So I've almost completed the first month, only have two classes left in each course. So what I have learned? Well, I've learned a lot about creating games. At least all the preplanning stuff before you even start to code anything. It has been insightful and its been fun.
There has been a lot of work that goes into group efforts, kinda like at Dell when I would have to corral people and coordinate efforts to get parts replaced or a bunch of servers repaired. Now I have to coordinate with a lot of people to get a robot costume built, sound effects worked out, Power Point content consistent.
In my ever so serious career at Full Sail the most note worthy things I have done so far are dress up as robot - with my own custom made sound effects, and create a very crude 2D animation of an owl biting the head off a rat to demonstrate the kind of sound effects our game could potentially have.
I'm still waiting on video of the robot, its the craziest thing you've ever seen
I do have the rat snack though so without further delay...
Make sure you have your sound turned up, so you can hear the totally awesome CRUNCH!
Monday, April 28, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Its all game stories and BS
And by BS I mean Behavioral Science.
So I'm actually half way through my first two classes at Full Sail. So far English Comp/Game Doc is the best class. BS is a little odd, some things are helpful, some things are unexpected from a psychology class.
So the game doc class is way cool. The idea in this is class is to create the all the story, character, and level content that will go into a hypothetical game. On day one you start by creating some basic elements. They give you the game genre (My team got "action adventure") then you get three very random objects, we got a key chain with a bird head (it was just a toy not a real bird head), a pink plastic barbie purse, and a tiny plastic cylinder with a magnifying lens at one end. From these three objects you must abstract you game idea, and it has to be done in about an hour and half - it sounds insane but it was really fun. We were all skeptical that we could come up with a game that was interesting but its evolved into something that's really cool. It has personified animals in the game and somehow it's ended up having a story line and characters similar to star wars. It been fun fleshing out the characters and then seeing what other people develop and how they tie it to the main story. We've been learning about how to present the documentation in a way that's useful for the artists, marketers, executives and so on. This way everyone making the game can gleam the things they need from the document.
Its been fun learning how developers created story in some of my favorite games like half life, splinter cell, Max Payne, even Mario. The teacher discusses all the techniques that have been developed and what works and what doesn't. The major problems the industry has trouble with, like developing characters that are 3D or round, most all games characters are 2D or flat. Most characters don't arc, like in a movie or book, they don't really go through hardship and trial then learn from that. If the do its very hard to relay this to the player. There is no way to learn their personality as intimately as in a book. These are all challenges that no one was figured out how to effectively overcome and our instructor challenges us with finding a better way. You really get the sense that telling stories in video games is a craft still in its infancy, and in fact it is, its exciting though there is a lot of room out there to progress the art.
To future students: This class is being broken into two parts now, English Comp traditional style and Game Documentation. This will allow a more in depth approach to designing the game story, characters, levels and so forth. This will be a good thing.
Behavioral Science, while not my favorite, has its benefits. I've learned some interesting things about stress at Full Sail and how to handle it which has been helpful. The class so far is really easy, you get a book but its never required to read it, instead of reading the book we just use Power Point slides from class and all tests are based on them. Mostly this class seems to focusing on having you interact with people and get to know them, the big assignment is to work with your assigned group to come with a presentation, basically a skit, to demonstrate one of the concepts from class. This is a bit weird, I wasn't too excited about doing it but it does force people to work with others from different degree programs so you end up getting some good contacts in other degrees.
Culture shock - So getting up every day and designing stories for fairy tale kingdoms, skits for psychology, playing games for research, going to club meetings on modding the latest RPG game, and hanging out with people who's idea of a full day is 8 hours of World Of Warcraft is to say the least a major, major, MAJOR change. It's been strangely difficult to get in sync with this, I keep finding myself distancing myself so that I can clear my head and be ready to work. But this is the work! Crazy. It seems to be successful here you have to be really creative, really social, and work really hard and maybe not even that creative just social and work hard. It's definitely not the typical school, for better or worse, and when I start to take myself to seriously I have to remember that "hey, I'm making video games" its ok if I have to help design a skit for psychology class, or whatever.
So that's the summary for the past 2 weeks
So I'm actually half way through my first two classes at Full Sail. So far English Comp/Game Doc is the best class. BS is a little odd, some things are helpful, some things are unexpected from a psychology class.
