MY BLOG POSTS

“Don’t Innovate, Replicate”

What do you think of when you think of video games or the video game industry? You might say Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Uncharted, Gears of War, Destiny Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto, the list truly can go on forever. Yet, do you know what these games all have in common? They’re not only all triple-A titled games produced by some of the most well-known companies in the game industry (Activision, Bungie, UbiSoft, EA), they’re all the same exact game.

No, Assassin’s Creed is definitely no Gears of War, although that would be quite the mix-up. But, I would argue that games like Halo or Call of Duty are really just mirrored imitations of one another. Yes, I completely understand that a lot of these games are competing with each other for a rather large, selective player base. What I am talking about is that lack of innovation many of these games have, in their own series and in their own genres. By now, it’s a pretty widely accepted fact that the Call of Duty franchise is truly just a re-skinned, albeit with each installation a very high-resolution re-skin, game that gets pumped out nearly every October by Activision. This highlights the issue that games have truly become a valid form of business. Moving forward, business will forever be associated with game making and that’s not an entirely terrible thing. After all, the hours spent developing games should be rewarded with some type of compensation that is more just than just player happiness and satisfaction. I want to spend the rest of my life creating games but I also need to be realistic and earn money to be a functioning member of society, or at the very least, stay alive. The problem is when business takes over the sole purpose of creating games.

The reason I got into games is that I saw video games as a near-perfect blend of films, photography, and literature. All games have cut-scenes, all games have dialogue, and all games have art. The factor that makes games stand out is that interactivity of them. You, as a player, get to experience a game hands-on, something that cannot be translated to simply watching a movie on a giant silver screen. With that being said, games are an art form. They can be used to express emotions and ways of thought, they can be used to teach lessons both moral and academic. They can be utilized to tell stories with unimaginable impact, the likes of which books and films can never fully capture. That’s why games like The Legend of Zelda or Doom or even Pac-Man were so successful back in the 80s and 90s. That’s why games like Halo: Combat Evolved or Assassin’s Creed 2 or Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were so successful in more modern times. The games took chances. They had more than just engaging stories (and let me say, those stories are some of the best video game stories ever told), they toyed around with mechanics and ideas that should not have worked but just did. Seriously, an assassin with not one but two hidden blades? The concept is so novel but encouraged a sleuth of different play styles that truly created a fine distinction of actual game play and atmospheric feel. The most important thing, though, is that they aimed to create a fun experience above all else.

The current state of the game industry is past that era of game making, unfortunately. The motto is “don’t innovate, replicate”. Innovating takes time and passion, sometime money does not reward as quickly as replication. Replicating the same formula of a game, giving it a new texture, and slapping on a number does not make a game good, it makes a game stale. Marketing for games have become brilliant, in that sense. They are able to sell the same game year in and year out by generating hype and promising “new things” to just cop out. Cut content is now only available as payable DLC and game development cycles are much quicker than they ever were. As a result, games lack the heart developers once had and put into the games they crafted. Rather, games just “steal” or “trade” mechanics with one another and brand that as “new and unprecedented”. Look at Call of Duty and Halo. For a period of time, both franchises were pumping out games that were nearly identical in play style. You could play Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or Halo 5: Guardians blind and the multiplayer experience would have been the same.

I have hope that these issues are not singular in nature. With each growing generation of game developers, there is a slow but definite push to begin to correct the errors the industry is making. Many of the developers entering the industry now, myself included, have experienced the era in which games truly soured with innovative mechanics and awe-inspiring stories. We have experienced the current era of staleness, lack of creativity, and corruption. I beckon that a new era is upon games, one that will seek to combine the art of games with the successful business model games can produce. I believe the industry is about to boom with games no one thought was possible. Look how many indie games are being created already. If we’re able to talk about these issues now, the future for games is a bright one. Don’t replicate, innovate.

Choosing an Art style to fit a game

When it comes to choosing an art style for a game, the choices are seemingly endless. In this modern day of art, there are a plethora of choices to pick from. 2-D art alone is a very saturated field that is constantly evolving and being added to. In that respect then, 3-D art is a whole another beast. One of the most problematic things I have encountered as a game artist is then choosing an art style that best fits the game. As an artist, our creative minds want to take any game we are currently developing in 15 different directions. One art style might be incredibly fun to craft and code into a game while another might be colorful and eye-catching. How does an artist pick then?

I have found the answer to this question in something I encountered very early on in my game design and development career. During my sophomore year, I began taking the game labs, courses in the game design program that finally introduced us, game design students, to game engines such as Unity. In these labs, we were able to work on 1-2 major game projects throughout each semester. Usually, the development teams started off small, from solo projects to teams of only 2 members. Thus, for my very first game lab, I was paired with a programmer while I took on the role as the lead artist. My responsibilities were to create all the art assets, level design, and animations for the game. The game idea was to follow a young boy who was trapped in a series of mazes. The entirety of the game took place in the dark and the player only had control over a small orb of light that would serve as the player’s tool to navigate through the dark mazes and a defense weapon against the creatures that inhabited the maze.

The idea alone lends itself to several possible ways of designing the art for it. While brainstorming, as the artist, I thought up multiple ways of I could take this idea and actually create it. One option was to create the game in 3-D, where the player would navigate the maze in either a first-person perspective or a third-person perspective. This opened up two doors; one door would lead to a more realistic art-style which would make the game much more horror-oriented, with the idea that a first-person approach would make the game personal and engaging. The other door would take a more cell-shaded, comical cartoon-look and feature the player in a third-person perspective. The only problem was that, as a sophomore game designer, I had no idea how to 3-D model let alone texture and rig.

