they’ve all been developed in just the last few years. Indie games are sweeping through the markets, showing up on every platform, and, since they’re fairly cheap, gamers and reviewers alike are happily claiming that they are worth buying, playing, and supporting.

The same cannot be said of the triple-A market. The publisher EA, one of the few mega-corporations behind game development, is notorious for releasing games of sub-par quality chock full of microtransactions on top of high base-game prices. The Sims series, one of their forefront staples, has hundreds of DLC packs, and those packs average at $30 - half the price of the base game. Other developers, like Bethesda and Ubisoft, are ridiculed for releasing “unfinished” games. Bethesda’s Fallout series and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series are full of bugs and glitches, and are often required to make updates and patches in order to push the games into what players call “suitable for sale” territory.

Still, not all indie games stand out. Some try their best and fall very flat. Mighty No. 9, a highly anticipated, Mega-Man-inspired Kickstarter game, was full of bugs and glitches in place of any good story or gameplay. And on the flipside, triple-A, high-budget games do not always come out as trash. There is, after all, a reason the triple-A developers are called triple-A. In general, many fans have high hopes from big-budget games; they are meant to be beautiful, powerful, fun works of art. For example, Nintendo is very well-known for putting out amazing works, to the point that “Nintendo Polish” is expected as their norm. However, that polish adds extra dollars to the pricetag, and, regrettably, Nintendo does not always live up to the the term. Lately, many of the powerful developers have been “slacking off,” and the independent devs are filling in the holes. More and more, indie games are being praised, and triple-A’s are being criticized. Again, it’s not always true, but it’s becoming more true as time goes on.

Artists through the ages have used writing, painting, movies, music, and more to express themselves. Today, they are adding game development to the list. Development in the early years of the gaming age required high levels of technical knowledge and skill, but nowadays, it has changed enough that one can take it on as a hobby. Anyone who can draw, write, or express themselves are able to get into game development.

Because the cost of getting into game development is almost nothing, if you’re willing to make assets on your own, you can start. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and start.