So the game doc class is way cool. The idea in this is class is to create the all the story, character, and level content that will go into a hypothetical game. On day one you start by creating some basic elements. They give you the game genre (My team got "action adventure") then you get three very random objects, we got a key chain with a bird head (it was just a toy not a real bird head), a pink plastic barbie purse, and a tiny plastic cylinder with a magnifying lens at one end. From these three objects you must abstract you game idea, and it has to be done in about an hour and half - it sounds insane but it was really fun. We were all skeptical that we could come up with a game that was interesting but its evolved into something that's really cool. It has personified animals in the game and somehow it's ended up having a story line and characters similar to star wars. It been fun fleshing out the characters and then seeing what other people develop and how they tie it to the main story. We've been learning about how to present the documentation in a way that's useful for the artists, marketers, executives and so on. This way everyone making the game can gleam the things they need from the document.
Its been fun learning how developers created story in some of my favorite games like half life, splinter cell, Max Payne, even Mario. The teacher discusses all the techniques that have been developed and what works and what doesn't. The major problems the industry has trouble with, like developing characters that are 3D or round, most all games characters are 2D or flat. Most characters don't arc, like in a movie or book, they don't really go through hardship and trial then learn from that. If the do its very hard to relay this to the player. There is no way to learn their personality as intimately as in a book. These are all challenges that no one was figured out how to effectively overcome and our instructor challenges us with finding a better way. You really get the sense that telling stories in video games is a craft still in its infancy, and in fact it is, its exciting though there is a lot of room out there to progress the art.
To future students: This class is being broken into two parts now, English Comp traditional style and Game Documentation. This will allow a more in depth approach to designing the game story, characters, levels and so forth. This will be a good thing.
Behavioral Science, while not my favorite, has its benefits. I've learned some interesting things about stress at Full Sail and how to handle it which has been helpful. The class so far is really easy, you get a book but its never required to read it, instead of reading the book we just use Power Point slides from class and all tests are based on them. Mostly this class seems to focusing on having you interact with people and get to know them, the big assignment is to work with your assigned group to come with a presentation, basically a skit, to demonstrate one of the concepts from class. This is a bit weird, I wasn't too excited about doing it but it does force people to work with others from different degree programs so you end up getting some good contacts in other degrees.
Culture shock - So getting up every day and designing stories for fairy tale kingdoms, skits for psychology, playing games for research, going to club meetings on modding the latest RPG game, and hanging out with people who's idea of a full day is 8 hours of World Of Warcraft is to say the least a major, major, MAJOR change. It's been strangely difficult to get in sync with this, I keep finding myself distancing myself so that I can clear my head and be ready to work. But this is the work! Crazy. It seems to be successful here you have to be really creative, really social, and work really hard and maybe not even that creative just social and work hard. It's definitely not the typical school, for better or worse, and when I start to take myself to seriously I have to remember that "hey, I'm making video games" its ok if I have to help design a skit for psychology class, or whatever.
So that's the summary for the past 2 weeks
Monday, April 7, 2008
Orientation, More money saved, The beach
So I completed orientation last Friday. It was long, cold, and I was hungry. The main feeling that I brought away from it was, that Full Sail is very serious about you following rules, showing up on time, and being honest. They exact stiff penalties for breaking the rules or acts of disparaging character. For example, they said one student in the gamedev course had asked another student for some help on a coding lab. The other student had all ready done the lab and shared code on a disk, that disk was passed around and code was copied. They were caught plagiarizing, and those that just copied the code were suspended a month, had to pay to retake the course and lost out on living expenses. Those who copied and shared it were suspended for 2 months and had to pay to retake the course. The course cost about 9K. The lady at orientation said they use software to compare your code with code from other students to verify its original. So they are a little more high tech than most universities.
After Orientation I picked up my books with the other students in my gamedev class. We arranged a get together and do what gamers do, we played halo-3, Gears of War, Call of Duty 4, so on and so forth.
More Money Saved!
I've been studying like crazy to take the Calc and Trig test-out exam and its been good to go back over everything, however, I got an email this morning and they notified me I now had a transfer credit for for Calc and Trig so I accepted the credit. I no longer have to take the test and I got the credit, whoohoo!
To the Beach
So off to the beach we went, I had my transfer credit it was time to unwind. It was great, partly cloudy, 78 degrees. The sand was fine, the water was cold and it only took about 45 minutes to get there.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Updates and random stuff
So tomorrow is orientation, my class will get there at 8:30am, we will get our game developing laptops, and I'm sure there will be tons off hoopla with prizes, live shows, gun shows, no shows, mimes, guys juggling flaming torches, students bursting into spontaneous song and dance, you know the usual stuff.
Anyhow, I'm excited to get this thing started, time just seems to be crawling by the closer I get to the start date.
I found Tuesday that there will be at most 14 people in my game dev class. This is a small class by normal standards but the assistant instructor said that one year they had just two people in a single class. He also said that the class format usually has 4 hours of lecture, then 4 hours of doing exercises on what the lecture covered with instructors present to help.
