Disaster detector is a game where you manage the income of a city in preparation for disasters you have to predict, the player is persuaded by knowing they are the only one who can make a difference and you only have limited funds to make the right decisions. It’s a fun game in terms of interactivity, as the game requires you to analyse and make choices and makes you feel good when you predict the correct disaster incoming. However it is a realistic situation conveyed in a cartoon style game, teaching how unpredictable natural disasters are and the difficulty behind keeping people safe from them. The game makes you feel better off knowing how these situations are handled, and teaches how you can identify the general traits of a natural disaster e.g. correlating wind high speed with low air pressure signifies a tornado in the future. Another mechanic shows townspeople calling in to help you from time to time, letting you know that you too can assist in predicting natural disasters if you know what they are in the real world.
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Barrel Texturing – Substance Painter
For practice I textured my barrel for a gas company called Texaco, this attempt showed me how easy it is to overdo the damage and how much realism it takes away from it being that way. I feel the depth of the marks made don’t really correlate or make sense to be damaged in that way and with such severity. I feel the subtle scratches along the white areas is the most effective, and I took this idea along to the final texturing idea.
Looking and working from real life examples, I’ve textured my barrel using the Havana brand. Taking care to understand that a barrel containing edible substances wouldn’t end up in many places where it would take severe damage. I made the barrel look a bit beaten up from transportation, and added liquid damage from the elements.
Using photoshop I created the logo, scripture, and graffiti and used them as stickers in Substance painter. In hindsight, I could have modeled my barrel in a less industrial fashion if I had thought ahead of how I was going to texture it, resulting in a more realistically styled barrel.
Flow In Minecraft
I feel Minecraft is a game where I have experienced flow as it keeps you as the player busy with the choices you have made, the prompts of the game are your surroundings; seeing a tree is a prompt to knock it down, seeing mountains prompts you to climb, caves to explore, monsters to fight or run away from.
The game is clever in getting you to feel like these choices are your own, the dangers in the night mean you need shelter and weaponry; a farm to keep yourself fed. But this is only in the beginning, it allows you choose your tasks and gives you creative freedom with them, this will have you playing for hours without realizing, driven by your own ideas and ambitions.
An entire day is 20 minutes if you don’t sleep through the night, and with the tasks you’re setting yourself throughout the day, the time seems to fly, By then you’ve pushed your tasks to the next day or worked through the night. A key part of Minecraft is of course mining, where you usually don’t see the light of day; there is no telling what time it is (excusing an in-game clock) leaving you oblivious to how many day cycles you’ve spent down in the dark.
The game limits you by your own progression, and your progression is down to you, your motivation is to stay alive and to do that more easily you upgrade your gear and create somewhere to feel safe. The fact that the game is so open to the choices you can make, creates an area where flow is easy to feel. Nowhere is cordoned off to you as the player, and you know this from the endless horizon of forests and seas you see everywhere you go.
The best way to experience flow in Minecraft is in silence where you’re subject to just the sounds the game gives you, like your footsteps in the grass and the melodies together creating a mellow vibe that evokes curiosity. The game will bring the rest, keeping you engrossed for hours.
Computer Game Studies: The Field
Reading the article I see the message being that Games Studies as a medium is a compressed media of many old and emerging mediums of the time. But while there are clear ties to many other types of media, It’s differences reach too thin and far between each for it to be considered a sub-category medium to any other and should rightfully be studied in its own separate field. Games are a hybrid medium taking interactive storytelling to a new level but not always needing to be either interactive or tell stories, the aspects that would come with the field of games studies vary from each title and could possibly even need categories within itself as trying to place it under another medium would be foolish.
Fields looking to take games sees themselves within it but not in entirety, as the varying social or aesthetic aspects in combination quickly pull them away from the media studies or sociology fields. Games are the only media to be played which is very important to how they’re received, as it brings new explorable angles. Other fields have tried to study games as a sub-medium but even multiple fields are not able to look deep enough while staying within their field, which would leave the study of games condensed and unfulfilled. A medium containing cultural, technological and social aspects is far too vast to not be considered as media worth studying as its own separate field and is still yet to be fully understood.