So with the 3-D option put to rest, I had to come up with an appealing 2-D art style. Immediately, I thought of two distinct art styles that could work: pixel or a rogue-like cartoon style. I felt as if the pixel medium has become an oversaturated and overdone style. The pixel style also limits how much emotion I could portray in the few set of pixel dimensions I could work in. Thus, I opted for a more rogue-like cartoon style since I really wanted to capture the details of the young boy and the environment he was in. This is where my own personal style begins to bleed into the work I create. As an artist, I tend to draw and create realistically so my first take at creating the characters and monsters for HOPEless is best described as: proportionate. However, this made animating their sprites much harder since this was my first few attempts at actual 2-D animation. Many of my first animations for the game are passable but definitely lack several frames and correct limb movements. On top of that, given that the game was 2-D, I developed two contrasting art styles. The levels, walls, and floor were designed as top-down 2-D while the character and enemies were designed as side-scrolling 2-D.

It was only until my senior year in the game design program was I able to go back and update the art for HOPEless. My programmer and I decided to redesign the mechanics and overall goal of the game. We opted to scrap the maze-level designs as the mazes added an unnecessary layer of complexity that took away from the game. The one thing I chose to keep was the top-down aspect the mazes instilled in the game. This meant, I had to go and update the art style for the player. I still wanted to keep the overall cartoon art feel to the game so I looked at top-down 2D games that blended that art style. Looking at games such as The Binding of Isaac, I decided to redesign my character with an exaggerated cartoon look: a large head with a small body and limbs. This updated art style nailed the image I wanted to portray back my sophomore year and made animating much easier to organize and efficiently produce. It also provided a more unified look to the game since the walls and floor from version 1 of HOPEless looked too realistic, causing a jarring look when placed with all the other art assets.

The importance of choosing an art style for a game really speaks volumes, as I have learned. It can dictate how you create your characters, how you design your levels, and works hand in hand with how you develop your game’s mechanic(s). It also determines the mood and feel of your game, as well. I would argue that as an artist, to try and employ different art styles in the early stages of development. It not only hones your skills as an artist but by experimenting, you may discover a new mechanic you may want to explore or cut out a part of the game that just isn’t fitting with the rest of it. All of which could dramatically alter your game and you’ll be left satisfied with a game in which the mechanics play off the art.

showcasing a game

One of the best experiences to ever have as a game designer is to showcase your work for the entire world to see. After all, spending hours and days and weeks and even months on a project is only ever worth it to see the reaction of players who play your game and take true enjoyment from the experience. Yet, showcasing a game takes a lot more than just showing up to a booth and expecting people to play the game the way you want them to.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to attend a hackathon at Yale University. The hackathon’s purpose was to gather groups of game artists and programmers together to work in either virtual reality, augmented reality, or mixed reality and to create a game or experience that showcased or highlighted environmental issues that are currently plaguing the Earth. As a group, we had two days to develop an engaging experience. The twist was that none of us ever worked in any of those three mediums. Regardless, my team and I took on the challenge and we decided to create an interactive experience that made use of the Google Glass technology. Our experience made use of 3-D models of an Earth and as you stepped through the 3-D generated world and followed certain colored paths (which indicated different levels of emissions ranging from high emissions to no emissions), you could see the effect of certain outcomes and realities on Earth as the years went by. While the experience was simple, the Google Glass made the experience very eye-opening for the wearer.

But then it came time to actually present our work. The presentation went absolutely terrible. The program did not work for the majority of the presentation and when it did, only one person was able to go through the interactive experience before being cut short due to time restrictions. Additionally, the PowerPoint was hastily created minutes before we had to present and no one was truly prepared. The one video we did capture only featured an outside perspective of a play-tester. As a result, we did not win any awards for our work yet we were the only team to successfully incorporate the Google glass technology. So what went wrong? Well, truthfully, the answer to that is everything.

In retrospective hindsight, a lot of lessons can be learned from this experience. Given the timeline to produce and develop this game, playtesting was always going to be one of the last tasks that was going to be complete. However, as a team, we should have formulated a game plan going in and sectioned off each hour to dedicate our time to achieving a certain goal per hour. This meant planning when to playtest, planning when to create the PowerPoint, planning to edit the video footage, and assigning talking roles and planning to practice presenting. Yet even with organized planning, when you’re presenting, anything can happen. Creating back-up plans or having back-up technology (such as an extra laptop or another Google glass headset on the backburner) ready to go when something does go wrong goes an incredibly long way.

Additionally, in events like this, it is crucial to talk to everyone. Besides obvious networking opportunities, by talking to everyone at this events, you allow yourself to be enveloped in all types of ideas, mindsets, and processes. You can best figure out how to sell your games and experiences and really refine the nitty gritty details about what those games and experiences are about just by talking to people. The act of talking to people forces you to really know your games to a level where you can explain them to just about anyone you meet. The biggest lesson I learned, however, is that game designers are creative people by nature and by putting yourself in a position where you have to think on your feet, your creativity can and will truly shine.

