As you may have heard, for the past semester we have been doing online learning from our homes. While this has been a struggle for most (including me) during the school day, I have found that it has allowed me to remember and play older games from my childhood. Playing games like Wii Sports and Super Mario Brothers on the Wii have brought back memories that I would not have remembered if not stuck in my house all day. As I have been playing these games I remember why they are so nostalgic and why I feel they can be played many times. Playing these games on the Wii with sub-par controls has helped me realize the main difference between newer games. Right now, it seems like every game is trying to have the best graphics or new controls instead of focusing more on people replaying and experiencing the game again. Going back to Super Mario Brothers and having the same feelings that I did years ago is why it is such a good game. Being able to enjoy playing the same levels means that the game was created properly. Looking at games nowadays, if there is a story, I very rarely go back and play it again to remember. Games like Destiny 2 have lost this factor and after you are done playing new content, it starts to feel dull and a boring grind to stay at the highest level. I do however feel like some games have mastered this in the newer era. Games like Red Dead Redemption II and Zelda: Breath of the Wild which are open-world have a great ability to keep the user engaged and immersed for long periods of time. This along with the fact that the world is unique and introduces new concepts allows for players to play over and over again and still have fun. I feel like these games, like Super Mario brothers, will too bring back the same nostalgia because of their replayability. Overall, playing older games has made me realize what makes a game great, and what gets me coming back time and time again to play.
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Over the winter holiday and the weeks before our class once again started to work in Unity and create our own games. Our project was to create a 3rd person parkour game that allowed the player to jump over and on different obstacles. This project was something that I had never coded before. Learning once again how to set up a player controller script was very helpful as it reminded me of some of the other processes and helped me get back to coding games. The one thing I really struggled with however was working with animations. Because this was a parkour game, the player had to have a jump and walk animation at the very least and this meant that I needed to learn how everything worked in Unity. This was a struggle that took multiple hours to figure out. From making sure all the code was right in my player controller script to setting up an animation controller, I finally remembered what a struggle Unity can be. After long hours, when I finally figured it out, I got a great sense of enjoyment that I remember from creating games last year. For creating my first game in half a year, I would say it turned out pretty good and it helped get me back into the groove of coding. The gameplay is featured on my selected works if you would like to check it out. Along with this class, I am also taking AP Computer Science Principles and I am learning Python which does help me when coding in C#. I have found that they are very similar even though they use different keywords and I think this will help for design later in the year. In Python, we have been learning much more about loops and functions and that will hopefully correlate to our future projects. I hope to keep improving and is I think that because of this refresher, I will be able to contribute much more to the game design process for our full game later in the year.
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AuthorHi, my name is Nick Bayer and I will be posting blogs about every 1-2 weeks in the 2020-21 school year. I am doing this for my Advanced Game Design class at Durham School of the Arts(DSA). The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools. Categories
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May 2021
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