Monday, August 31, 2015

Game Design Intro Video

https://youtu.be/ZXpAk1i-CKM

The link shared above is my video that I made with a voice over. This video is of me rock climbing at Lake Juliette near Macon Georgia on 28 August 2015. I wanted to get a little bit of outdoors time and I figured that this video was a great way to accomplish two things at one time.

Sunday, August 30, 2015

 The picture to the left is of my girlfriend and I at the Doctor Who convention in Tampa Florida in 2013. In class you brought up Doctor Who multiple times which I thought was funny because it is one of my favorite shows. I wasn't to sure what you meant by images created. I have never done actual graphic art, but I have used photoshop for more basic photo editing because I am an aspiring photographer. I have used Autocad and SolidWorks for many drafting projects throughout the years, but most of it was very geometric.
The second picture is one that I took 20 May 2014 when I climbed Mt. Hood in Oregon. This is one of my favorite pictures because of how everything lines up. If you look to the left you see the clouds running perpendicular to the ground whereas the the mountain is running down towards the ground in a pretty gradual slope.

My two favorite games

One of my favorite games of all time is Castle Crashers (http://www.castlecrashers.com/). It is a fun side-scroll game where you have "knights" and are going to save a princess. It really brings back those early memories of Mario, but with a more modern appeal. A good reason that I like the game is the fact that there are appealing graphics. It is not like most games because of it's un-serious manner throughout the game. You never feel that sense of urgency because the friendly and funny way the game is, but when there is that sense of danger it could never be more fun. With simple controls and a large amount selection of weapons and accessors it really makes you strive to achieve more.

Another game I enjoy playing is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty_4:_Modern_Warfare). The fact that they don't even have a website for this game anymore shows how dated it really is. It is by far the best game I have ever played. I think millions of people would agree that the Call of Duty franchise is one of the best and most successful ever, but in my opinion they are wrong in some aspects. In class we talked about the uncanny valley where the characters begin to look real where they are then not as aesthetically pleasing. In this instance of Call of Duty when they hit Call of Duty 4 they had hit the maximum peak, but once they went over that they started to become to complicated and unrealistic. They had a perfect mixture of graphics and simplicity in play that could not be topped. Once the games started having to many different items and the graphics were so intense the game lost all sense of the word game. That is why one of the best games in history now has all of its ancestors sitting the uncanny valley.

As you can tell by my choices of which games I enjoy the most you could probably assume I do not play video games anymore, which is true. It is not that I do not like video games, I have just grown out of them. I am still probably one of your most interested students because I am more interested in all aspects of game design. It is like the metaphor that a dealer should never use their own stuff.