Chris Goodswen lecture –

The lecture we received from Chris I found really interesting especially all the work he has achieved in the 3d and animation aspect of the subject. He explained how the nets of the characters supported the design itself and then went into a little bit of detail about texturing his characters.

       I also learnt from Chris that a good way to became a fair character designer was to study anatomy in depth to get all the measurements right. He also talked about player centric design which I had never heard of before , which means a part of the game which stands out from everything else allowing the player tosspot it and then interact with it, essentially it’s a vague guideline to the game for the player to follow.

Player centric design

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://ps2media.ign.com/ps2/image/article/760/760481/god-of-war-ii-shots-20070201111212362.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php%3Ftopic_id%3D27078780&usg=__POp0asB2ouQTwH5Hsgbk1CwTpVk=&h=560&w=640&sz=45&hl=en&start=124&zoom=1&tbnid=VLq0-5fiZt8QfM:&tbnh=120&tbnw=137&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgod%2Bof%2Bwar%2B3%2Bboss%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1916%26bih%3D1015%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C1979&itbs=1&ei=Fh_ATNq6N9fPjAfvrIWZCg&biw=1916&bih=1015

                           

Chris also spoke about his master’s degree he had taken and honestly the amount of work sounded really daunting, he also said for the majority of the time it would be 90% research and 10% work and from how much work he had to show I dread to think how much research he actually had. Overall his work he showed us I thought was amazing my favourite piece of work he presented us was his Pandora’s guardian concept.

History of My Game life-

(Chronologically)

I think the first game I ever played from what I remember is most likely ‘crash bandicoot’, this I thoroughly enjoyed as well as the sequels from this I expect I changed from the playstation one to the gameboy where I would have played a mixture of’ Pokémon’ and ‘Mario’. Then came the playstation 2 saga where I would have played game such as ‘ratchet and clank’, ‘need for speed’ including the sequels, ‘god of war’ (god of war being one of my most favourite games I have ever played due to how interactive and challenging it sometimes was), ‘dynasty warriors’ (including sequels), ‘tekken’, there were also a lot more for the playstation 2 but too many to list. I would say that the play station 2 was definitely the best console for the era.

After these games I then went through a very long period I would say on and off for about four years playing one game ‘world of warcraft’, for some reason I still don’t know why today but that game was so addictive, I think it has to be for these reasons, constantly u could play talk and interact with friends, the game constantly had updates so new items and areas were brought out to keep giving objectives to players, but the game was also very hard to start with and the challenging side of the game to be the best made it all the more playable. The reason I quit and do not play today is as the game grew and grew more and more people started joining and didn’t understand the game there for more updates were released to make the game easier and easier. To the point where if u were really good at the game someone who didn’t understand the game nowhere near as much as you could have the same items as you, therefore in my personal opinion destroyed the game.

Moving from this part of my life the Xbox 360 and the playstation 3 was released, where I played very few games apart from the call of duty saga, I never did play for the actually game play and story mode I only played for the online side of the game which I found at the time addictive. Overall I have played a fair few games in my life but so far I find the best games ‘mmorpg’s’ (massive multiplayer online role playing game).

Video game theory reader 2-

“Pong has got to be the baseline of entertainment, at least on its surface. In the early years of video games, why was it that Pong and its offspring were so outrageously successful”.

From this a section of this book I have learnt that Pong was a massive and contagious change in ways games were presented and played, from this game sparked the start of the arcade games and over a very short period of time leapt to advanced consoles such as the playstation 3 and Xbox 360 we had made this jump from pong the latest consoles in just 30-40 years, which in my opinion is very impressive.