Game Jams and updates!

So, I know I don't update my blog often. It’s like a once a year thing but this site is mainly for a portfolio for game design, game art, and digital art that I do. In that spirit, I wanted to let you know that I have updated the portfolio part of this site with information and links to the Game Jams that I was able to contribute to. The two Game Jam games I am most proud of were Enlightenment and The Awkward Position. I contributed 3D art that I created in Maya for game assets for both titles. With Enlightenment, I was able to write, take the teams individual ideas and craft a story out of it, lend my voice to the project and do the majority of the male voice over work for the game.

Please see my portfolio section to find links to the games if you would like to give them a try!

The last time I updated this blog I mentioned that I had started a Star Trek Podcast Called Synthaholics. The podcast is going well! We put out weekly episodes and have recently transitioned from a Sunday release date to a Tuesday release date. We just released our 51st episode, and we have had several guests join us on the show including Todd Shawn Tei, Walter Koenig, Ashley Robinson, Jason Inman, Larry Nemecek, and Guy Davis. Most of them have been on the show more than once! March 30th will be our one year Anniversary for the show!

I've started a podcast

Two posts inside a year! Well this is a special occasion I have started a Star Trek Podcast called Synthaholics. While at PAX East this year I spoke with several members of Disruptor Beam about their upcoming game Star Trek Timelines and I asked them for their favorite Spock moments! I also got the opportunity to speak with the cosplayer Bellechere and she shared with me some of her thoughts about Leonard Nimoy. These interviews are split between the first and second episodes! Please check out the Synthaholics website. http://synthaholics.com/

You can also listen to my show on iTunes and Stitcher! The links below will take you directly to my podcast!

Playing Catchup

My last post was for PAX East 2014; a year later and I’m newly home from PAX East 2015. I will try to quickly make an update on what has happened over the past year.

Shortly after PAX East 2014, I participated in my second Game Jam with the Buffalo Game Space. The game’s theme was “parallel universes.” We came up with a game called Quantum Sliders where the game alternates between 3 types of game play. The game switches from a side-scroller, to a beat’em up, to a top down shooter every several seconds. Since the 2014 Global Game Jam, I was encouraged to get into 3d modeling in Maya to focus my game design skill set. So, that was what I did for this game. I designed several enemies in 3d and had them move in different positions so that we could have a few frames. This allowed them to animate a bit in unity. For this game jam I also designed the level lay out. The game can be played at the following link.

http://www.buffalogamespace.com/bgsforums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1399&p=2733&hilit=quantum+sliders#p2733

My friend Aaron saw my Maya work on Facebook and asked me if I was interested in working with him on a Star Trek web comic. I agreed and I started working on modeling ships for the comic. I will update the “Other Projects” section with my work on this.

In September of 2014 I participated in another Game Jam with the Buffalo Game Space. Our theme was “let’s do something weird.” We broke up into smaller groups for this Game Jam and I focused mostly on 3d models in Maya. I designed the first level once you leave the hall way with all of the doors. I also designed most of the props in the second level (the TV, Lamp, Couch and Knife) after the hallway. I worked on the first draft of the script and did some of the voice work. We choose to call the game Enlightenment because when we first started brainstorming we brought up the idea and stages of enlightenment.  Below is the link for this game. 

http://laksom.com/Enlightenment/

In January 2015 I participated in my second Global Game Jam. This year’s theme was “What do we do now?” The group I was a part of came up with the idea to do a “choose your own adventure” type game where the scenario was a job interview. As in a normal interview you are asked a series of questions. What makes this game interesting is the strange questions with the even stranger answer choices. I modeled the office which is the back drop for the interview. We called our game The Awkward Position. 

http://globalgamejam.org/2015/games/awkward-position

In January I was talking with Aaron and about the comic book and had the idea of starting a second project: A Star Trek Podcast. We played around with some names for the podcast but after a while Synthaholics was born. We hope to have our first show up and running sometime this month. Below is a link for the Podcast page. Please note that the page is sparse because the podcast is not yet live. I have also put together a Facebook group for Synthaholics and a twitter page. Please join and follow by clicking the Facebook and twitter buttons on the Synthaholics web page.

http://synthaholics.com/

It has been a while

I’m still here things have just been really busy lately. First off I am still working on the indie project Blindsight. I am still working on the enemy AI and enemy placement for the game. I have been working in getting reacquainted with Maya and will in the coming weeks start working on the characters and enemy models for our game.

This past January when looking to participate in the Global Game Jam I found out Buffalo has a local indie community called the Buffalo Game Space and I have been attending meetings since before the Global Game Jam. We made a game called House where the player experiences the house from 3 different perspectives. The first perspective is that of a dog, the second is that of a fly and the third is that of a man whose intent is to become drunk. We were able to get the man’s perceptive set up with the Oculus Rift. My primary responsibility for the game was sound design. I also did some voice recordings for the fly but they did not make it into the game. Below is a link for our game if you would like to check it out.

http://globalgamejam.org/2014/games/house-0

PAX East is right around the corner and I will be attending. I am looking forward to it. Last year was a great time got to meet lots of great people. I am looking forward to seeing some of them again and meeting new great people.

Stimpaq Studios

Shortly after PAX East I joined up with Jason Rowell, Colin Renfroe, and Hugh Weymouth, (also Full Sail graduates) on a game project. This project is called Blindsight. When we decided on a name for our game we also set up a web site and a social media presence to generate interest in the gaming community. Our group is now called Stimpaq Studios.

