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Unit 7 Post Mortem

So here we are at the end. Lets Recap real quick.

Overall, considering all our shortcomings the outcome we got was the nearest to the best I can think we could of done. The team was happy with the progress and end of the project. The ending wasn’t a smooth dismount, but great nonetheless.

Alpha and Beta was the slowest and largest problem in our project, creating something from what seemed like nothing at the time, it was hard to see what we were looking at and what exactly we were doing, hard to measure any kind of progress and that was disheartening at the time, though so relieving later on when we saw the fruits of our efforts. After feedback from our teachers, peers and the Game Industry panel that came in to review our projects, we were really pleased to hear that what we had was something that everyone was excited to see come into reality, to see realized. We had to make a few changes, like making our art more centralized and not jarring with the difference in our models at the time. We also reviewed our only female character and tweaked how she was being represented, as we were worried that it was a little old fashioned and not progressive enough for others to enjoy.

We were mostly OK with the sum of our changes, we were not too afraid to ditch our ideas, mostly I think because we're excited to expand on what we had to make it even better than before, which is something that made me happy in the moment.

The last stretch of gold was more like a sprint compared to the last Beta and Alpha though, it went by so quick.

Testing and reviewing and more tweaking, it was a blink of our eyes before we were finished. I think as far as teams goes, our team were more like family in how we worked together. There was a lot of love and understanding, but we were not afraid to talk about our shortcomings critically to improve each other.

Very understanding. I would gladly work again with my peers on another project.

I am extremely happy with our game, I can’t wait to show it to our friends and family, and I’m so glad I could learn from this experience so I can be better in the future.

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Unit 6 Post Mortem

Team Disco Drop Bear. Vikings, Neon Lights and guns.

The end of year is coming soon, so our end of year projects have been assembled. Our powers combined have become more than the likes of captain planet, forming Disco Drop Bear, a play on the words of the Australian mythical animal “Drop Bears” and the drop in most EDM songs. I thought that was clever. 

Anyway

Compared to other teams, we were very blessed on how in sync we all were together on picking a direction and discerning our abilities to scope out our work in front of us. Accounting for our time frame and our skills, we chose to take a approach to comedy in our design and art, trying to make a game that would make us laugh and enjoy ourselves in making it.

With everything in place, we’ve taken to our stations and have started to lay out the tracks and foundation for the work that is coming. We’re really excited and enjoy each working together, and even though we have had discussions that have lead no where, we’re still cruising and I think that’s neat.

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Unit 5 Post mortem

Q and A takes time to do proper.

QA was fun, sure, but was such a time vampire. I’m sure finding bugs and logging them in a buggy game would be fun in some way, but finding bugs in a game that is so well made with a fine tooth comb isn’t my idea of a lean back relax kind of job.

Getting perspective has been good though, getting insight to QA, which I don’t think the majority of people that talk shit about QA don’t really understand what QA entails exactly. Sometimes like in the case of sonic boom, QA told and reported what was wrong and they don’t get listened too and also take the fall.

There is for sure more respect for the job in my mind and heart, and I can say for sure this job isn’t for me.

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Unit 4 Post Mortem

One of my favorite things, writing and narrative work.

At first glance, I was really happy and excited to get started at the start of the unit, but the devil is always in the details. Always read the fine print.

I got to design a character, a backstory and environment, but at the time I didn’t consider the one point of contention for the unit. Making an actual small game.

I straight up can’t code. Anyone that knows me knows that.  I am illiterate in code. Though I can debug code really well if you give me an hour to read. But that’s all good, in the end I was able to work around that, using our teachers unity package called QuickScripts to basically make the entire play experience I had planned.

That being said, I also grossly underestimated the amount of time in my hacknplan and burn down charts that I actually had to work with, and as a consequence, I had to cut some of what I had planned.

In the end though, it got finished. It ain’t pretty, and it ain’t what I originally wanted, but it got finished 

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Unit 3 Post Mortem

I can’t program and that sucks. Though, going through this unit has brought some perspective.

I made a game of a cube rolling down a line with obstacles. It was easily the worst unit, ever. So much panic, trouble and pain, but at the end i got through and made it. I programmed a small game and I passed and that is all that matters.