I didn't really get to meet anyone but they looked to mostly be older, around my age I think. The one guy I did talk to, cause we both finished the test at the same time, was fresh out of high school. A good guy, mature for his age and a nerd - c'mon what would you expect. Actually most of the class looks Mac nerdy not PC nerdy, or nerdy in a trendy way.
Speaking of trendy nerds, this school is a nerd show case on steroids. You know the stereotypes from all those high school movies, this is where they come when not shooting movies. There are the aspiring audio engineers, they wear all the latest trends with all the new tweaks, all the bling, all the slang (when you see a huge group of them all sporting the same looking getup trying so hard to be different in a group of people that all look the same its great irony, pretty funny - will try to get some pictures). Then there are the animators, the digital art people, visual art and such. Basically you get three choices of hair-do. You can go mo-hawk, bald, or ponytail (this goes men and women). You hair must be black, you are allowed fire red highlights. Grungy clothing is expected, blacks and grays are encouraged, but a little quirky panache is ok (like red converse sneakers, white suspenders, or full face and head tattoo).
Then there are the developers, this group ( my group) stands out in the same way a dodge neon would stand out in a line up with Lamborghini diablos. We are quite extra ordinary. My people try to blend in but we end up sticking out in spite of our strategic clothing choices of blue jeans, new balance sneakers, and subtly faded striped polo t-shirts.
Needless to say its fun place to go a peruse the halls. Just don't let the art people see you with a PC laptop, they will take you out back and beat you with it (I hear they have lost a lot of good programmers).
Well I'm excited to see how it goes tomorrow will update then, later people!
Anyhow, I'm excited to get this thing started, time just seems to be crawling by the closer I get to the start date.
I found Tuesday that there will be at most 14 people in my game dev class. This is a small class by normal standards but the assistant instructor said that one year they had just two people in a single class. He also said that the class format usually has 4 hours of lecture, then 4 hours of doing exercises on what the lecture covered with instructors present to help.
I didn't really get to meet anyone but they looked to mostly be older, around my age I think. The one guy I did talk to, cause we both finished the test at the same time, was fresh out of high school. A good guy, mature for his age and a nerd - c'mon what would you expect. Actually most of the class looks Mac nerdy not PC nerdy, or nerdy in a trendy way.
Speaking of trendy nerds, this school is a nerd show case on steroids. You know the stereotypes from all those high school movies, this is where they come when not shooting movies. There are the aspiring audio engineers, they wear all the latest trends with all the new tweaks, all the bling, all the slang (when you see a huge group of them all sporting the same looking getup trying so hard to be different in a group of people that all look the same its great irony, pretty funny - will try to get some pictures). Then there are the animators, the digital art people, visual art and such. Basically you get three choices of hair-do. You can go mo-hawk, bald, or ponytail (this goes men and women). You hair must be black, you are allowed fire red highlights. Grungy clothing is expected, blacks and grays are encouraged, but a little quirky panache is ok (like red converse sneakers, white suspenders, or full face and head tattoo).
Then there are the developers, this group ( my group) stands out in the same way a dodge neon would stand out in a line up with Lamborghini diablos. We are quite extra ordinary. My people try to blend in but we end up sticking out in spite of our strategic clothing choices of blue jeans, new balance sneakers, and subtly faded striped polo t-shirts.
Needless to say its fun place to go a peruse the halls. Just don't let the art people see you with a PC laptop, they will take you out back and beat you with it (I hear they have lost a lot of good programmers).
Well I'm excited to see how it goes tomorrow will update then, later people!
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Registration
So it turns out registration was today, somehow I had it fixed on the 3rd. Anyways I showed a little late but it was no problem I got all my other little papers in and processed, got my new badge, and took the math skills assesment test.
The test was easy no worries there. For those who happen upon this blog the test contained, simple orders of operations problems, simple algebra, some graphing including one rational function, simplfying including one rational function and some other pishposh.
The more important tests are coming up on friday, placement tests for trig and calc will be given. Hopefully I can test out of those courses and save myself some more money.
The test was easy no worries there. For those who happen upon this blog the test contained, simple orders of operations problems, simple algebra, some graphing including one rational function, simplfying including one rational function and some other pishposh.
The more important tests are coming up on friday, placement tests for trig and calc will be given. Hopefully I can test out of those courses and save myself some more money.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Free Money!
Cha-Ching! I just got a call from my admissions rep it looks like my merit scholarship form (and all the math and programming I've done over the years) really paid off. They decided to award me not the typical $3000 scholarship but a $5000 dollar scholarship. Sylvia (one of my admissions reps) says this is one of the larger scholarship awards they give out. The total money they give out is 10 grand so I captured half of that. That's pretty awesome and I'm honored by the vote of confidence.
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