Job research/ ideal job

During my research of the games industry i discovered these 5 useful sites that offer varied job roles in different gaming corporations. Although many offer job roles in different countries entirely. Here are the following sites:

https://www.gamesjobsdirect.com/

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/

https://app.hiive.co.uk/job-roles/games/departments/all/

https://www.indeed.co.uk/Games-Industry-jobs#

http://creativeskillset.org/creative_industries/games

From my research I have concluded that i would like to be game designer. I would like to have this role in the game industry as it allows you to use creativity to come up with different game ideas and different creative aspects for the game you’re creating. This role also gives you overall control on the project and its direction. I will also be able to plan the game itself, i.e its setting, structure, rules, story flow, characters, the objects, props, devices available to the characters, interface design and modes of play.

As a game designer i will have to develop and improve a wide range of skills in order to be successful. This includes being able to: communicate and collaborate with the many different departments, accept feedback, present ideas confidently, be imaginative and creative, have visual design skills and programming skills and many other different skills. I will also have to be able to communicate and direct many different departments into the right direction in order to successfully co-ordinate the team into the right direction. The approximate salary for a game designer is £98,497. Becoming a game designer, however, is difficult as it requires at least 3-4 years in the game industry in order to acquire knowledge of the industry and how it works. It helps greatly if you have degree in computer games design and various other courses.

In order to improve my chances of obtaining this role in the future I must work hard in my current Interactive media and games course in order to achieve high grades. This will allow me to go into further education, in the future, and give me a greater chance to obtain this role.

Story flow chart

The game starts inside the freak tent where our main protagonist, Rommy (Romeo), meets the freakette, Julia (Juliet). Winning the heart of Julia is the main objective for the player and the innocent protagonist Rommy. The main protagonist, that has fallen madly in love with the freakette preforms arduous tasks of retrieval for the fair lady; this is inn order for Rommy to get a better standing and relationship with the freakette. He will traverse through the perilous circus during both day and night for his love. Despite the fact that during the day he will be discriminated against by the people of the day and hunted down by his schizophrenic imaginings of the night. The night will slowly wither away his sanity, whilst the day shall physically hurt the frail freak. Rommy, not being one for confrontation, will use his sling shot to briefly stun the enemy and escape whilst using his flashlight to light the way. Something always feels off however with the owner of the circus, be it day or night, his mere presence is nightmarish.

Creating audio and Modifying sound

We were tasked with creating various different sounds for our different and individual games. We had to use resources around the college. The tools used around the college can vary from simple rocks to the complex piano. Even the simplest of sounds can be edited and modified to create a completely different sound. For example for one of the sounds we sprinkled rocks into a puddle to create a light yet heavy sound. I then took this sound and made it sound as if flesh was being eaten and bones were being broken.

Unit 1 – Game art-style research

Photorealism:

Photorealism is a type of art-style for games where the graphics look so life-like that it looks like a photo. This type of art-style is used most commonly through big titles and game companies like EA. Games use this art-style to bring realism and weight to their games. Seeing realistic faces allow the player to connect with the character more. Photorealism can make scenery look more appealing and pleasing to the eye; this makes the experience more enjoyable for the player. Some believe that the common use of photo realistic graphics will e the death of story and substance in future games as the main focus will be around graphics.

Cel Shading:

Cel shading is when the texture of an object is made to look like a comic book or hand-drawn image. This is done by using flat colours to give it the impression of it being hand drawn. This type of art style has become more popular after the release of the infamous borderlands. The art style itself is quite simplistic in how it uses flat colours and bold outlines to create the comic book feeling. This type of art style is mainly used to appeal to older audiences that grew up with comic books. The target audience feels the nostalgia of reading comic books when they were younger and thus associates that feeling with games that use the same art style. The nostalgia brings back good memories and associates those feelings with the games therefore making the games more enjoyable.

Abstraction:

Abstract art style often makes use of a lot of lines and geometric shapes that don’t resemble any real-life objects. Games like geometry wars combine a neon type colour scheme again for nostalgia purposes. The neon colour scheme gives the game an 80’s type vibe. This art style is mainly used for arcade type games. Big game titles will most likely not use abstract, as it is abstract, and abstract can be interpreted in different ways by different people. The art style doesn’t just use the neon colour scheme. This type of art style can also use a vivid and relaxing colour scheme. An example of this would be Flow.

