Quit walking! Its time to sprint.

A lot has happened this week and I’ve changed a lot of my thought processes. I’m a bit sad that I couldn’t keep up with my studies over this last week. But ya gotta do, what ya gotta do. Especially when it comes to paying the bills. On the plus side my birthday is coming up and my wife has given me the go head to upgrade my current desktop rig. What will I upgrade….

Updating My Rig

• Fractal Define S
• Intel I5-4690k
• MSI Classified
• 16gb HyperX Savage
• EVGA GTX 1080
• Mushkin Enhanced 512gb SSD
• 7200RPM Unknown 700gb HDD
• Blackweb Keyboard and Final Gaming mouse
• One 24″ LG monitor and Two 17″ LG monitors

Upgrades? There’s still a lot I wish to upgrade. My storage is lacking. I could definitely use a few more terabytes of storage. However I could also use a CPU upgrade. So what am I going to upgrade first? Monitors…

Of all things why the monitors? Currently the two 17″ are very lacking. It’s making it hard to follow tutorials because they barely run 720p. Its not sharp and makes it hard to read when there is a “read a long”. That being said, I ordered two more 24″ LG monitors to replace the two 17″ monitors.

My plan for my next upgrade is to wait until I’m closer to my game design goal. Kinda like an incentive to work harder.

GameDev Progress

My friend came up to me the 1st of May and said class had started. He seems pretty excited. I can’t wait to see how it turns out for him. But as for me. I still want to completely surpass him. I want to launch my first game before he graduates in the next 2 years.

Its kinda funny how things can kinda just fall into place. I’ve decided to take another crack at udemy. Like I said before I’m not much for classroom settings. But the other day I got an email saying that Udemy was having a site wide sale. So I figured why not check it out and that’s when I found a course that was 22 hours long that taught nothing but game art. Its teaching everything from concept art to game assets and even character design. The best part is the teacher has had 10 years of experience in game art. Its exciting to learn from a creator.

My goal for today and tomorrow is to at least get through 10 hours of the course. Then finish it the next day off I get. Once I finish the course I will post again what I think and whether or not it was worth the money.

Until then have an awesome week!

Progress Report: Research for Stage 1

PROGRESS!!! This week has been awesome! I spent everyday after work researching for the first stage of my game development. It would appear there wasn’t many tutorials on creating characters from start to finish. But I did find some awesome tutorials to at least learn the fundamentals (Creating, Rigging and animating). That’s not going to stop me. Now that I’ve got the next few days off its time to buckle down and learn the materials I’ve acquired.

Stage 1: Research

As I mentioned before I found it was rather difficult to find game character design tutorials. Perhaps I’m to critical when it comes to my research. When doing the research I had one goal in my mind. I wanted to create the hero for my first game.  I wasn’t looking to piece together information.

I’m okay with that though at the very least I’ve got a starting point. Beginning with this tutorial playlist.

In the tutorial not only does teach modelling, texturing and rigging. There’s also a walking and running cycle episode. Although this entire playlist is only 2 hours long. I feel like this will be a good step forward!

Stage 1: Getting Start!

Unfortunately, I will have to wait till I wake up to start the tutorial. Right now I’ve gotta stay on my sleep schedule for my night job. But you can bet as soon as I wake up I’ll be hitting the books.

After the tutorial I’ll practice what I’ve learned and sharpen my skills and when Thursday rolls around I will post my progress

But until then,
Thanks for reading.

Growing Pains

It would seem the more I learn about game design the more difficult it becomes, at least for me. I’ve reach the conclusion that I need a “game” plan and to create my first game.

This outcome was realized when a few buddies at my work told me they were enrolling in Full Sail University for game design. I see the appeal of going through school to learn game design.  But as I stated in a past blog a school curriculum is just not for me. But that being said I also have my pride to take into consideration.

I cannot allow my coworkers to beat me. So, I’m going to take a stand and give myself until the 1st of 2018 to make some substantial progress. If not I will also attend FSU. So its time to make a game plan and set some goals.

The Game Plan

I don’t want to waste time. The more time that passes the more things change in the gaming industry. If I’m not going to hit the ground running I might as well learn game development and design as a hobby.