I believe the biggest reason many game projects fail, whether it’s a solo project or a giant team project, is the lack of establishing goals for the game. Game designers and developers naturally have a lot of ideas for games. This stems from most of us being gamers ourselves and having played a wide assortment of games; it’s like our brains are an index of game ideas and we get to pick from time to time. Give us any game to play and I’ll guarantee you a game developer will have, at the very least, one suggestion to add to the game. Many game developers are also computer scientists, graphic designers, storytellers, and artists. We’re all creative, it’s really just a matter of how we express that creativity. So when you throw a group of game developers together, the possibilities are endless. And that’s exactly the problem.

The multitude of minds on any given project, for that matter, will inevitably always cause a clash in thinking. I think the greatest and impactful occurrence of this that I have had a game developer is linked to my very own senior game projects, Hook King and Synergy. On both projects, I was assigned the role as lead artist. Yet my actual responsibilities were very much up in the air. This was the first example of disorganization and lack of goals. So, to the best of my ability, I was directly responsible in creating all the art assets for the games. For Synergy, I created many of the 3-D models. For Hook King, I created many of the various art assets that could be found in-game. For Hook King, I also had to facilitate the art direction for my UI/UX designer and any freelance artists that joined the project. Additionally, I worked very closely with the lead programmers on both games to make decisions on what asset would be most logical for a certain mechanic. More so, I worked to establish the theme and setting of the games which would dictate how big levels could be and how enemies would ultimately interact with the player. Without a doubt, these senior projects already had a lot of moving parts.

What was the problem then? What ideas clashed? The main problem we encountered as a group was that we did not know what we wanted to create in both instances. There was no working clarity between myself and the rest of my group. As a team, our biggest mistake was that we came up with all these ideas that could certainly work if we had given more thought and time into them. Beginning with Synergy, we wanted to capture a unique co-operative experience but our lack of defining what the experience was ended up being our nail in the coffin. We spent so much time debating “what if we did this” or “what if we incorporated that” so by the time it came down to actually creating the game, every week we had to present our progress, we would throw together a somewhat working prototype of our mixed ideas and that was that. Synergy ended up being a dead-end and we had to refocus our efforts for the spring semester.

However, with a new semester and a fresh start, my team and I were downright terrified to take risks or tackle anything we remotely considered “large-scale”. Our failure with Synergy solidified that hesitation. We were back to step 1: deciding on what kind of game we wanted to make and the mechanic we wanted to explore. We spent nearly a month meeting every other day and tossing around idea after idea. Every single time, there was always one person who did not like the idea or did not believe the game could work. By the time we settled for the concept of Hook King, we had to immediately get to work. Yet for the first month of development, we encountered the same issues as Synergy: we were creating parts of the game just to create and satisfy the requirements of the course. It was only when we realized this approach was not working did we sit down and literally write out what we wanted this game to be. We decided to write out the goal of the game: Hook King would be a time-based high score game that mimicked the feel of trick skate games like Tony Hawk or Skate but instead of skateboards, you could grapple, swing, and launch your ragdoll player around to cause hilarious destruction. Next, we wrote out the goals for the programmers to have week and did the same for the artists. By doing so, any shroud of confusion was finally lifted and within a month, we had a decently polished game that could compete in game festivals.

The point of all this is that writing out your goals provides a structure or hierarchy for you to follow. Many times, developing a game is frustrating and soul-crushing. There will be days where you just want to throw your laptop out a window or strangle your groupmates. Goals add a boost of motivation to not only get things done but a way to check and make sure you are on track. At the very least, it facilitates communication because if there is one thing game design is, it is very much a group process. Like it or not, communication is the only way a game will be made in the end.

The Importance of Being Goal Oriented

However, with a new semester and a fresh start, my team and I were downright terrified to take risks or tackle anything we remotely considered “large-scale”. Our failure with Synergy solidified that hesitation. We were back to step 1: deciding on what kind of game we wanted to make and the mechanic we wanted to explore. We spent nearly a month meeting every other day and tossing around idea after idea. Every single time, there was always one person who did not like the idea or did not believe the game could work. By the time we settled for the concept of Hook King, we had to immediately get to work. Yet for the first month of development, we encountered the same issues as Synergy: we were creating parts of the game just to create and satisfy the requirements of the course. It was only when we realized this approach was not working did we sit down and literally write out what we wanted this game to be. We decided to write out the goal of the game: Hook King would be a time-based high score game that mimicked the feel of trick skate games like Tony Hawk or Skate but instead of skateboards, you could grapple, swing, and launch your rag-doll player around to cause hilarious destruction. Next, we wrote out the goals for the programmers to have week and did the same for the artists. By doing so, any shroud of confusion was finally lifted and within a month, we had a decently polished game that could compete in game festivals.

The point of all this is that writing out your goals provides a structure or hierarchy for you to follow. Many times, developing a game is frustrating and soul-crushing. There will be days where you just want to throw your laptop out a window or strangle your group mates. Goals add a boost of motivation to not only get things done but a way to check and make sure you are on track. At the very least, it facilitates communication because if there is one thing game design is, it is very much a group process. Like it or not, communication is the only way a game will be made in the end.

Game Designer, Filmmaker, or Both?

One of my favorite childhood memories was of me, when I was just about 6 or 7 years old. I remembered my mom would always be in a rush in the morning, trying to prepare breakfast while simultaneously putting on make-up, styling her hair, and brushing her teeth. Being a kid who loved his mom, my genius and brilliant mind at the time figured out the most complex way to help her: by taping the toothbrush and pan to the blow dryer so she could accomplish all 3 activities at the same time (okay, maybe not so genius or brilliant). The point of that story is that ever since I was young, I have always wanted to create and I have always come up with unconventional ways of doing so.