Seeing people around me play test and create every morning was so interesting to see, not only for the content, but seeing how everyone interacted with each other.

One thing I am grateful for is the lack of art content. I love art and modeling, but the entire process is so hard and drawn out. No UV unwrapping, no texturing, just straight up shapes and solid colors. 

In the end, despite personal problems and being inept and borderline illiterate in programming language, I was able to create something that I was Semi Proud Of. That is epic.

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The new COD is aight

Man, the new Blops is a lot of fun. People might look at you as a sewer man for liking and playing COD these days, but that shouldn’t get in the way of enjoying something.

I never played heaps of multiplayer in Blops 3, only really zombies. As such, I never got into the wall running and jumping and flying around. I am so glad that isn’t a thing anymore here.

They also have a new mechanic now with health, no longer, will you get strawberry jam on your screen when you get shot that disappears when you lay down for a second. Now you have to satisfy a drug habit and inject yourself with a med pack which sits on a cool down. Makes it hard to choose between reloading and reloading sometimes, which is an important decision sometimes. The game is also a little harder? You still get spammed with kill streaks but ehhhhh.

Black out mode is also fantastic for what it is. You can tell it’s a AAA quality mode. Even if you’re not a fan of battle royals games, I think most people can agree when playing this game that it’s still fun. The vehicles are also great since they control just like Halo. Anyway, THE MAP. The map is excellent, like really good. Dora the explorer wishes she had this map. Almost every bit of the map is a reference or chunk from other call of duty games. Where ever you drop, if you know the other games well, you can instantly traverse the area like you know the place. GENIUS. And it’s not just multiplayer maps but also zombies. Forgot it was black out when I first found them and was busy dealing with zombies when I got shot. It was a total “Oh shit!’ moment. The best part for me though was the grapple gun. Zooming around with a shotgun to get immediately in range to blast some poor soul away is the best strategy.

Zombies has also returned, and after four games this zombies is real confusing in how much stuff is in it, but it’s still the same great experience. All together, these three modes are fantastic for the price of $80AUS. Every time a single mode tires me out, I just try one of the other three and it’s just a blast.

All I’m saying is to give it a chance guys, it’s good, trust.

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Why did DayZ die, and Fortnite rise?

Brendan Greene discovered the formula that made DayZ such a phenomenon, and Epic Games took it to a new level. The fun parts of DayZ, as Greene realized was not playing a running simulator, or glitching through a wall and breaking your legs, but the character interactions that came as a result of the world’s limited and difficult to reach resources. And what better way to capture the loot, shoot, scoot formula than with a Battle Royale game in which 100 players are dropped into a giant world, fighting over limited resources until the last one standing is claimed the winner?

 It’s a constant source of excitement and edge-of-your seat heated battles over supply drops or large cities. Where PUBG fails though is that it’s too similar to DayZ. DayZ is a mod for ARMA 2, which is a hyper-realistic niche shooter. In ARMA 2, you can be sniped from a kilometer away and have never had the chance to fight back, a feature that’s commonplace in PUBG. That’s not fun! You could have spent the entire game carefully planning out an optimal route into the safe zone, defeating other players at every turn, only to have your run ended by being forced through open terrain overlooked by snipers. The action also tends to be slower paced, a lot of sitting behind rocks taking pot shots at grey dots in the distance. Being forced to move from cover would be tactically disadvantageous under accurate machine gun fire, which can lead to firefights being a bit campy and dull, especially if both sides have run out of smoke grenades. The stalemate often being broken by either impatience, or the zone moving. Fortnite on the other hand, is a far more arcade-y shooter. The choice to use a pre-existing platform and design a battle royale mode for it was ingenious in the first place. Fortnite released with very few game breaking glitches, already making it a strong contender against PUBG by virtue of being a working substitute. PUBG’s early access was horrific after all, with the game not even running on many systems. Fortnite goes beyond that though. Fortnite’s building mechanics lead to far more dynamic and fun fights between players, who have the opportunity to build their own cover when they’re being shot at. One shot kill weapons are also uncommon and difficult to use, which means that instead of being able to safely pick off enemies from a distance, players are more often forced into firefights where the building mechanics can be put to good use. The gun play in PUBG has nothing on the high intensity action of the PvP in Fortnite. Put simply, you feel like you have a lot more control over whether you win or lose in Fortnite, since you’re constantly vying for an advantage during building battles, and it never feels like it’s too late to come back so long as you outplay your opponent. It leads to more satisfying game play. It makes the challenge of each individual fight a lot more rewarding. It means that while PUBG was a great stepping stone in the lead up to where we are now, Fortnite has gotten close to perfecting the formula.

