VFS GD 25 – Month: 05

Posted by Matheus Pitillo on Jun 1, 2012 in Life at VFS | 2 comments

Hey guys, how are you all? It’s incredible how the days are passing so fast, and we are almost in the end of Term 3. Yeah! Already. :O The fifth month of classes is over and here I am to do – like always – a quick review of classes and assignments. First of all, Term 3 has been AWESOME. The best one in my opinion until now. Maybe because now we can focus exactly in the classes that we most like. But I just know that I’m really enjoying so far, and we have been doing great projects.

Based on my classes and streamings that I’ve been taking, we had the following projects / assignments during this term:

Mobile & Social Design
Basically class is focused in Mobile Design – duhh – as the name of the class already says. We had an introduction about mobile and gaming experiences, with the differences between mobile / handheld and console / PC, with the whole background history of handheld gaming devices. After that, the class start to focus more in casual gaming and social networks. But one of the best points of the class is that recently we are receiving people from the game industry every class, so we can have more info about the field and even having a Q&A time.

• Assignments:
• No assignments until now

Detailed Design Documents
One of the “hardest” class in this term, we are writing our Detailed Design Document, focused in one of our games that we pitched before in one of the Pre-Production classes. Different from the well-knowed pitch documents, the DDD is a deep document with the whole details of our game, since game camera until controllers, interface, levels etc. Every week we need to submit a new part of the document, until reach the end. The game that I chose to write about was webRain.

• Assignments:
• Concept & Three C’s;
• Game Mechanics;
• Game Modes and Progression

Game Interface Design
The class started with an introduction of Game Interface and explained how flowcharts works. Everything that we’ve been doing in this class is directly related with our DDD, in a way that all interfaces that we creates are for the game that we are detailing in the document. We did an Interaction Design Document, with wireframes and how the interface works in our games, and after that a Front End Mockups of three of our game screens. For now, the class is more focused in the implementation of these interfaces inside the games, using Flash.

• Assignments:
• Interaction Design Document;
• Front End Mockups

Level Design 2
A veeeery hard streaming, in Level Design 2 classes we’ve been developing all types of Game Levels. We learned about CTF Design Theory, followed by one Workshop and some Tools information. The first level was a CTF (Capture the Flag) level – as I already posted here in my website before – and now we are developing our own Single Player level. For this term the Single Player is only the first Milestone, but even so is a lot of work, including documentation, whitebox, and game puzzles.

• Assignments:
• CTF Level;
• Single Player Milestone

Environmental Level Design
This class is much focused in the environmental part of Level Design, explaining more about visual prototyping, landmarks, art pass, materials, scene composition, functional lighting and final polish. For this class we received a white box level totally in blank, and we are suppose to prop dress the level from start to finish. I will post more details about this project later.

• Assignments:
• Exterior Level Milestone;
• Exterior Level

3D Modeling 1
We are finally having good classes with Maya. We had again one introduction of the software, poly modelling, texturing tools and object modelling with basic detailing. Until now the only assignment was to Model a Futuristic Apartment, and then to open the meshes and texturize it.

• Assignments:
• Create a Futuristic Apartment

Environment & Lighting
Maybe one of the biggest surprises in this term, the Lighting class is amazing. And also the incredible instructor Vincent Chi. I will give more details about this class in the next post in my website, but for now I can say that we learned a lot about the purpose and function of lighting, the power of it, the colour of lighting, shaders, texture, light shapes, light pools, shadow, fog and post colour tinging. Basically, every class we take one of our levels on UDK, and we study a new type of lighting, based in one visual target that we liked.

• Assignments:
• Lighting Visual Target

And that was the Month 5 of classes. It may look easier compared to the previous terms, since we had less assignments, but believe me, it’s too hard as the previous ones. Each one of those assignments requires to the students much more time and ability. But I’m pretty satisfied with all the result that I’m having.

GD22 Final Game Projects
In the last Wednesday we had the GD22 Final Game Projects Presentation at school. Five different projects were presented. Between then we had: Catalyst Zero, In Stitches, Lifted, Pulse and The Mask of QI. I don’t want to give a directly and deep opinion about those games, so I will just say some things that I really noticed about.

From left to right: Catalyst Zero, In Stitches, Lifted, Pulse and The Mask of QI

All games of GD22 was developed using Unity3D Engine. I liked how different each of the projects are, but as always, one or two projects had more highlights than the others. We could see nice art direction, great scenarios and even well done games, but the point is that some of those games looks like more of the same, and I think that is some of the negative points of GD22 Final Game Projects. Unfortunately I think I was expecting more, and that’s sad to say. But of course this is just my opinion. In overall they did an amazing job and all teams presented very well the games to us. Congrats! 😀

Between the games presented, the ones who called more my attention was Lifted and Pulse. Lifted because it showed as a very complete game, with a lot of game modes and pretty much polished. I loved the whole game interface, the levels, challenges, art direction and the gameplay. For me was the one who had the better gameplay experience. And Pulse… what to say about Pulse? The game has an amazing art direction and a very innovative gameplay. The whole thing that the player controls a blind girl is great and finally some team decided to explore this concept that we are always listening in some game pitches. I loved how brave the team was to go ahead with the idea, and they ended up doing one awesome job. The game is beautiful.

I hope you guys take a time to check the games online and for any comment just leave it here in my blog, ok? Thank you again for your visit. Stay tuned and see you soon.