This game uses more calming colours to match the flow and progression of the game. the use of subtle colours calm and soothe the player allowing them to relax. These subtle colours were purposely used to create this effect. The shapes are also a lot more soft in comparison to geometry wars that has sharp, straight shapes. These colours and shapes compliment each other greatly, as it creates a light and soft tone.

Exaggeration:

The exaggeration art style is primarily used in anime and manga, they exaggerate features of humans or environments. Games using this type of art style mainly became popular after the success of multiple anime series and final fantasy. Games like street fighter have always been popular but recently adopted this type of art style into their new games to appeal to wider target audience. This art style look similar to cel shading in how it looks hand drawn, with the bold black lines. However the colour scheme often differs as games like street fighter use more vibrant colours to stand out. The exaggeration can be seen in the picture above. Some have incredibly big bodies with massive models whilst others look like green ogres. The exaggerated art style is also loosely based on photorealism. The art style has been enhanced and modified to represent something that could be realistic but is overly done. Again, the massive muscles.

 

Unit 1 – Construct 2

Today we learned how to use some of the basics in Construct 2 by creating a small and basic game. We made a basic top-down 2D shooter where the player is tasked with killing the monsters.

Progress

We used a game engine that was “object orientated”. This meant that there was no raw coding to be done; we just had to apply “events” and “actions” to different objects and sprites. These events allowed the various objects to preform different actions and tasks within the small shooting game.

The engine was a grid based engine, which means the X and Y axis was constantly used throughout the making of this game. We had to use this axis to decide where the monster and player will face throughout the game.

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I had to use events to decide where the player would be looking at through the course of the game. In this case the player will continuously look at the mouse icon and use the arrow keys to move. I also had to make the bullet travel at a different speed and appear out of the players gun rather than the middle, where it originally came from. I switched the origin of the bullet using the image point tool and selecting it as the barrel of the players gun. I had to make sure that the bullet didn’t travel endlessly off the layout, otherwise it would continuously take up memory space and slow down the game. In order to prevent this I had to make sure the bullet destroyed itself as soon as it went off the layout.

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Animation Research

Today we were learning the history of animation. For example, animation has evolved over the years from hand-drawn animation and clay-models  to digitally drawn animations and 3D computer animation. Two animators that give evidence to how animation has evolved is the famous Walt Disney’s early animations such as the “Steamboat Willie” and Pendleton wards popular cartoon show “Adventure Time”.

Walt Disney

Walt Disney gained heavy influence from his small-town life growing up in Chicago. In 1906 Walt attended Park elementary school. The small-town Walt grew up in is Marceline of Missouri. The small-town life allowed Walt to indulge in drawing animals and strengthening his imagination. This exposure to rural life has aided Walt throughout his career, heavily influencing many of his animations. At a young age he would also take part in theater by preforming little skits at the Kansas City Art Institute. Walt Disney’s major theme mainly consist of barnyard animals like mice and cows and small town life.

Unit 2 – Emily Mulenga

Today we went to the Firstsite art gallery to view Emily Mulengas digital art-work and understand the reasoning behind her choices in the art-work. We went to see the “taking up space” exhibition.

Most of her exhibition revolved around the representation of women, black women and black people in different forms of media. In different forms of media black people are mainly viewed as thugs/gangsters that cause trouble and break the law. This is obviously a negative representation of black people. In other words, these are stereotypes. Woman, as a whole, are often over-sexualised with unrealistic body expectations in games and other forms of media to appeal to the male audience. This is done to make the product seem more appealing to the audience in order to get them to buy the product.

This piece of artwork reinforces the stereotypical idea of black people driving arrogantly through the streets and being obnoxious to their surroundings. It also gives off this thug/gangster type feel. Later on in Emily’s artwork, it shifts to the 3D model behaving as a regular member of society, sleeping calmly at home just relaxing. The purpose of this artwork was to shatter the stereotypical view of black women/people being these arrogant brutal thugs, in various forms of media such as gaming.

Monster Archetypes

There are many different variations of monster archetypes; for example, there’s more than one version of zombie or robot. There are different types of unique monsters, like the stereotypical zombie to the homicidal A.I. The many different monster archetypes scare people in their own individual ways. An example would be people being scared of how witches could transform/ harm them whilst zombies create the fear of becoming infected and becoming a mindless zombie.

