For the third part of our summer assignment for Advanced Game Design, we were tasked with writing about what excites us about the upcoming school year in our class. I cannot explain how excited I am to once again be coding during school. This summer I have been learning how to code in Java through edx and other websites. This has sparked my interest in coding and computer science immensely. Along with taking Advanced Game Design next year, I am hoping to take AP Computer Science Principles to supplement my love for coding. Over this summer I realized how interesting coding really was and how fun it was once you got good at it. This is a feeling that I did not have when we did coding last year. This is why I am so excited to get to code more in C# during the school year. While Java and C# are not the same, they do still have the same underlying principles. I think that taking Java courses over the summer will help me improve during the school year as I know that I understand the principles of coding much better. Along with that, I think that I will be able to create better games this year especially since we will be working in groups to create more advanced games. This to me is very exciting because for me the hardest part of making games was coming up with the concept art and sketches. Now with the help of a team, I will not be alone in creating these sketches. This allows me to focus more on my strength which is coding. I think that working with a group of people will be very beneficial because each part of the project can benefit from the work of many people. Concepts become easier to make and choose, coding becomes faster and better designed as well as the actual art going into the game is designed better with more attention to detail. Overall, I am excited for this coming year because I have found a passion for coding and I feel like I will have a lot of fun doing it in class during the year.
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As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I have been trying to improve my skills in Photoshop or in the free version Pixlr. This time I decided to incorporate one of my favorite things into my artwork. To improve my skills I chose to learn how to create text art in Pixlr which is slightly similar to what I did in my last post. I have always found using words in images to be very creative and also interesting as they can bring spotlight to other elements in the piece that are not usually highlighted. To improve my skills, I first followed a video tutorial on creating text art using a guitar and words associated with music. I found this to be very informative while also simple in design. The main preface is using masks to cover parts of images and using the magic wand to help add the text into the spaces. After following the tutorial, I chose to do something more advanced which included not just an outline but other lines inside the picture that I had to figure out how to mask and replace correctly. For this I chose to do a image of the Philadelphia Eagles Logo with the starting offensive players of the team as the words. I found that it worked very well as it is something that interests me while also being more intricate than the guitar in the tutorial. The main struggle I had in creating this piece was figuring out how I wanted to mask the logo in order to make the words stand out while also making it identifiable as the logo for the team. To finish off the piece, I added a gradient as the background in order to give it more depth which I found added a lot to the piece as a whole. Here is the final product: As you can see in the image, there are many details in the logo which is where I ran into the most trouble. Overall, I found Pixlr to be once again, a great substitute for Photoshop as well as having its own features that make it easier to use.
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Kipfer, Kyle "Create Text Art in Pixlr E" YouTube, 17 Apr. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XeJaGlwehQ. Since the summer began I decided I wanted to improve my skills with Photoshop and other programs like it. While I do not own Photoshop, I was able to use the free program Pixlr which happens to have many of the same functions of Photoshop. The first thing I decided to learn and the focus of this blog post was how to use images and words in different ways and combining them. I started doing trying to fill words with images to make cool banners and other artistic pieces. I found this both very interesting and I found many ways that I could use this to help others around me. The first piece I made was one in which I took a photo from my friends music video and put it into his artist name. This came out really well and he is now able to use it as a banner or anything else he wants. The biggest struggle I had was transitioning from how to do something like this in Photoshop to Pixlr. Even with the help of a step by step on Photoshop I still found it quite difficult to transition with the new interface and different capabilities. After doing this, I decided to challenge myself more by using multiple pictures and trying to learn new effects. My next project was one I made for my friend of his dog. Instead of using one picture for the whole name, I used a different picture for each letter of the name. This helped show me how careful I have to be when editing the pictures around the letters as I found myself going back and having to fix the pictures over and over again. After I was done however, I found that this picture came out very well and I was very proud of myself for accomplishing it. Through this process I not only learned how to make these kinds of images, I also learned how to navigate and edit in Pixlr which took some time to get used too. As well as learning new things about Pixlr, it really helped me to get used to Photoshop like programs again which will be very useful for projects later this summer and continuing on through the year. I am proud of myself because at the beginning of working on these projects it took me at least an hour just to get the first one right, and now I am able to do these very quickly. This will allow me to help my friends and family with edits like these and others that use the same skills. Overall this expanded my knowledge of the program and helped me learn a new technique that will help me in the future.
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As the beginning of the school year is approaching I have been thinking a lot about next school year and what I’m looking forward too. The main thing I am looking forward to is learning about ways to improve animations in 3DS Max and further improve the detail of my models in the animations. Last year I really enjoyed when we would be able to do animations and as I became more skilled I was able to make them more detailed. Along with animations, I hope to start to make games during my third year of GAD. Making games all starts with the assets that we make in 3DS max and making detailed assets will make the games better. This is a video of an animation that is a great example of one that could be used in a video game that we create next year. Hopefully as the year moves along we will start to become more advanced and my hope is that by the end of the year I might be able to have a somewhat functional game with good assets made in 3ds max.
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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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