Organisations
We have been researching organisations for women in the tech industry, to see if their presence and efforts have contributed to the ratio of males to females in hands on roles in the gaming industry. These organisations have been gaining relevance since 2009 to this day, and are still proving to be quite popular. Events by such organisations including DevelopHer, Geek girl meetup and women who code to name a few; arrange talks, workshops, mentoring and networking opportunities mainly from women who have made it in to the industry.
Every year since 2015, for a six month period mentoring programmes are run by DevelopHer focusing on helping women achieve and recognise their various goals. The Developher awards have run since 2015, appreciating women in the tech industry across East Anglia.
“The second DevelopHER awards were attended by more than 200 people, who saw 16 winners crowned from across the region.”
We spoke to Alice Middleton, who won ‘best Newcomer’ 2016. who told us of the vital roles she took part in within her company “Inertia games”as a programmer and other smaller Art based roles. While Inertia games is a small company, this shows women can and do work important roles.
“A lot of people at the beginning were unsure of whether they were doing the right thing. Some of them got new jobs through the mentoring scheme, some of them had been running their own businesses and they got new inspiration and new business leads through the scheme and now their businesses are absolutely flying. For me as a mentor, being able to see the mentees grow was incredibly rewarding.”
Lucy Blair, Director of International Sales & Marketing at The Orchard and DevelopHer mentor.
We believe that these organisations do have an influence seeing as the % of women in the games industry has been shown to have more than doubled between 2009 and 2014, staying consistent until then.
“The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is the largest non-profit membership organisation in the world serving all individuals who create games.”
Every 5 years a quality of life survey is taken by the IGDA, this survey shows statistics of 7.1% being women in the industry in 2009 and 22% 5 years later in 2014, I see the founding and growth of theses organisations to be a part of why this number has grown to be so much bigger. Influencing and inspiring women worldwide to pursue a career in the more technical fields. The idea that games are targeted at a male demographic due to a largely male workforce, seems to be reflecting the emergence of a larger female workforce with adult women being the largest demographic of game consumers at 36%, followed by adult men (35%), Young men (17%) and young women (12%). Source; The ESA, 2014,
“The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is the U.S. association exclusively dedicated to serving the business and public affairs needs of companies that publish computer and video games for video game consoles, handheld devices, personal computers, and the Internet.
In addition to owning and operating E3″
The % dwindling by about 5% in the past 2 years, However there are still more women in the gamer/tech scene than before; not disproving my research one bit.
Organisations are helping women become more knowledgeable and confident in an male dominated industry, allowing them to take on more vital roles.
Photoshop barrel texturing
We took our barrels to photoshop to texture them using stock images with masks and overlaying textures on our models. I found that it’s very easy to do too much damage and corrosion while texturing, making the textures look less realistic and less effective; A way to more accurately represent a damaged barrel is to look for relevant references instead of guessing what should go where without having an understanding of how/why it would look that way.
Barrel modeling
Using Maya we modeled a barrel making use of tools such as scale and mirror geometry, understanding how useful pivot placement is and how to snap between different things.
Lamp modeling
Using Maya we were tasked to model a desk lamp, this task helped me understand the necessity of reference images as they help to create a proportionately scaled model.
The follow up task was to model a lamp of our own, I chose to model a bankers lamp because of it’s varying shapes; It would be similar but a different challenge in itself.
With this model also allowed me to model new things like the pull chain, the bulb and curve edges. Also letting me use lighting, materials and transparency, however I feel the metal supports look quite thin and I have yet to understand how to create the illusion of curves using polygons.
Evaluation
Since we started in September I’ve improved a lot using digital software and gained a good understanding of the process required to produce something of good quality. I found that I don’t show enough of where my ideas come from which makes it’s difficult for people to see where they’ve originated, and that’s something I need to work on. As an artist I’ve been very hyper-critical in the sense that it doesn’t help me improve, and that working from a strong silhouette can provide a very good place to start and create a lot of ideas. I’ve learnt that making mistakes only helps me understand what not to do in later projects and I’m here to be the best I can be, and I’m already seeing improvements from just a couple of weeks. This term has made me eager to learn more and helped me to look at my work from a design stand point, picking and choosing what I like best because there is no wrong way to design. The way we work is very helpful and your final design doesn’t have to be the one you decide to work with, because it’s about the capabilities of the work and what you’re willing to take it to.
CHARACTER PROJECT: STAGE 16 – Final Painting
Anthony Cooper - Artist, Games Art & Design 