Applying for college was one of the hardest things I had to do. I did not have one specific interest or dream. I was obsessed with biology, space, games, writing, and movies. I was truthfully all over the place. The way I was brought up didn’t help. I was told that making video games (I actually had no idea that it was a legitimate choice of study in college) or becoming an author or creating films were not sure-fire successful ways to make a career. So I opted to go into college studying bio-medical engineering. Yet every college I visited for that field of study never interested me; it scared me more than anything. It was only when I visited Northeastern University did I learn of a game design program that existed there. For the first time in my life, I had a gut feeling that this was a path I wanted to take. So I took it and ran. I applied to almost every game design program I could find and in the end, went with Quinnipiac University.

Yet going into college, I still was very unsure of myself. At first, every person I told what I was studying would give me a look. “Game design, what’s that? Is that even real?” they would say. Even after I started the program, I struggled to fit in. However, at the very beginning of my freshman year, the school held an involvement fair where all the school’s clubs and organizations would table and try to get new members. As I wandered around the fair, I stumbled across Q30 Television. “Come and screw around with cameras” someone shouted. That caught my attention almost immediately. As much of a gamer as I was, I was just as interested in film. So I joined and the rest is history. I learned the ins and outs of film and television production without ever having to take a traditional film or production class. I became an executive producer of a whole television show. For most of my collegiate career, I developed games in my classes and produced short films in my free time.

The only problem was that I felt very one-sided a lot of the time. While films and videogames fall under entertainment media, the two concentrations share as many differences as they do similarities. My biggest struggle in college was, “is this exactly what I want to be doing?” I asked that question as a game developer and a television/film producer. It was only until the end of my junior year and my senior year did I realize the value of being both. Being a game developer and computer scientist gave me the tools to use the entire Adobe Creative suite, as well as learn different coding languages and employ development methods (like SCRUM cycles). But being a filmmaker helped me craft my narrative story-telling, how to frame up scenes, and how to produce and get an entire team to come together and work.

As a result, the path I ended up following is a path many do not usually do. Films and games, who would’ve thought? I used to compare myself viciously to other game artists and their abilities until I realized they could not create game trailers or direct game cut scenes like I can. One of the weaknesses I have found many game designers in the program have is the inability to produce: assign tasks tailored to individual roles on a game project, ensure efficient development productivity (such as tasks being completed on time), and overall project management. That is where my unique worth comes in. I can do that and if there’s ever a time where I will be confident in my abilities, it is my ability to produce. Moving forward, I want to focus on narrative-based games and my film and screenwriting experience adds a whole new layer to work with; something many of my peers do not possess. I really used to be so unsure of what I can do but now, by combining the fields of films and games, I truly believe I can create hybrids: films that you can interact with or visually and narratively satisfying games that resonate with all types of audiences.

WHAT FORTNITE DOES RIGHT

By now, everyone has heard of the ever-increasing in popularity “Hunger Games” style game, FortNite Battle Royale. The game, only being in beta or early access, has garnered hundreds of millions of players in the span of only several months. It’s arguably one of the most addicting games that has come out in a very long time. Truthfully, it reminds me of the time Modern Warfare 2 dominated the gaming sphere. Like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, everyone is currently playing FortNite. At the very least, everyone has played FortNite or watched someone play the game. And what’s not to love about the game? The game beckons its players to play with friends, either in duo or squad mode. Games last anywhere from 15-20 minutes and attract all types of playstyles: those who want to rush in and get as many kills as possible before going down in a bullet-ridden blaze of glory, those who want to take the stealthy approach and hide in bushes, those who want to stream, those who want to build zany contraptions and structures, the type of playstyles can go on and on. However, what the game does well is that regardless of how you play it, you as the player are always having fun to some degree. Winning that victory royale is just that sweet topping on the cake.

However, FortNite also successfully capitalizes on another concept the game industry has struggled with for years. That concept is the option to pay for additional content. Currently, one of the driving factors in FortNite’s success is undoubtedly the fact that it is completely free to play. That idea is the reason the game blew up to begin with once players began to realize the value and direction Battle Royale had and could go in. Anyone could play and so indeed, everyone began to play. Many companies would be eager to try to capitalize on this exposure by offering downloadable content. Many companies already abide by this concept but do it in the worst way possible.

Take for example, EA. Besides EA singlehandedly achieving the award of being the most hated gaming company multiple years in a row, the flaw in their business model is that they do not know how to separate the payable content from their playable content. The two, in EA’s example, work hand in hand with one another. This turns out to be a detrimental error however. Players are given the option to simply “cash out” and spend a dubious amount of money to rank up, gain skills, and “pay to win” rather than grind and take time to hone in their skills in that particular game or game mode. As a result, there’s a dramatic shift in the player base as some players can spend weeks becoming better while others throw money blindly at companies like EA and no longer have to spend weeks training. The model is simply and unequivocally unbalanced.

Another example would be loot boxes or crates. Many games employ this kind of method in their games. The idea of a loot box is that it is a randomized assortment of items, skins, weapons, abilities, etc. and you, as the player, have the ability to open these loot boxes and gain new items. Many game companies employ a system in the game where you can earn these boxes through hard work and sheer grinding. Those same game companies also still offer the choice to once again drop money and buy these loot boxes and the same issue unfortunately persists. The worst of it all is that it is completely unregulated so companies can theoretically design these loot boxes to never truly award players with good “loot” but still manipulate players into spending either an unhealthy amount of time playing the game or spending the player’s actual money.

