As this year is coming to an end I thought I would do a reflection of Advanced Game Art and Design as a whole. This year has been completely remote so that is taken into account but I think I have learned a lot anyway. Firstly I think that while all of my classes were online this year, this class was the easiest to adapt to as we are always using technology even when we are in school. Because of this, most of my classmates and I already had the programs installed and we were able to use all of the same things that we usually do. I enjoyed this year and I think that it was very helpful that before we started making our game we went back to 3DS Max and Unity to refresh ourselves with the programs. This allowed us to both learn more about them and also become better at the skills we had previously learned. This also benefited our final project as we were able to make models and create the game a lot faster than we would have otherwise. Another benefit from this year was that we focused a lot on the pre-production for our games and this allowed us to go through the production stage fairly quickly as we knew exactly what we were looking for. Being able to create a game design document for our game as well as mapping out what choices the player would have allowed us to not have to think about these things and focus solely on the actual creation aspects. If there are any aspiring game designers out there, I recommend doing as much pre-production as possible as it will help a lot later. Moving past this, when it came to making our game I thought that as a whole our team did well. We communicated well and often and I think that our game as a whole turned out good. I think it could have definitely been better but for us being seniors about to graduate, I think we did a great job. Overall I think that this year went as well as it could have given the circumstances and I am very happy with how it all turned out. As this is my final year of this class this will be my last blog post and I have to say that I will not miss having to write these all the time.
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During the past year with most sports shut down I have turned a lot of my attention to esports. I have watched many different esports but the two I watch consistently are League of Legends and Rocket League. At the moment League of Legends is hosting an international LAN event where the best team from each region plays. This has gotten me thinking of how LAN events are some of the best esports content that is possible. During LAN events not only can you watch all the best teams play, but you get to see all the regions compete for the title. This allows for a great comparison between all of the regions and the viewers get to see who is the best in the world. One of the main downsides of this is that they are very infrequent. While that is a major downside, it also allows for more attention to be drawn to the international events and they usually get more viewers and sponsors because of this. As an avid video game player, I know how important it is to have a good connection to the game. Because usually, you are playing online, it can promote lag in the game and make the game feel slower. Meanwhile, in a LAN environment, there is no need for a wifi connection and everyone has the same advantages of playing with lower ping. This helps reduce the amount of variability in the connection and it allows for there to be no excuses due to lag. Like I mentioned earlier I am a fan of Rocket League Esports as well. Recently they have been doing show matches where players from North America will play players from Europe to see who is better. Because the regions are separated into North America and Europe, these teams do not play often except during LAN events. This year due to COVID-19, Rocket League has canceled all of these events so we are no longer able to see the teams play against each other. While there are show matches going on, one of the two teams always has to play with ping over 100 (bad connection) and it makes their gameplay much worse in comparison. This is why I think that having a LAN event is very important as it shows who is the best in the world and lets all teams play with no advantages due to connection. Overall, I think more and more esports should do live LAN events because they are much more telling of the better teams and they also provide a higher average view count for the organizers.
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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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