What makes games look good?

After several rounds of seeing games in my game development portfolio class, I;ve begun to ask myself why do so many of the games struggle to achieve an acceptable level if visual quality. As a graphics programmer this is something that concerns me greatly because often times our purpose is to facillitate the best looking game possible. So why then do many student projects fail to achieve a professional level quality in their aesthetic?

It would be simple enough to argue that academic programs with a smaller pool of artists will be the driving factor behind poor game aesthetics. I think the issue goes a lot deeper than this for a couple of reasons, but having a stronger artist community will indirectly be associated with better looking games. The reason I think this is that it takes a large slice of the team to make a visually pleasing game. Programmers need to have good animation controllers and neccessary shaders, artists need quality textures and animation, and designers need to create levels that allow players to take in the aesthetics of the game properly.

So in the end, I almost feel like the greatest obstacle to good looking student games is a general lack of caring, which almost seems a little harsh. However, I think students too readily cave to only just scraping by with their games for class. This is why a strong artist community will have a strong impact, because not only will artists have better resourcces and expectations for their artwork, but they will also know when their programmers and designers are screwing them over.

All in all, I hope to see more good looking student games in the future.

Making fish, but Flash on Hold

I've made a lot of head way on Manatee Quest over the past week, but I haven't had access to Flash to work on the shootorial game that I started a couple of weeks ago.  The fish have several behaviors implemented, as I can currently make them swim in circles and spirals, stare at the player, and chase after the player.  However, I hope to create a chase behavior much more refined than my current one, so that I can have the fish follow behind the manatee but not get too close or have them bump into each other.

Also, Ive been going through some websites for my Story, Sound, and Motion class, and I think this one is really cool: www.wefeelfine.org.  It tracks occurrences of the phrase "I feel" in recent blog posts around the world, and can really be interesting.

Flash Games and Research Papers

I went back to Michigan State for my second semester a couple of days ago so I'll probably be updating my blog more often from here on out.  I'm working on my first independent Flash game by following Kongregate Lab's "Shootorial" series.  I'll try to post that when I'm done.  I also plan to use violent video games as my main topic for my political science class.  If anything interesting comes out of that I'll probably throw that up too.

Assassin's Creed Review

So I just beat Assassin's Creed for the XBox 360, and I have to admit that it has been a while since a game left me crying for sequel.  The core plot that the game play objectives revolves around, but the main plot is just getting set off when the game ends.

People told me that Assassin' Creed is marred by weird futuristic elements, but I disagree.  These thoughts are spawned from the misconception that Assassin's Creed is a Crusade game, and this is a misconception that I myself shared when I started the game.  By the time I was halfway through the game, all elements of "futurism" and the lack of interaction with historic Crusader figures and events were completely forgiven, because Assassin's Creed is actually more of a conspiracy theory game revolving around Holy Grail type artifacts and their influence in the game's modern and ancient time frames.  Due to this, I actually enjoyed the futuristic elements.

As for the game play, it kept me both satisfied until the plot fully hooked me and at the same time greatly enhanced the themes of the game all of the way through.  At its core Assassin's Creed is Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, with many of the same game play elements reappearing in Assassin's Creed.  However, instead of having the elements of the environment set up like a puzzle  with only a few solutions, it is just covered with all of the banisters and ledges and scaleable walls so that running and leaping through the cities is very fluid.  Furthermore, the battles also require much more strategy than Prince of Persia and give the player more control.

In the end, I have decided that Ubisoft took their great game play they developed for Prince of Persia and turned it into something with a much deeper level of plot, character development, and freedom for the player; and what they came up with was Assassin's Creed.

Manatee Quest: Latest Build

So I just got back from some awesome snowboarding and some ridiculous winter storms.  The snow was plentiful up in the glorious state of Michigan and it was great for boarding, but it was a pain to drive through.  Now that I'm home in Indiana, an ice storm's covered my entire city and the trees are all bent into weird shapes until it warms up again.

Anyways I've finally found the time to put an update out on Manatee Quest's status after concluding my first semester at MSU.

The above screen shot shows a close up to the cabbage I modeled in Maya. I've got a simple rotator script on them right now but I think I might write a script to make them bob up and down for a better effect. I also have a working counter that displays on the game HUD which is visible in the following shots.

Also in this shot is a cube that I hooked a rigid body onto and got Unity's physics engine interacting with the Manatee properly.  This is a result of fiddling with the Manatee's collider because Unity would not allow me to turn it's Character Controller collider sideways.  In the end I'm satisfied with the result, which you can see demonstrated in the final shot.