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Modern Military Shooters don’t bang like they used to.

Brutal DOOM shows us that it doesn’t take fancy graphics and a plethora of throwaway game play gimmicks to make an enjoyable shooter. What you need is a world teeming with variety in enemies and weapons, with every shot feeling like a freight train careening into filled car park. 

But, most importantly, a fun game revolves around a deceptively simple core game play loop. Brutal DOOM couldn’t get much simpler. There’s demons invading you! You can shoot the demons, and you can run circles around the demons, and when you want to advance, you collect keys to open doors hiding more demons. There’s the big ones and the small ones and the stupid flying skull ones. Why do AAA budget shooters in the Call of Duty and Battlefield vein think it’s necessary to constantly distract us from the shooting with scripted cut scenes and throw away game mechanics? Are the shooting mechanics of these games not strong enough to be memorable of their own accord? Well, they aren’t, but doesn’t that mean that AAA developers would be better served putting more effort into designing a well balanced and fun core game play loop? That is, instead of trying to sweep it under the rug and leave players dazed by a flurry of strange, boring cut scenes and turret sequences? If you’ve ever been impressed by a cut scene in a Modern Military Shooter, imagine how much better that cut scene would have been if it had been in an action movie which was dedicated to spectacular special effects and fight scenes. It doesn’t take long to realize that such things are invalidated by the Die Hard movies, or waving a torch light back and forth in front of your closed eyes. That one’s actually a surprisingly good time waster. It just feels like a lot more thought and care went into the design of DOOM and the Brutal DOOM mod, which helped to make the game more accessible to a modern audience. Health is a limited resource in DOOM, you have to scavenge the level and look for secrets if you want to gain any major advantage over the hordes of demons you’re pitted against. But in Call of Duty you can just sit behind a wall after tanking a rocket to the face and regenerate back up to full health in a matter of seconds. Where’s the challenge in that? Where’s the sense of danger, of being forced to step out and sacrifice your safety in order to complete the level? Why is hugging a wall and occasionally popping your head up to shoot at grey blips in the distance more fun than taking the action into your own hands, and strafe circling around the spawn of hell at 80 km/h with a big meaty sounding shotgun. I don’t think I’ll ever understand the appeal “modern” (which means “Futuristic” these days) military shooters in light of that.

I will say though, Black ops 4 that’s come out recently, addresses this problem quite well.

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I don’t like Bethesda made Fallout games as much as the Fallout games made by Black Isle Studios

Fallout 1 and 2 are impressive games for their time period. This grungy, oppressive atmosphere of the post-apocalyptic United States. The world’s are overflowing with personality, interesting characters and quests, well written dialogue. It’s surprisingly easy to become immersed in them, despite their dated graphics.

 Hailing from such a pedigree, it seems difficult that Bethesda could possibly screw up Fallout 3 and 4. And yet, when I first played the Bethesda Fallout games, I found it very difficult to be drawn into them. It was shattering. I had high expectations of modern graphics and sound design after all. But as pretty as the games are, and as meaty as the guns sound, nothing can distract me from the strange synthetic humanoids that I encounter on my journey through the wasteland. The writing is atrocious. And for a game that has been so reliant on world building and a soul crushing sense of dread hanging over the player in the past, that’s a real bummer. Nothing takes me out of the experience like the player character in Fallout 4 monologue to a robot over her lost son. Isn’t that supposed to be my character? Aren’t I supposed to be projecting my own moralities and personality onto her, so that I can fit into a role? A role that I were playing, as it were? So why am I suddenly supposed to care about a lost son that the game has given me no opportunity to become attached to? Normally I might be able to suspend my disbelief momentarily during the stranger moments in an otherwise solid game, but Fallout 4 does not try very hard to pull you in at all. The character interactions could not be more hamfisted if they were acted out by a pig wearing a Vault 111 snap back in most cases. And the quests aren’t much more than “Talk to guy, go somewhere, kill stuff, get paid.” I cared infinitely more about rescuing Tandi in Fallout 1 than I do having my lost son on the back burner throughout the entirety of Fallout 4, and she’s hardly got a 3D model. The entire environment of the first two fallout games just had this constant sense of dread about it. The very Earth itself seemed to want to try and crush you, and what little light you could gain from the people around you was a welcome relief from the struggles of the outside world. But in Fallout 4 I’m much happier to mindlessly plink away at bandits all day. At the very least, the game play of the Bethesda Fallout games is miles ahead of the isometric top down Fallout’s. I just wish that there was some way to marry the two ideas… To have a Fallout game that is not only dark and well written, but has the advantages of first person shooter mechanics… We could set it in the bombed out remnants of Vegas, and perhaps call it; “Fallout: Las Vegas”.