So what does FortNite do right then? FortNite and Epic Games (the developers of the game) offer hybridized versions of what I just described. What I mean by this is that the content that FortNite does sell has zero impact on the game. The variety of skins and emotes you can purchase on FortNite certainly make the game much more fun and entertaining (and paves the way to creating some really funny moments during gameplay). There are not necessary to getting the full experience out of the game however. They do not make players better by the slightest. The game still is heavily focused on skill and learning what tactics work or don’t work. The Battle Pass is also another area where Epic Games excels. In the simplest of terms, the Battle Pass works similar to that of a Season Pass. Season passes tend to be a one-time payment for future content to be released for a certain game. The Battle Pass is also a one-time payment (very cheap and affordable too, coming in at only $10) but instead of waiting for content to be released, you have to train and play and grind like you would for any other game to gain access to the content. The content is already there. Epic Games navigates the criticism of season passes; which is if the content is going to be there, why release the game without it and force players to pay more to play more. Instead Epic chose to not only make the content an individual entity to the gameplay but if you really want to have all the content, you still have to work like any other player would.

That right there proves that there are better, more efficient ways of introducing payable content with detracting from the overall gaming experience. While I agree that game developers need to find a way to get paid for all their hard work, games should always be considered an art form, first and foremost. That being said, gameplay should take priority before “DLC” or “Season Passes”. FortNite is the first game to successfully do so and I hope to see more “FortNite-esque” business models moving forward into the future of gaming.

THINKING SMALL-SCALE

One of, if not, the most important lessons I have learned as a student, as a game developer, and as a film maker is being able to sort through ideas and think small-scale while simultaneously thinking large scale. The issue that most creators of content face is that they have these grand and spectacular ideas that they want for their games, for the films, for their television shows, for their “insert anything here”. Often times, all of us have that one grand idea that we know for sure works well in our heads but the moment we sit down to begin writing, drawing, or programming, we hit a wall. And by hit a wall, I mean we’re going 80 miles per hour and then all of a sudden we come to a complete and abrupt stop and crash into a brick wall. It’s utterly heart wrenching to have no idea how to continue a project. Sure, the usual advice is to breath, take a step back, and go do something else so you can allow yourself to refocus. Personally, I agree that it probably works (and I have had to do that from time to time) but once I get fixated on something, it’s always going to be bothering me in the back of my head. I want to figure it out now.

The solution that I have found is to, yes, take a step back. But instead of dropping the project altogether, try to figure out what is not working. More often than not, the problem is because the idea or concept you are trying to achieve simply is not currently achievable. That is to say it is not achievable, anything can be achieved with the right amount of time, people, and willpower. That’s exactly it though: a lot of the reasons why your grand idea is not working is that it has not been fleshed out enough. Whether that means more time needs to be spent on the logistical portion of figuring your project out or more resources or skills or people are needed is usually the issue. This is not the end-all, be-all, however. This all means that you’re thinking too large in scope. You have to narrow down what you are trying to achieve and break up the hard portions of your project to more manageable, “bite-size” portions. In doing so, you slowly build parts of your project up as well as your confidence (and trust me that truly goes a long way

The types of ideas rushing through my head truly scare me to be honest. Half of the time, I spend my free thinking in how I could ever possibly make my ideas come to life. For example, my time as an executive producer for Quinnipiac Tonight and Q30 Television was spent devising two live televised musicals with short films intercut in between. Additionally, we had a live audience and jazz band. To pull off one musical was nothing short of a feat; to pull of two, well let’s just say I barely felt like a functioning human by the end of it. These were big aspirations I had for myself as a producer but also big expectations I had in my nearly 40-person cast and crew. Without a doubt, those two musicals were the largest-in-scope ideas I have ever had thus far in my life. I owe a lot of the success to both musicals to the wonderful and dedicated actors, writing team, and associate producers I had at my disposal. But writing that sentence also indicates how many moving parts I had to personally manage to make sure that the musicals were merely put on. The way I did it was to think small-scale. I broke up the necessary parts that the musical needed to work into smaller portions that I could wrap my head around and keep track off. I delegated work as much as I could and I set up schedules and timelines to ensure filming for the short-film segments occurred, prop and set design occurred, and writing the musical and live portions occurred. Most importantly, I took it day by day and one step at a time.

More than that, while balancing two musical productions in back to back semesters, I also worked on not one, but two senior game projects. The first one failed and became a dead end solely to the fact that my game design team went in thinking large scale without taking into account the logistical small components that required a lot of thought (let me emphasize this again, A LOT OF THOUGHT. We were shooting to create the next Borderlands in 3 months at one point). The second project started off to a rocky start because although we were aware that thinking large-scale was detrimental, almost all our ideas would start off from one mechanic and wildly shoot up into 3 different ways to use that mechanic, which made the whole process of coming up with a game idea that more difficult. It took us nearly a month to condense the summary of our game but once we did, it was as if the tides had shifted and both the artists and programmers were able to turn around and produce a working game in a month.

I can go on and on about how vital it is to think small-scale. It is much easier said than done but I believe the more aware people are that life is overwhelming and so are the ideas we come up with, the more people can begin to approach large scale ideas with the mindset of “chipping away” at grandiose ideas. The process of starting small and working to that big goal is the reason why so many games that do work did not just happen overnight (or in the game industry, in one year). It’s okay to have a bigger picture in mind but if you cannot explain your idea in one word, your idea might be way too complicated already.

