#aiemelb

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The end of my first year at AIE

With the final group project coming to an end at first year at AIE as game designer draws to an end. These are some of the things I have learnt this year and some of the things I am thankful for.

I learnt that I am not very good at 3D modeling or art in general, and I was not happy with the results I gave during the art module this year. But through practice I have slowly gotten a better understanding of Maya and I have created a few small models for some personal projects.

I loved the whole concept of Narrative design and enjoy the Narrative Module this year the most. Understanding how a player will play the game you make and learning how to lead them is something I strive to understand more and have been practicing this a lot through personal projects at home and testing it on family and friends. 

I enjoyed my first year at AIE studying game design immensely. I am most thankful to both Shane and Ben who gave me a lot of important advise throughout the year and I look forward to what is to come next.

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Side Project: Update 01

In my spare time I have been working on a small side project. A small turn based strategy game

With the map fully completed and each individual province on the map can be selected on it’s own. It is now time to write up a few scripts that will allow me to move the army and fleet units around the board from province to province.

I will if I can need to find a way to make the land rise up with terrain but still be an individual province if possible, I would also try to do this with the sea zones giving the map a more lively feel instead of just a flat board.

I look forward to researching what I am able to do and sharing my progress.

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The Noodling Sell Sheet

With our presentation to the industry professional panel our game needed some sell sheets made up to go along with our presentation.

The format we went with was to try to immediately get the person looking at this sell sheet to understand our game is meant to be a silly wacky kind of game. 

The backing of the sell sheet shows off what is expected in our game as well as a little bit of concept art to give the person the idea of what the game arena they are playing in will look like.

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Team Logo and Name

Our team has finally agreed on the logo we are all happy to use, following our team name ‘Bear With Me’ our artist created a very awesome logo for it.

Of the five team logo concepts the artist came up with for us we all voted this on to be the best.

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Stamping every card

After creating the layout for my business card I decided that on the back of each card I would stamp a studio logo instead of just having it printed on the back. I am pretty happy with how the layout for the stamp itself came out.

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What have I learnt from this project

I have learnt a lot about the different disciplines during a game development project. What the programmers need focus on compared to what the artists and the designers should be doing with their time.

During this project I helped manage the entire team along with my Producer, we learnt the hard way that time needs to be managed properly. Our team wanted two weeks trying to create real physics for our combat. these two weeks could have been used to fix other problems that were already in our game.

As well as other issues that happened with the artists and us designers. At the end of this project we have all come together and we are all happy with the outcome. For next time though time management will be a very high priority.

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Almost at Gold

With only a few hours to go our team has come together to get our game over the line. Adding the audio together in the game and the rest if the artists assets.

The last thing on the teams check list to finish is the game trailer, something that we all decided should be done once the game is completed and ready to submit. It has been a lot of fun coming together and working with the team we had. our programmers were the best as were our artists. I would love to get together again at some point and try to make another game if we all ever had the chance.  

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512 Game: Star Citizen

Another game from the 512 list of games every game designer should know that was given to us by our teachers from AIE. I pledged to the game Star Citizen late last year and have only played it a few times. But I recently re downloaded it and tried it out again. 

Star Citizen is an extremely ambitious space trading, exploration and combat game. The game is an open persistent universe where players can do almost anything they want to.

I bought a multiplayer ship to play with family. It is a large cargo ship which would allow me to become a trader in space if I wanted to or I could buy the equipment to change my ship into a exploration vehicle for me to find new planets or worm holes that will port me to new galaxies.

I also have the ability to buy armaments for my ship and become a pirate who could attack NPCs or other players. Also a nice feature added to the game is the ability to board other players ships and take them over. Something I have tried only once.

The game has still a lot of work to go through before it becomes what they say it will. It is planned to come out in modules, with only two out of the five modules out at the moment. I am looking forward to see how good this game really can be.