#aieedu

The yellow Dots are where ducks will spawn, the blue/red zones are location the two players will spawn from, and the open area has not yet been finished,

This was quick, very quick. The initial design was based off a combination of a few peoples ideas drawn from a sketched layout. As a team we decided that we wanted to do a level with large amount of verticality and jumping options. 

We essentially have four heights to this level. As you can tell it is very, very grey box and not even a scale grey box. However, the team and I tested this at least twenty times in an hour and a bit, and by the end of it, it felt really fun. 

You can see what you need to get right at the beginning of the level. There is a central focal point that forces places to cross paths. You have many options to jump to great heights and to run away from opposing player. The best thing we found right towards the end of our allocated time was that you can jump from one of the highest points in the level in order to land on the lowest. This was great watching this happen, because it happened in testing and was an accident. Seeing something occur when you hadn't planned it was amazing. Having this kind of mobility with many places to get in and around, made a very broken simple grey boxed level become quite enjoyable. 

I’ve been practicing framing and really seeing the positive effects it can give.

This session at AIE was a big one with a lot of writing and watching. We started by watching a movie titled ‘How video games changed the world’. This movie was great, filled with a lot of specific information regarding the first video game Pong in 1972, through to influential games like Pac-man, Tetris and DOOM, moving onto more controversial titles such as Grand Theft Auto III and Mortal Kombat before closing with modern hits like Minecraft and The Last of Us. The film looks at specific titles like these and many more as they represent specific changes in the industry which shifted how games were made at those points in time but also how games have leaked their way into everyday life, bit by bit, year by year. 

There was a few titles i was not aware of which was interesting but more to my surprise was to see in a more broad way how video games since the 80′s have been such a massive medium that has played a role in the affect of day to day culture. It gave me so much inspiration and excitement to be part of the next generation of game creators who get to the set the tone for the future of gaming and who will play a large role in shaping the way everyday culture could look down the track. 

After this we looked into market research for games, how to do it, where to find it and how valuable it is. This exercise gave me such a great insight into a whole different side of the gaming that was originally foreign to me. Shortly following the completion of our research task into a genre, (Management games) i realised that games production or being a games producer is a job i am going to strive for and to be honest one that i think i would be good at. (keeping in mind that i still have so much to learn and always will, after all we are always learning)