Zombies:

Zombies are a staple of horror monsters. A lot of horror films/games feature zombies or zombie-like creatures as their main problem or enemy. people don’t usually fear a zombie when they’re by themselves because they’re more vulnerable and easy to deal with. However, zombies become incredibly scary when they’re in massive hordes, swarming towards the playable character/main protagonist. There’s also the great fear of becoming infected by them and losing yourself to the infection.

Source: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-makes-zombies-so-scary-hint-it-s-not-the-brain-eating

Ghosts:

Ghosts are, again, a well-known horror stereotype. There are many famous films that include ghosts and portray them in different ways. For example, the popular kids film Casper portray ghosts in a gentle light in how they’re misunderstood and kind. Ghostbusters portray ghosts as goofy yet still a danger to humans. Whilst, movies like paranormal activity and poltergeist portray ghosts as terrifying invisible beings that only wish to harm you and wither your sanity. This is how the invisible apparitions are often portrayed in movies. Ghosts don’t have quite a large place as zombies in games, but still hold a great presence in different games.

Ghosts are primarily scary due to them being unseen but are still able to interact with physical objects/people in a psychological or physical way. People are usually scared of ghosts because of their unknown capabilities and the controversy of whether they actually exist or not.

Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/should-you-be-afraid-of-ghosts-2594056

 

Robots:

Robots aren’t as common as zombies or ghosts in the horror genre. A fear of robots isn’t that common due to the constant use of technology in everyday lives. People are mostly scared of robots if they have fear of the future of technology. A.I and Synths however are much more terrifying than a regular robot. A.I are scary mainly because they lure in the audience with their human-like personality or human/lively voice (both lead the human/individual into a false sense of trust then killing or torturing them due to an error with logic or glitch. It’s also due to the fact that they lack the ability to feel emotion or empathy towards anything, mainly following logic. A famous stereotype of A.I is them being programmed with the logic of protecting humans the best way possible. This usually leads to the conclusion of protecting humans from other humans by killing them off before they have to suffer.

Synths are scary due to their human-like appearance yet twisted personality and, again, lack of emotion. All forms of robots follow a prime directive that gives them purpose. Synths have inhuman strength that allows them to easily destroy anything. Synths are usually blank slates that are given orders to follow without question. This aspect of them makes them scary as they can preform any order no matter what, even if it meant killing somebody. If, say, a corrupt A.I hacks into the synths minds and ordered them to slaughter all humans around them, nothing would stop them. A.I are intelligent and can form plans to counter-act anything. They can calculate many different things in a second. Robots efficiency is what makes them scary.

Source: http://science.howstuffworks.com/realistic-robots-creepy.htm

Unit 1 figuring out our target audience and Pegi rating:

Primary audience: Our primary audience will be 12-16 year old male, students. We have chosen 12-16 year olds because this way we will be able to reach a wider target audience. the extended age range also helps the target audience relate to our game. the moral of our game is the protagonist being rejected and discriminated from society purely because of the way he looks. Teenagers going through puberty cause them to have multiple mood swings and have a great interest in how they are viewed socially, i.e the way they look/appear. This social interest will allow them to relate to our main protagonist who’s ridiculed and attacked purely because of the way he looks. Therefore the 12-16 range is perfect for this effect as 12 year olds are just hitting puberty and are beginning to learn what its like, whilst 16 year olds are drawing near to the end of puberty and can fully understand how cruel puberty can be.

We have made the pegi rating a 12 because the violence shown within the game are directed towards fictional fantasy characters. This is allowed in the pegi 12 rating. At pegi 12 graphic injury is also allowed to be shown and depicted in our horror game. By also having the game rated at pegi 12, we can make the game more fun and enjoyable rather than a pegi 16 rated game. The tone can be more light than serious.

Secondary audience: Our secondary audience will be 20+ year old male students that attend university. We have chosen 20+ year olds due to nostalgia purposes. For examples people who were gaming in the 90’s or early 20th century would have grown up with pixel games being their main source of entertainment. The sense of nostalgia will help older audiences get in the mood to play our game. The reason why we chose adults that attend university is because they will often find themselves wanting to spend some free time doing something they enjoy. Due to their busy schedule at university they will want to spend some time feeling nostalgia through small pixel games that can give them a bit of a thrill.

Unit 1 – Horror questionnaire

Horror Questionnaire

We needed to conduct primary research in order to construct our game to the needs of our target audience. The questionnaire is vital to our games success as it provides valuable information for what to use in our game; like what type of scares to use in our game to effectively creep people out or make people feel fear.