ADDING THAT EXTRA OOMPH

As a game artist, one of the key things we look for are ways to add that extra “oomph” to our art and our overall games. We live and work in a day and age where technology is constantly evolving. Through that boom of technical evolution, the capabilities of modern art are also constantly expanded. You can see it in the movies we watch and the games that we play. The drive for hyper-realism is at an all-time high. Why wouldn’t it be? The CGI in movies are through the roof because they are down-right gorgeous to look at. The same goes for in-game cut scenes in games. Actually, the same goes for the gameplay itself. Take games like the Uncharted series or The Last of Us or even the most recent God of War. Often, I’ve had to take a double take simply because I literally could not believe that what I was watching was in fact a videogame and not an actual video of some sorts.

Granted, being a student and a game artist/developer that has just put his boots on the ground I am certainly nowhere near the level of producing hyper-realistic art like the triple A companies do. I would not know where to even begin with my subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud and student version of Unity game engine. However, that is also not where my area of skill is at just yet and that’s perfectly okay. What I am good at, however, is a range of 2-D art styles combined with intermediate 3-D modeling knowledge. The one thing I have always struggled with, then, is making that art feel fluid and organic for the type of art that it is.

What I mean by that is that 2-D vector art in illustrator is a piece of cake the moment you understand how to correctly utilize the pen tool. Every other tool in that program seemingly falls in line the moment you understand the areas of use that Illustrator provides. Yet for the longest time after I understood the basics of Illustrator, I was still creating incredibly “flat” vector art. Each logo or character or asset I drew for my games or graphic design work looked clean with no obtrusive design errors. Yet, it still lacked a certain texture or for lack of better words, a certain “oomph”.

It was only until I focused entirely in the game art track in my game design program at my university did I learn to look at art and compare it to the actual real world that I’m surrounded in did I learn what I was missing. During one of my 3-D modeling courses, we finally began to learn how to texture 3-D models. To my surprise, one of the ways to texture a model is to actually create a texture map, which is in fact a 2-D design that can be imported into software like Maya and mapped to specified areas on a 3-D model. My first attempts at texturing suffered the same fate as my vector-based art: there were flat with no real organic feel to them. The project I was working on the time involved a character with a television for a head that wore a two-piece tuxedo. So I took a step back and looked at my own suits. I looked at how light reflected off the suits. I looked at how shadows contoured parts of the suit. That’s when it hit me, all of my art up until that point was flat because I was not taking into account light. Look everywhere around you: everything you see is being manipulated to some extent by light. Nothing is truly an opaque base color of itself. Rather, every object has a blend or gradient of colors and shadows on it.

So I went back to my texture map and I began playing around with transparency modes and adding more layers that played around with different shades and hues of colors. I imported that into my 3-D model and voila, almost like magic, the suit itself looked less flat and looked like it actually had a grainy texture that you could almost touch. I expanded that very concept to my 2-D based art as well. I began creating layers of darker (or lighter) colors and using the pathfinding tools in Illustrator to slice out small but detailed highlights and shadows to add to my designers. And that right there is the extra oomph I needed. Art, after all, is an exaggerated version of reality but the thing that connects art to us is the fact that is based out of our own realities.

MY TIME AT BANDAI NAMCO

Truthfully, my junior year of college was one of the most pivotal times in my entire life thus far. I had my freshman and sophomore year absolutely dedicated to learning the ins and outs of game design. By the time the first round of game labs was over though, I was left somewhat out of place. It seemed like half of my game design peers were computer programming wizards, understanding the complexities of Javascript, C#, and C++. The other half were miniature Da Vinci’s, producing some of the best pixel and 2-D art I only dreamed I could do one day. I fell somewhere in the middle, being a game design and development major and a computer science minor. I understood the core concepts and syntaxes of programming, especially Javascript and C#. I understood Illustrator and Photoshop. I even understood the basics of the Unity game engine. I just simply wasn’t a master in any of the three. All my work in those sophomore year game labs were passable but they truthfully weren’t my vision of what I thought or hoped I could do. The fact that I was not taking the optional junior year game labs going into my junior year certainly didn’t help. I instead chose to focus solely on the artistic track of my program and finish up my computer science minor requirements. The highlight of my junior year, however, was my breakout of being a producer and filmmaker. Something that at the time, I had no solid idea how to bridge to my field of study.

That focus into filmmaking only served to draw an ever-growing line of doubt for what I wanted to really pursue going forward (plus switching majors as a junior is not that feasible if I wanted to graduate on time). Nonetheless, I also kept an optimistic mind that one day, I would get the chance to blend games and film together. Thus, I applied for the QU in LA program. This program enabled Quinnipiac students to live and work in Los Angeles granted they were able to obtain an internship there. So I created a make shift portfolio and began applying to over 50 different jobs. 54 to be accurate. Not a single game company, graphic design company, or film/production company got back to me. Except one: Bandai Namco Entertainment America. Bandai Namco is the company that produced and published games like Dark Souls and Dragonball FighterZ, as well as gaming classics such as Pac-Man. You should have seen my face the moment I got the email response back for my application.

