Games first, story second.

I talked with Roger yesterday about some frustrations that I've been having with the game that we're designing, and after a good night's sleep, I think that I've really figured out what kinds of things need to be done.

For those of you that are not Jake Muehle, I was frustrated that Roger would consistently comment that the game was not focused enough, too broad, or he didn't care about some of the thematic elements that we picked--namely, bullying. Every time Roger talked (and disapproved) of what we had come up with, I felt as if the game got less game-like and more towards this nebulous "edginess" that Roger seemed to want out of a student game.

On a trip over to the MEB, I expressed these exact frustrations, and Roger gave some great tips on what we needed to do. We've been trying to make our game "student-y" through the thematic wrapper, where our game is not actually a game yet. Our game was based on the concept of "pushing stuff around is fun", but then we tried to make a game out of it by adding a story. Roger suggested that we give the story a break and think up pure games that would be fun given our entertaining mechanic.

After sleeping on it, this advice seems so obvious I feel like an idiot. This is why I came to EAE, THIS is why I switched to being a producer--I'm great at making games. I got so caught up in the seemingly required edginess that I didn't even stop to think about what the most important part of games were--making them a game. Story follows behind making the game fun. I can't believe I didn't come to this on my own.

One other thing that's been surprising to me is how effective the "late mark" system is. It's just a bunch of tally marks on a sticky note on people's computers, but everyone seems to try *really* hard to be on time to avoid them. That might be because people are so devastated to receive them, as I've been making a habit of giving out late marks no matter how awesome the excuse--if you're late, you're late. Another tip-of-the-hat to mission organization theory--if you record your progress, people perform better.

Catching up...at the beginning.

Our team is going well, so far the off-day standup meetings are really successful, everyone's been on time and they're fast and efficient. Ironically, its our in-class stand-up meeting that had some trouble starting this week, mostly due to the snow. Our engineers have trouble getting here at 9:00, and they talked me into starting the meeting at 9:15. Hopefully, that will change this week.

There is an incredible amount of stuff to do between the game we're developing, art homework, and game engine homework. This weekend just really flew by, but my family is no longer in town and I'll be able to focus a lot more. I'll probably have to give up video games on the weekends until I get caught up.

Highs and Lows

In lieu of choosing projects for us, the faculty here at the EAE program informed us that all of the game pitches that we did last Tuesday were excellent enough to warrant all of them being picked. As a result, they told all of us to choose a game we wanted to be on, and stick with it.

For myself, this wasn't initially bad. I--along with the rest of my team--were not terribly interested in making the game that we ended up pitching. Our pitch was a game about a schizophrenic who would change between different personalities and have his goals and the environment change as well. While it was--in my opinion--a well crafted pitch and a good game concept, it was a little asset heavy for our cohort and was far away from the original game that we wanted to pitch anyway. In truth, we were pitching the game because we had to pitch something, even though it was a cool concept.

Here's the Prezi. I tried to rely mostly on talking and I think it went over well, even though it doesn't make for as interesting a read-through later on.

http://prezi.com/6yrqch6ucrhu/eae-game/

After a lot of thought of what team to join, I eventually decided on joining the "Physics" (or, more commonly, "Fus-Fus") team, for several reasons. First, I had initially worked on the team that developed the prototype last semester and spent quite some time with level design and fine-tuning it. Second, before I joined the team there were no producers, which provided me with an unexpected opportunity to take the reigns as a producer. Third, I've worked with both Cody and Damean before and I was really excited to work with them again.

Things aren't all peachy, however. What I thought was a solid team that had met the base-requirements of five people with at least two different tracks turned out to be not solid. The day after I thought things were decided, our EP Bob Kessler emailed everyone to make sure that we knew that we still had until Tuesday to decide what team we were going to be on. While this didn't effect my decision to be on Fus-Fus at all, some of our team started to shop around for other teams to be on.

This wouldn't be a problem if not for other circumstances. First, we have to present a pitch plan on Tuesday morning. Second, since people are able to change their minds up until Tuesday morning, I might find my last minutes scrambling to find a team instead of polishing the pitch plan that I've been making. It's pretty frustrating that I could find myself with no team at the very last second, and I wish that I could be able to focus on the game instead of campaigning for meeting team requirements.

2013 is my lucky year

This semester I'm starting out as a producer, and as such will be participating in Game Production II: Art for Producers.

Our first assignment was to make a 500 tri action character, and as my first-ever maya project, I tried my hand at a generic cartoon-y superman character.


I feel a lot more fit as a producer, even though I'm still taking Game Engineering II as an elective. Crafting games is what I've done my entire life, and getting to use this skill as an occupation is like telling a fat person he has to taste-test a buffet for a job.

I'm also excited for the upcoming extra-curriculars. With some extra time on my hands I'll be leading the Press Start club, an organization aimed at landing jobs in the video game industry. Right now I'm working on securing both funds and a domain name for said club, and with any luck it'll be a hit.

Additionally, since I'm not going to pitch the game that I spent last semester writing a game-doc for, I'm hoping to start up a little side-projects group of people who are interested in making their set-aside games outside of class. There were some really cool ideas, and several of them were fairly small in scope. I'd love to have a collection of games that are fun that I can say that I worked on.