This month, two new members have joined us, Rosa Tung and Brandon Knieriem. Both members bring diverse skill sets which will help us realize our vision for Stimpaq Studio’s first game, Blindsight.

The team has been working all hours to get Blindsight into its alpha stage! We are excited by the progress we have made and hope to reveal more of the game soon. I have updated my portfolio page to show everyone what we have done on the game so far. Once we get further along, I will be adding more video. Also, when the game becomes available to the public, I will provide a link where our game can be downloaded.

Don’t forget to check out my portfolio page to find links to our Facebook and Twitter page. There are some awesome screen shots of Blindsight!

 

 

Why Game Design?

I knew I wanted to make videos games from a very young age. As a child I was intrigued by the intense stories and epic action battles. As an adult, I am still excited about these aspects but I have also gained an appreciation for gaming as an art form. TIE Fighter was one of those games that really opened my eyes to what video games could do. The visuals for this game were brilliant. Each space scene was loaded with intricate details that made the game feel real. Tie Fighter  was also innovative in its villainous point of view. Usually players are the underdog, the hero–to-be character. Tie Fighter broke from this norm having you play the entire game as the villain. This point of view shift encouraged me to play other games with similar innovations. In strategy games like Command and Conquer or the WarCraft series the player is offered the choice to simulate many multiple points of view. Playing from multiple points of view is perhaps what inspired my favorite game genre, the Massively Multiplayer online. Being able to play from multiple perspectives provides a creative freedom that is extremely inspiring. I hope one day to harness the creative power that gaming design offers.

While attending Full Sail University and working towards a Bachelor in Game Design, I had the opportunity to work with other students doing various team assignments. These experiences were profoundly rewarding as seeing an idea through many points of view enhanced the project and the final product. Team work, in game design especially, offers limitless possibilities in creative design. Over the course of the program I was fortunate enough to be able to take on a variety of roles within different teams. This allowed me to learn different perspectives on a design team and taught me valuable communication, leadership, and group-oriented strategy skills.

One of the earliest projects I worked on was a group project creating a playable board game. I was the team leader and lead game designer for this project as I had the most experience with various board games and pen and paper role playing games. I enjoyed receiving everyone’s input on the direction of the game. We finally decided to make a game called Rygor, which was an attempt to meld aspects of pen and paper role playing game, tower defense, and Chess. During early play testing we discovered that some players could power through to the end of the game and win early on so we had to rethink our approach as a team. We implemented new mechanics to make the game more difficult and very risky to win early on. This project went through several iterance’s in which we worked together to find a common solution. The ability to remain flexible and play test constantly was a valuable lesson.

In the last year of the Game Design program we started working with Unreal Development Kit. The first of one such projects was a group of four charged with the mission to conceive a concept level and then create it. For this project my main role was environmental encounter design. I built traps using kismet. This urged players to learn first how to recognize a trap and second how to avoid traps to stay alive. On this particular project, we each worked separately on the aesthetics of the game. This project taught me to see games in a new light, and to scrutinize every detail. I can now fully appreciate the nuances of gaming as an aesthetic experience. 

The next team project game was quite a bit more challenging. We conceptualized and built a three level game called Cohabit. On this project I was the primary level designer for one of our three levels and was also in charge of the game’s User Interface. Cohabit is a puzzle game involving a turtle and a rabbit that needed to work together to complete levels. In order to create a user friendly UI, I built a HUD indicator that would display a portrait of which character was selected. I also added UI elements that would visually show where each character was when selected. There were also other visual indicators of where things were such as switches. These first three levels acted as a tutorial. This was my first experience working with the UI. It was a struggle but I learned that endurance and patience is the key to working with anything difficult. This lesson was the key to being able to create and finish the final project.

For the last three months of my education, I worked with a group on our final project. I took on many roles and had some of the most fun designing because I was able to take on new challenges. Our game was called Impact Event. I was the project’s team leader and producer. I continually made myself available to the team and worked tirelessly to keep everyone organized and on schedule. In this light, if a deadline was not met due to whatever circumstance I always took responsibility as the leader. Besides being in a leadership role, I was also the primary level designer and built four of eight levels.

One of my proudest achievements was building the ending condition that had 7 possible outcomes. I worked with Nvidia PhysX Lab to incorporate Apex destructibles into the game. This involved a lot of kismet work as well as importing the new actors into UDK from the PhysX Lab. This project was rather difficult to create and even more difficult to incorporate into the game. When everything finally worked, I was ecstatic!

My final contribution was that of a sound designer I built the music using sound files in GarageBand. I created most of the sound effects myself using my electric guitar with GarageBand and UDK's sound cue editor. I learned so much during my final project. One of the hardest but most fulfilling lessons was learning how to work with a team for an extended period of time. This project was the largest undertaking any of us had ever experienced. Emotions were high as deadlines were looming. I learned to keep my cool and approach every problem with a positive attitude. It was evident, that as a leader, if you can keep your cool, your team can keep together and carry on. I also learned that I really enjoyed doing sound design, something I hadn't even though of when I had stared my degree at Full Sail. Suffice it to say, all aspects of Game Design have intrigued and inspired my passion on an even deeper level. I cannot wait to begin my next project!

PAX EAST

I will be heading to Boston for PAX East next week. This will be my first PAX experience I am looking forward to meeting many new people.