The only problem was that Bandai Namco was based out of Santa Clara. At the time, I just assumed Santa Clara was one of the sub-portions of Los Angeles. Funny enough, it was only the hour before my first phone interview did I think to look it up. That was when I found out Santa Clara was about 7-8 hours north of Los Angeles, smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley and an hour outside of San Francisco. Yet this was the only company to give me a shot so I figured if I could land an internship here, QU in LA could take a back burner and I’d travel out to the Bay Area myself. This was my chance and I was not going to let it slip away.

I applied to be a video editing intern at Bandai. And luckily enough for me, I gave a good enough of an interview to get to the second stage and finally, be offered the internship opportunity. I remember the night before I left to drive across the country to start the position. I had a mental breakdown, I truly felt scared to my very core. The position was video editing, not game design. I truly thought that everything I had done up to this point was going to be for nothing and that I majored in the wrong field. I calmed myself down, drove 5 days through the entirety of America, and when I got there, my life truly did change for the better.

It was here at Bandai Namco did I realize the sum of all the work I had done so far in college. I realized I was a much better filmmaker than I ever thought. I knew how to edit, I knew how to work cameras (or I could at least learn a camera very quickly), and I knew how to direct. But I also realized I knew how to talk to people and hold interviews. Those skills quickly propelled me to be one of the hardest working and efficient interns there that summer. However, that internship was the first time I ever blended film and games. I was asked to help work on the mobile version of Pac-Man and I got to QA test as well as learn programming tips from the mobile programmers. I also befriended one of the lead graphic designers there, who shared tips and tricks I never thought were possible to achieve in Photoshop and Illustrator. My world was shattered, a hundred new doors opened up for me. I began to see the raw potential in the type of person I was: a dual game and filmmaker. My true test came towards the end of the internship in which I was given creative control over a company video that would be premiered in front of hundreds of thousands of people. I was able to direct and edit the video itself but I was also able to bring my knowledge of games and the design of games to really deliver a video that emphasized gameplay but also emphasized the theme Bandai Namco abides by: Fun For All.

I left Bandai Namco with a new, confident outlook on my life and my abilities. I would argue that because of that internship and the summer I spent in California, I finally realized who I was and who I was meant to become. If anything at all, I learned the proper ways to interact with your bosses and coworkers. To think all of this came to fruition because I screwed up in my internship hunt. Bandai Namco was my first experience in the game industry but it will not be the last. After all, who else can produce and direct films and games and make it work? Actually, probably a few people but to be honest, that just makes me hungrier to get out there and make an impact.

MY REFLECTION OF THE GAME DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM AT QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY

There’s a lot I want to say in this specific blog because the game design program here has come to mean something to me that words can hardly begin to describe. Let me start at the beginning, when I was a young, naïve senior in high school with no idea what the rest of my life was going to end up being (and truthfully, as a young, naïve senior in college, I’m the same way just with some more life experience). I found out about game design being a field of study very late in the college application process but by April, I had received several acceptances to schools across the Northeast that offered the program. The two top contenders were Drexel University and Quinnipiac University. Drexel had it all: an established top 10 program combined with the “co-op program”, an internship program that teaches and sets Drexel students up with internships 1 to 3 times during their time at the school. It was in the heart of Philadelphia and the tours showed numerous game labs in the midst of a teeming building that oozed creativity from its walls. My friends and family were convinced that I was going to be pick Drexel. After all, in the 5 years I would have spent there, I would have left with a bachelor’s in game design, a master’s in teaching game design, and at least 1-3 internships under my belt. But I didn’t go to Drexel.

I chose Quinnipiac University. An up and coming school that featured a top 30 program that was and still is up and coming. It was in the middle of Nowhere, Connecticut and I would only graduate with a bachelor’s degree. I shocked everyone with my choice and looking back, I do not regret it a single bit. I think I chose Quinnipiac less for the game design program it offered but rather, the experience the school offered. Game design was that fundamental base or structure that I desperately needed but Quinnipiac offered something Drexel didn’t: the feeling that I could get something more than learning the craft and trade of developing games. That something very much ended up being my passion and love of producing and filmmaking. That something were the friendships I made here. That something was Quinnipiac Tonight, the show I had the utmost pleasure on running for 4 years. That something was the opportunity to start a whole fraternity chapter of Alpha Sigma Phi here. That something was the chance to leave my mark and legacy here, not just be any old student that went through the program, passing classes, and creating games without some sort of substance backing up the whole creation process.

Truthfully, the game design program here is nowhere near the potential it could be. My class of game designers were some of the most brilliant guys I have had to pleasure to get to know. Many of them are going to go on and become wonderful programmers and outstanding artists. Yet the major flaw of the program was that we did not learn how to program or how to create art. The game labs were very much: “here’s an assignment/lab/design restriction, hopefully you understand it. If you don’t, figure it out and then throw together a completely functioning game in x amount of month(s).” There were no classes (or at the very least, not enough classes) dedicated to programming for games or learning the Adobe Creative suite. Much of the learning we did as game design students came from trial and error. That is a completely valid way to teach and learn but the disconnect comes when half the class comes from high school prepared with tech or art skills and the other half comes in expecting to learn those skills. We got thrown into groups that did not mesh well because most of the time, half of us were playing catch up and doing our own personal research because we had no idea of how to turn our ideas into actual tangible pieces of work.