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Persona 5 and Time Management

I have always had a great love for the persona series after my first experience with Persona 3. The dungeon crawling, the character and monster design, the writing- AND GOD THE MUSIC - It’s bliss.

There is so much about these games that make them so unique and wonderful, all ranging from the bomb ass music, the use of colour in Persona 3, 4 and 5 - Blue Yellow and Red respectively, the depth of the characters in how they interact with the player, how adorable and wholesome Nanako is-

One of my favourite bits though is how simple the way time passes in these games as called by fans, “Japanese HighSchool Life Simulator”, though to be honest I don’t think I’d be jealous if they did half the running around fighting these lot do. 

Point is, that doing things in these games are finite, you don’t get the option to promise some one “Oh yeah I’ll go help that settlement right now” and then forget about it for a year, these games have a time limit built into the game and narrative. It isn’t real time though, like defeating The End in MGS 3 Snake Eater by saving and eating/ fast forwarding the clock a week to kill the boss of old age. No, there is a move limit, and in that way, it is very much like a puzzle, even chess like.

Not only that, but it’s some 4D chess at play here. 

You need to balance your social life, make money to buy items - which means doing part time work, run through dungeons to save people before they die, and just as importantly improve the main character so you can help everyone as the game progresses. You have a limited of time to make friends, and making friends is important, since how powerful you are in the combat sections of these games is based on how close your relationships are, which make this really nice game play loop that doesn’t connect the down time moments of the game of walking around the streets doing stuff and running down hallways killing shadows. You need to make friends to become powerful in combat, and you combat to progress the game, get items and XP and extend dead lines so the game doesn't end.

I just think it’s so neat that time is designed this way in this game, I always feel so tactical calculating in the game what I’m going to do for an entire month to optimise myself in the game.

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A post about difficulty and the appeal of struggling to overcome a great challenge and the forms that takes.

Difficulty and the appeal of struggling is intriguing to me. It’s hard to find that balance of a game being just hard enough and not too easy, finding that perfect Yin and Yang. Some games go to absolutes (Like most Sith) and explore that space to it’s full effect. Examples of that are Animal Crossing, the game where it isn’t really difficult to do anything, and the obvious hard game title that everyone and their dog knows and has played, Dark Souls.

Overcoming a great challenge is cathartic, it feels good, it’s just all round a good time. Dark Souls fits this description to a T.  Dark souls’ system is pretty cleverly designed. Dark Souls is all about challenge, about being the underdog in a world that is vastly superior to you. If you want to become more capable of defeating a challenge, you have to undergo a smaller set of challenges, and that paradox cascades down to a seemingly infinitely small point where progression can feel slower than some really analogy about speed. By making small challenges, Dark Souls slowly builds you in breadth of ability and resistances until you reach a level of capability, where even if you are a filthy casual, you can still rely on your stats and items and just barely pass over the line being able to take down a large menacing boss, achieving that seemingly impossible challenge. There is not a more perfect example of this, than the first encounter you have in Dark Souls 1, the tutorial boss, The Asylum Demon.

