I think that a really nice aspect to any game is having a very good online mode. Some more modern games that are entirely online have shockingly bad servers in perspective to how much income that company makes. I think that having bad online servers and not matching people with proximity based connections really just messes with how the game functions. For example, in very precise intense difficult games where you need to play with precision and timing, having bad servers and input lag just ruins the entire experience, leaving people with just wanting to play the offline. I think that a lot of big companies tend to spend all of their budget towards cosmetics and purchasable items instead of putting that money towards making their game better overall. There's nothing more frustrating than crashing when you're about to win or dying simply because the servers have an immense amount of input lag. I think one thing that should be emphasized is having separate servers for those with Ethernet and those on WiFi. I think that a lot of games and companies don't encourage their players to get a better connection, and in the long run, ends up creating a laggy experience for everyone, not just those with the good connection.
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Over the last year I've been using razer peripherals for my computer such as the Razer Mamba TE Mouse, Razer Mamba Firefly Mouse pad, Razer Mamba ChromaOrnata Keyboard. These different pieces of junk all have so many problems with them and they are dramatically overpriced for the quality that you get. One thing that's really nice about these is how high quality they feel for the first month or two, but then the problems begin to arise. The first thing that I've had a problem with so far is my mouse. Some problems that have occurred are the tracker just completely cutting out, and tracker jumping all around my screen. What I mean by the tracker jumping is basically whenever I lift my mouse off the mouse pad the pointer will jump from one side of the screen, all the way to the other. This makes playing any game completely unplayable with this garbage. Razer offers some software for their peripherals which actually just make them work way worse. The calibration makes the mouse jumping 10 times worse and also creates typing problems with the keyboard. The problem with the keyboard isn't the build of the device, similar to the rest of their peripherals, but it's how the utility interacts with the computer. The computer will sometimes randomly not read an input on the keyboard. Some problems I've run into with the mouse pad however, are entirely build flaws. The first week of having my firefly mouse pad the tracking and gliding of my mouse was super smooth. After that, the build starts to wear down. My mouse pad is so unbearable to use my mouse on at this point of which my mouse just scratches across the surface of it. After having all these problems with peripherals that cost me a grand total of 170$, having them for only a year, I have to already replace them all. I DO NOT RECOMMEND BUYING THESE PERIPHERALS.
I think that difficulty in video games is a topic and concept that is really underwhelming in many different modern titles. I think its great to have games like dark souls and sekiro are great because they're targeted towards more hardcore players who are looking for a serious challenge. On another hand I think it's great to have games such as kirby's epic yarn which are targetted towards a younger audience, but I think that the amount of resources and time that they put into the game is completely unnecessary for what they're making. I think retro nes games have it perfectly. They have incredible difficulty but they're not impossible to beat. Take nes wrestling for example, it has a really simple move set, but mastering the style of game play, strategy, and timing are a much different realm of difficulty. I think a big mistake is allowing the player to choose their own difficulty. In most games when it's too easy, its completely boring. Too hard and its you give up too quickly.
One of my favorite retro games that I've ever experienced is Punchout for the NES. I feel like this game really hit the nail on the head with a memorable cast of characters, smooth controls, and an amazing amount of difficulty. In Punchout you play as little mac, a small fighter who has to go through many divisions to rank up against much bigger opponents. The game starts you out in an easy match against glass joe and then hits you in the face with Von Kaiser who is a much faster and unpredictable opponent. I think when the game really starts to scale though is when you face up against soda popinski. This guy is really difficult. He's about three times as big as you and his punches knock you down almost immediately. His punches come out in a very unpredictable pattern and are extremely hard to react to. I think one of the things that this game does perfectly is how unlike NES wrestling (which is another amazing game) it has a much more memorable style of play and cast of fighters that you face.
One of my favorite current mobile games is Brawl Stars by Supercell. The reason why this game sticks out to me in comparison to the other supercell games is how it's very fast paced and requires a lot of thinking. The game includes 4 different game modes slots that rotate daily. The game modes that show up include showdown, heist, bounty, gem grab, and brawl ball. My favorite game mode out of all of these is Showdown because you can play either solo or duo and you go against 10 other people in an arena that's shaped like a square. Once the game starts you need to find chests to get power cubes from them that increase your brawler's health and damage output. After 20 seconds a poisonous fog starts to close in around the arena, constantly shrinking towards the middle of the stage. The fog forces camping players to move in and compete with the others that are alive. The game has various different selectable brawlers that each have their own specific moveset that is fitted around their playstyle. Bull is a short range character who has a slightly higher move speed than the others. Penny is a long-range character that has a slightly slower move speed than the others. Each brawler has its own star power that becomes unlockable at level 9. The star power enhances the abilities of the brawler. The game has its own leveling up system where when you get experience, you level up and get brawl tokens which you can buy chests with to upgrade your characters.