Many factors could probably be given to explain why classes were the way they were. Funding and money is most definitely amongst one of the top reasons our learning experiences ended up the way they were. There just was not enough money invested in our program to hire more competent and passionate professors and equipment that could benefit our development processes. It certainly does not help going to a university focused on the health sciences either. Art-related fields of study tend to fall on the backburner. However, the game design program lacked a real sense of community. The game designing class as increased every year the program has been at Quinnipiac but as a graduating senior of the program, I literally could not name the junior class or the sophomore class or the freshmen. Each class is just sectioned off to their own courses with one another. The most interaction different grades of game designers had with one another came in the Game Club. The Game Club, however, only attracts a certain niche of game designers. Many members of the Game Club were in fact not game designers. I think that is very much because every game designer is wildly unique, with some being much more serious about gaming while others found their priorities to be in the studies or their extracurricular activities. We all kind of just dispersed and followed our own paths since we never had a structure that unified as game design students. As a result, the community at Quinnipiac is severely lacking.

Game design is a field that relies on group work and cooperation yet in all our classes, the groups that were formed ended up being the same group of friends. Almost all of us fell into “assigned roles” where our game art or our game programming lacked variety. I’m a perpetrator of this, as I certainly have a distinct art and coding style that rarely truly fluctuates. I would argue that this is the same situation for many of my fellow game artists. Even the programmers. If you really strip each game down to its core, they all follow a same basic mechanical formula. I think it’s the reason most of us are not completely satisfied with the work we’ve done in the program. The way the courses are run force us to never explore any other type of game rather than mechanic-based games. Narrative-based games were considered “impossible” to realistically accomplish in the amount of time we had a semester to develop games. Time was the biggest stab in the gut too. Mechanic-based games are certainly much easier to design and develop and take significantly less time but we were forced to cram in anywhere from 2-3 mini games on top of 1-2 full-sized game projects in a single semester. I understand the importance of failure and believe me, I think most of my games to this point are failures. That’s the thing, before I could really digest and think about what I did wrong with one game, I had to force myself to start developing another game and the problem became an endless cycle. Most of the time, I was still teaching myself how to become a better coder or a better artist so it was always an uphill battle of learning new techniques and email-bombing my professor to meet and go over a piece of code or how to animate x, y, and z.

The way the program is run, ultimately, creates a very unbalanced mix of students. The students who know how to code or produce art from the get-go pumped out polished looking games and took off sprinting. The students in the middle who were able to grasp Unity, self-teach themselves skills to a somewhat successful state, and stay afloat amidst the barrage of expectations and requirements pumped out passable games but were left bewildered and dissatisfied. The rest got dragged along, which is a shame because many of them had bright ideas and concepts and they never really figured out how to best portray them. I feel this is partly just a way of life but I believe the whole point of higher education is that it grants anyone the opportunities to learn and eventually excel. The problem with game design is that it simply did not.

Instead of being told to just go and create games and hopefully you learn something out of that experience of creating a game, I think the whole entire program needs to be restructured. Freshman and sophomore year should be the year where you read actual, meaningful texts that discuss the principles of game design and development. This is the time for small labs and small-scale projects where failure and experimentation is encouraged. These labs can be utilized to begin learning Photoshop and Illustrator in depth or learn how to animate or how to 3-D model. This is how you can begin to incorporate other majors, such as interactive digital design and film. Additionally, these labs could be where you learn applied computer science; in this case, languages and syntaxes in the context of coding in Unity or Unreal. Again, this is where computer science and CIS majors can be matriculated into the program. By incorporating other majors, you not only begin to build a larger community but you begin to facilitate the transactions of knowledge between major to major and that’s truly how you enable educational growth and networking. Junior year should do away with the optional game labs (or at the very least, require game design students to partake in at least one lab during the fall or spring semester) and reserve those game labs to be the first true test of the skills garnered throughout freshman and sophomore year of the program. As juniors, game designers would be required to work on a singular game project all semester with group sizes ranging from 2-4 members. Near the end of the year, there should be a department meeting in which all the juniors are required to go. At this meeting, every junior gets to decide on joining a senior game group that consists of 4-8 members. They then have the summer to pitch ideas to one another and organize themselves for senior year. When senior year starts, the year should only be about developing one final senior game project for each group and working on portfolios. By the spring semester, most groups should be more than prepared to take games to festivals.

Finally, to really seal the deal on the program, create a game design club. Not a game club but a game design and development club with professors that can help facilitate the process. The club’s main focus should be to create a game every single year and should be run like an actual game development company. Even if it’s not run beat for beat like a real company, the idea that students are able to come together and run their own mock version of a game development team would, without a doubt, impress any potential employer. The benefits of a club like this include: people from all majors can join (i.e a marketing major could join and run the promotional aspect of game development), the amount of exposure about games, the industry, and the program at the school would be through the roof (we would be taken so much more seriously in the eyes of the university and job hunters), and you would create an immersive community for the entire game design department. Lastly, this would also be a gigantic resume boost but it would also teach communication and interviewing skills that would further prepare game design students for the real world.

I truly believe the possibilities are endless for the program if the proper amount of time and thought was put into it. I know there are behind the scene issues that I could not begin to understand and I know funding for all of this is a crippling reality. But realistically, this falls on the professors of the program working with the students. The program has taught us all to be resourceful. I think that’s really the lasting impact or takeaway I have from my time here. But I think the restructuring of courses is something that is 100% feasible as of now. Starting a club is also just as feasible. Yes, these things would take time to sort out and implement but isn’t that the very essence of game design itself? The best games take time to flesh out. So why don’t we all aim to flesh out this program and make it the best it could possibly be?

BLOGS