The forms that takes is, “I got nothing and I look like a human nugget, I can’t fight this big boy and live, it’s too strong.” Which leads you to trying to run instead of fight, and you (hopefully) find a open pathway where you find a bonfire to rest after a gate closes behind you, forcing you to go forward in one direction. You loop around the Asylum, find a sword and a shield, a way to recover HP- Enter ESTUS. You get items- tools, to equip you and give you the power to level the mountain that was in your way before, introducing a new mechanic as you do that. THE PLUNGING ATTACK. You jump on the big demon boy, and you take out like a quarter health out of the boss, and now you’re on the ground doing a decent amount of damage going toe to toe to what seemed like just an unbalanced OP boss. This little loop is everywhere in this game, and it’s in so many other games too.

There isn’t a point to this post, I just think it’s neat that games do this, and thinking about this as a concept makes it easier in my mind to apply this to games I play to see how they implement this and how I can implement this into my own ideas.

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Game controller Vibration

Something that I think Pc gaming is deprived of is the feeling of vibrations in the controllers we have on console. I’m aware we can get vibrating mice, and even keyboards that do too, but games made and ported for Pc don’t get the luxury for it.

Vibrations are a great source of feedback for the player, I’d argue that it’s just as useful if a little worse.

Shooting a man and getting a rumble from your gun, navigating UI and getting a soft pulse as nice feedback and reassurance for your choices, the Big Bad Dragon landing down trying to murder you and your family; each one of these are great examples to add emphasis to the player.

It can add to the gravity and severity to an event in a game, like when the finite amount of dragons in dragon age land on top of you, the strength of their wings moving the air around you in the game is made obvious in the sound and visuals, sure. But on console you also have the added experience of feeling that kind of power through your controller.

In the video game Sleeping Dogs, selections for the menu screen is met with a strong sound paired with a thick vibe from the controller, which provides nice feedback and reassurance for the player and their choices on the menu. You get the same thing in fallout, specifically Fallout 3, New Vegas and Fallout 4. The soft clicky clacks of the pipboy and hum of the nuclear powered screen are amazing, and the soft rumble you receive when you un-holster weapons like the Alien Blaster feel fantastic, and is just satisfying.

Vibrations can convey a whole lot in games, and I think it provides an experience that you can’t really get on PC with a keyboard and mouse.

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Horror Games, Music, and Meaning

Horror games, are spooky.

Some are at least, there are many that set out to great things, but ultimately fail through one thing or another, most often from what I’ve gathered; by not using or misusing tools and game play elements. The most prominent of these being sound, though the other most noticeable one being lack of consequences.

What is with horror games using brass and string orchestras following horror enemies and the player? I’d think it would suitable in the right place where subtety is out the window, like when the player is found by a killer and is being chased by them in Dead By Daylight. That kind of crashing and tribal like rhythm works really well when a player is scrambling to escape. The same kind of dynamic can be found in Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 when a player is playing as a survivor and a horde spawn is triggered.

A string or banjo leitmotif plays, (a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation, in this case the trigger for a horde to spawn.)  and drums and cymbals crashing frantically plays after when hundreds of feet are slamming and clambering to eat you really helps the game play in a meaningful way, making first time players that are not used to the gameplay sometimes panic or even get frightened like I was when I played for the first time. That kind of use is fantastic in the proper place. Hell, even the original Slender game did well with the sound when you collected the pages, adding on subtle pounding beats, then adding more and more until it became a cacophony of noise, a auditory representation of anxiety and paranoia.

But these days, Horror games, specifically new ones that are usually indie or at least small in team; tend to use an orchestral band in nearly every situation.

Some games use sound too much, some not at all. I feel like games need to do more things like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q7oJuyy5Ac

The absence of sound can be meaningful, but like most things needs it’s contrast to be understood and valued. It emphasises sound too. It’s the same rule when talking about mechanics I think as well, give a player a reason not to use a feature or they’ll do it all the time mindlessly.

One more thing about spooky games.

The thing that I hate in other games as well was the absence of consequence and the room for error that the player gets for messing up. Or even the complete absence of danger in the case of F.E.A.R. , a FPS with a horror theme that has no real consequence for the spooky things in the game. The Horror Game “Layers of Fear” had the exact same problem, walking into a room knowing nothing can happen to you makes scares a lot less than what they could be. Remove danger and threats to progress, and the meaning in a scare loses it’s metaphorical bark.

