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!