What is my plan of attack? I’m going to change my learning method up a bit. Let’s turn game design into a pyramid chart. Starting with the easiest subjects and working my way to the more difficult.

Character Design – The first stage, I will learn how to create different creatures and characters for my games. During this stage I will learn basic modeling fundamentals, animation skills and the texturing process.

Asset Design – During this stage I will learn to create the assets I will need for my game. On top of that, I will learn more advanced modeling and texturing skills. All while learning level design.

Code / Mechanics – The final stage, during this stage I will be learning C++ and some common game mechanics. Everything from controlling the hero to interacting with the environment.

First Goal

The first game I’m going to create is a hack’n slash. The hero of choice will be a knight. So, first create a knight, second rigging and third animate him. I hope to have a prototype by the end of this month. To keep myself honest I will blog every Thursday and Monday to keep track of my progress. My expectations are to have a complete character by the end of May. But for now we will see.

Thank you so very much!

I want to take the time to thank you, the reader. I really appreciate you taking the time to read my ramblings. Logging into my wordpress account and seeing all the notifications is really up lifting.

Thank you for being awesome!

The Art Of Scenery

6 days into April. Its been quite a roller coaster. It would seem life is testing my resolve. Since my last blog post there hasn’t been any progress when it comes to learning blender and creating video games. I have thought about what direction to take first and it has been decided. My first step will be dabbling in level design.

What’s in a scene

Level design, at least in my mind, is just setting the stage for the players to react and explore. The assets in the scene should make the player feel something. Whether that emotion is joy, excitement or despair. The scenery sets the tone of the stage.

Above is a screenshot of BioShock. Here you can see the developer was going for a dreary, despair feeling. In the game itself you feel very isolated and the only hope you have is the voice on the radio. As I played through the level it made me feel anxious. Walking into this dark area with a corpse under an over grown tree made me keep my guard up. I didn’t want to fall to the same fate as the unlucky soul. It was beautifully terrifying.

Where do I start?

In order to move forward I require the right mindset. “Where do I start?” You would think its as simple as looking up tutorials for level design. But for me, I wanted to break it down further.

The stage I’m going to create will be a forest area. So what better place to start than forest type assets. Here is an example of a tree style I’m playing around with. The tutorial I watched was rather interesting. You can check it out here if you wish. Next I need to learn to create leaves, bushes, flowers, mushrooms, etc. Anything that I can think of seeing in a forest. But, I must bare in mind to keep it low poly or at least light weight enough to not stress out a computers hardware. My overall goal is to create a game that can be played on a “potato”.

The Plan

The overall goal is to have the know-how to create a forest scene. But I’m going to keep the bar quite a bit lower for this week. For now, I will focus on learning to create forest assets and expand on that. The questions I have in my mind are, what do I want the forest to feel like? What functionality will it have? Will the plant life interact with the player?

Answers to come later, but for now thanks for reading.

The Beginning Of My Journey

I’m finding learning blender to be a challenge. In my early stages of learning I tried many different tutorials. It’s kind of like I was spinning my wheels but not getting any traction. So then I decided to commit to an online blender course. I paid for the course and off I went learning the necessary information to become a game developer.

The Road Block

Unfortunately, Being to person I am. I didn’t do well with step by step curriculum. Didn’t like school while I was in it and wasn’t about to start now. I may have been at home but the course still felt to much like school work.

This was very hard for me. The feeling of dread, knowing that the course was my “easy” way to start learning game development. Yet the thought of sitting at my computer watch the lectures and following the instructions made me sick. It made me feel like I wasn’t working on my overall goal.

Moving Forward

How do I move forward? I spent 2 whole months putting off my learning because of my stubbornness. Then I came across this video.

It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was time to start making games. Not just learning to create random models that I would never use again. It’s time to make a plan and stick to it.

The Plan

First I must create a list of all the game ideas I’ve had. Then take that list and start with the most simplistic ideas. Next I need to narrow it down further to a single simplistic game that wouldn’t be to difficult to make. Something with not very many mechanics but just enough to challenge me to learn more.

Now that I have it I will put all of my efforts into learning to create the assets, scenes and so on.

What is the game? Well that will be revealed later…