If anything, I think we can learn from these games and apply the lessons to other game projects that are not exactly horror.

Meaning in a Video Game is universal after all.

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Concept art as an asset in Video Games

People love to hate on games for using unused assets as objects and rewards in the game space, instead of seeing it positively, as finding a use for work not being used. Though, I do understand why people get miffed when conception is done in a bad way instead of being more subtle and chill with the focus of the game

I think a great example of excellent implementation of this is Mortal Kombat and its Krypt. In exchange for a small amount of your colored “Koins” you obtain, you’re able to visit the Krypt and view rows of graves which are labeled by letter and number, with different prices for different coins. The further down, the more expensive and more “chance” for locating outfits .

Of course it’s all predetermined, but it’s still unknown when you first play and unlock stuff in the krypt. The best part though, is the quality and the lack of focus on the concept art and other stuff you get. It isn’t a reward in a broad sense, and it isn’t a focal point to show off work that’s in the background of the game you’ve been playing. If you’re like me and are looking for new skins for your favorite characters, getting concept art isn’t a bad thing, and can even be a hint of what the skin you’re looking for looks like or could look like if you haven’t seen any of the alternate skins

I also think God of War did it well too, by having a level you can go to and see the first models they used and how it transformed into the final models they used, for trolls and even for Kratos himself. Not only that, but you get text from one of the devs about his thoughts and what went wrong with the particular model, or just why they didn’t use it.

What was the point of this post?

It doesn’t really have one, I really just like Concept Art in games.

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Unit 2 Post Mortem - A Overview

Right, so.

This second unit: Level Design, has been a nightmare to go through. Level Design is a doozey of a job, and we were assigned into a team of three. My Group have proven invaluable in my short 6 weeks working on the level for the pre-made game made by our teacher and peer Shane. With one friend doing most of the scene work in Unity, Another doing all the documentation, Myself sorting and naming all files in a manner that is easy for all of us to work with; and all of us doing modeling in Auto desk Maya and textures in Photoshop using the UV Snapshots.

I never really understood and appreciated just how much work it takes to make a level, let alone in such a matter that complements a game, and on top of that making it look nice and mint.

In the end, I didn’t mind as much as I thought I would that the things and goals I wanted to execute that I wanted didn’t come to be in the from that I wanted personally, but rather, I was just ecstatic to have a working level that was fun to play around in. Having a finished product that is functional and proof of concept and our skills as a whole, was transcendent in feeling and emotion. Which sounds dramatic, and is really, but I don’t really know how to describe what it felt like to have my stress melt away and be happy (to a point) with the work I helped to complete.  

This being Level Design, it was also incredibly insightful to see the art pipeline of things and how developed and intricate they are. Which was solidified when I made closer friends with some artists in the other class during my breaks. I want to at some point develop a background in art, that stuff is awesome and so fun to do. Especially modeling.  I hope to be able to sculpt sometime in the future too.

The only other thing I can really think about that’s worth writing about is how amazed I was with working with two close friends. I was originally worried that we would mess around too much and neglect work, but I was surprised how mature we all were able to be, putting ourselves aside enough to get serious and work together to make a finished product.

Working together is Badass.

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Gui-Tar man

As a kid, I spent a lot of time being an absolute nerd and staying home and reading and playing Video Games. Most of my fondest memories was coming home one day to find my older brother in our living room with his other friend, who had in his hands, the disc and Guitar Controller for Guitar Hero III : Legends of Rock.

It was so new, and strange to me, and exciting as well. The idea in my little kid head of being a rock star with the added bonus of staying home in my pj’s was something unrivaled. My brothers friend gave me a go, selected the song Before I Forget by Slipknot and put the game on hard, and I ate trash immediately. I had no hand eye coordination, and everything on the screen seemed so fast at the time.

But I knew it was possible. I soon after saw my brother and his friend play the game, on Expert and Medium respectively. Just the idea was insane to me at the time, but the track list, the songs it offered was staggering at the time. It had a bunch of music that my parents listened to that I also enjoyed. Guitar Hero introduced me to Rhythm Games and some of my favorite bands nowadays. Bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Smashing Pumpkins, Santana, Rage against the machine and so many others. The next three years of my life after first contact as it were, My spare time was spent playing Guitar Hero in my spare time, aiming to get better constantly. Moving up in difficulty, until eventually I was good enough to play nearly any song on expert. And all the while buying and playing Guitar Hero World Tour.