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been working in the amazing software that's is Adobe Premiere. Adobe Premiere is by FAR my favorite out of all of the Adobe Softwares. Some of the things that I find so amazing about Adobe Premiere is how easy it is to cut clips and put them into your own amazing composition. There are so many different effects that vary from simple transitions such as a screen slide all the way to distortions and other crazy effects that you can use to mess around with your composition. I've done 3 different projects inside of Adobe Premiere which I've loved each one. My favorite so far was the fluidity of motion project where we took several clips and cut them up and put them in a certain order to portray someone getting ready to leave their house in the morning. On my own time, I've put together a couple of funny compositions using royalty free short video clips from online. I really enjoy the variety of customizability that Adobe Premiere offers to you. I recently found out how to adjust audio gain in a certain audio block and I've had fun putting it to the max in a random part of my video.
For this blog post, I'd like to talk about Graphics in video games as it can be a key component of the game that can make or break the game. One of the most important parts of graphics in videogames is the colors that are used to allow the game to fully strive in how it looks. A lot of these newer games coming out seem to have this problem where they decide to have a million sources of light on the screen and you can't even tell where the enemies are. When you take a game and you don't overcomplicate the graphics and use nice contrasting colors, it allows the player to easily understand what to do and not have to worry about figuring out what the heck they're even looking at. Another huge problem that some companies seem to be interpreting in their games for I don't even know what reason are things such as motion blur, film grains, and more. I can't even comprehend why you would ever want to include something that is originally a film imperfection such as a film grain as it just makes the game look absolutely terrible. With motion blur, it makes it so basically whenever you turn around the graphics go from good to absolutely terrible. If the game company really wants to include motion blur, then at least give the player the option to turn it off. A really good example of a game that does graphics I think perfectly is Super Mario 64 due to the game having not the greatest graphics in a sort of high-quality mindset, but everything is simple enough and the colors contrast, allowing the player to understand every single object on the screen and what they're looking at. Conclusion -
Over the past couple of weeks, we've been working in Adobe Animate with 2 different projects. We've had the opportunity to use this software and really try to learn as much as we can about it. Currently, I've only done one of the 2 projects but I still have many opinions to share on this new software. One of my initial reactions was that the interface of Animate is very different than the other Adobe softwares that I have used. There are still some of the same things from previous ones though, for example, there are many of the same tools. One tool that is used heavily in Adobe Animate is the pen tool. You typically use it to create whatever you're trying to animate. For my first project, I used the pen tool to create the body, mouth, and teeth of the monster that I animated. One thing that I think is true is that the pen tool works exactly the same as in the previous programs (I might be wrong on this). One thing I consistently had trouble with was the remembering of how to create each different tween and how to create new keyframes. Since we typically don't spend that much time in one program, it can sometimes be really annoying to become familiar with the interface and be comfortable with it. With that being said, as I move into my next project I have some concerns with how I'm going to create my animation as for the next one we will have no guided video. Conclusion -
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been digging my way through the incredible masterpiece that is Smash Bros Ultimate. The game has more content than almost any other game that I personally have played so far. There's over 1000 unique songs, over 100 different stages, and 74 different playable fighters. One aspect of the game that I'd like to talk about is the unique physics of the game. Each character in the game has their own specific knockback ratios, hitboxes, windboxes, and many more features. Simply the way that each character flies through the air when hit is specific to the move they were hit with, the % damage the character is at and the weight class of both characters. In smash ultimate there are 22 unique moves per character MINIMUM. One of my favorite aspects of Smash Ultimate would have to be how large the skill floor is. There are players ranging from new players all the way to completely frame perfect players. Some of the best players in the world are able to perform moves that have a 1 frame window to press the button at the perfect moment and with the right amount of force. Smash Ultimate is always pushing the player to learn more and get better. The game starts you out with a small amount of only 8 fighters and lets you develop your roster to all the way to 74. Smash Bros Ultimate is up in my top 5 favorite. games of all time due to the mass amount of content the game holds, the unique move sets of every different character, and the sheer enjoyment that I have while playing the game. Conclusion -
Bibliography
BagoGames. “Ready for Round 4? | Super Smash Bros. (Ultimate) Review.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 26 Dec. 2014, www.flickr.com/photos/bagogames/15928355827. Instacodez. “Super-Smash-Bros-Ultimate-090818-049.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 9 Aug. 2018, www.flickr.com/photos/161227653@N02/43894733432. When writing this post I have currently just finished my saving of cels in Illustrator and I am ready to transfer to After Effects. I'm writing this blog post to share my initial reflection and reaction on what I've experienced creating 120 cels in Illustrator. One thing I noticed immediately off the bat was exactly how much time it takes to upload 120 different cels to Illustrator. When creating the squash effect in Illustrator I used the direct selection tool to edit my specific handles on the ball to make it squish so it looks as if it's really hitting the ground. One thing I found difficult was keeping track of what cel I was on and remembering to switch to the next one after each export. One thing I found aggrivating was having to rename the cel every single time. When setting up my path for the ball to "travel" on I decided to make it bounce multiple times to make the animation more lively than just a couple high bounces. I decided to use red as my color for the ball as it contrasts with the color of the sky. One thing I wish I could have done would be to have some type of software that could change the name of each file to the next number corresponding the previous file. This would have saved tons of time in the long run, and if I were to be creating another animation using the same technique it would help a ton. In future projects I hope there's a more effecient way to create our animations. Conclusion -
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AuthorMy name is James Gerondelis, I am 14 and in the 9th Grade at Durham School of the Arts. This is my first year of Game Art & Design. Archives
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The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools.
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