Flashing forward, Guitar Hero and even Rock Band has become a rare commodity in terms of being able to purchase. They’ve died out in the mainstream, and many would argue that it hasn’t changed or developed or tried anything new in a long while.Guitar Hero tried to stay relevant and succeed for a time, by modeling and rigging music celebrities in the games, and introducing a Microphone for singing, and a drum kit for percussion. Which was the coolest thing to all my friends and my brother.

Guitar Hero was and personally to me is still Amazing. But what could you do to make Guitar Hero Great Again? In a new Generation?I’ve been thinking about this for awhile now. What kind of recently developed Technology could be used today to give Guitar Hero some new Mechanics and some new potential dynamics?

First off, what console would we use? I suggest the Switch. There’s so many positives to having a hand held home console with special small “Joycons” And with using a guitar shaped shell, like the Mario Kart Wheel, you can make a guitar like feel. Or even be able to play without it, if you make a 6 colored button slider for the Joy Con, and use the “Waggle” controls for strumming. You can easily recreate the feeling and experience on the Switch, but you can introduce more game play elements to play and experiment with.

For example, you could make a “House of the Dead” like segmate using the same kind of controls for aiming a bow and arrow in Breath of the Wild. Playing the music and using the power of the music to blast enemies. You don’t even need to stand still and only move in cut scenes like house of the dead, you could use the analog on the Joy Con to move, and in third person instead of in first person.

Even take a few notes from the new Plants Vs Zombies games, the Garden Warfare games, and have a PVE survival. Even add a PVP battle, using the same Duel mechanics in Legends of Rock, where you can use power ups to make other people have more difficult notes to hit, or take out one of their guitar strings.

And in a setting like that, you could even have drum players using the “Waggle” Controls too, as a Melee character or some kind of defence character if you think about this Guitar Hero Sequel like a class basses rhythm shoot em up. And if you wanted to, you could take it a little further with the vocals, having that character be a DnD Bard, giving Buffs and De-buffs to teammates and/or yourself and enemies.

This would take this game and make it the entirety of the game a mechanic in a base shooter game. Something new, and fresh, and fun.

Destroying the Enemy with the Power of Metal.

[spacecowdoy-blog]

This is a Post Mortem of the first unit in my First Year Diploma at the AIE.

So far, I have learnt just how intricate the base foundations are in Design, In general. A lot of work, thought and constant revision is necessary in everything that we’ve been doing. And often, I’ve found that I’ve been adopting this work flow even into my own personal life.

Planning where and who I want to be. Reviewing where I am, and setting the foundations for change.

That aside, doing this constantly feels like it’s pulling me apart in separate directions. There’s been so many things I should be doing on top of the work in the Diploma, and out of it. Though, what has changed is exactly what I’ve adopted at the AIE so far. Focusing on one thing at a time and doing it to the best of my ability, so it’s done and out of the way, so I can focus on the next problem. It’s been hard to do this, but often when I do it, I build a momentum and tackle so many of my tasks at once, which felt like a mountain before, ended up being easy to wade through, like some Mount Franklin. 

As for something negative that I need to work on; There are plenty of things to do, and never enough time to do all of them. And If I dwell on them, all it does is waste time and overwhelm me. It’s good that I make this mistake now and not later. I feel like this can kill a project if you do this at a critical time. Something to definitely knock on the head.

I absolutely love the connections and friends I’ve made all over. Coming from such an isolated background, it has been amazing to make conversations and quick friends all facets in the AIE. People from Programming and Art, and I hope even our teachers, who hopefully become our peers some day in the future.

I don’t think anyone of us are gonna make it very far without some kind of support. Not me at least. Working together and even in future; suffering together over our respective projects, I hope we’re all going to pull through. I mean,

I challenge anyone to get through all of this without having a close knit group friends to lean on.

Persistent, and constant presence erodes difficult tasks and problems. And it’s made me stronger and happier for it. 

Even if we’re not terribly good.