Progress report on ART103 Final project

So after multiple last minute revisions revisions and advice from Steve, the final plan is to make a space suit/armor for a dog in scale form. My partner Tom, who is a painter and a scale modeler himself agrees and likes the new topic. Here is his site: http://kvlt-worx.tumblr.com/

The idea came from borrowing the idea of how Ironman customizes his iron suit to his liking, so how would a space suit look for a dog?

And here is my initial sketch for space dog, bear in mind this is super last minute, I will have a better 3D model of a space dog in the near future.

The FINAL product will be a sculpted figure of a dog in a space suit in 1/12 scale, in which I will utilize 3D printing and modeling and hand sculpting to create the figure, and the designers will be Tom and I. I will sculpt the dog, and Tom will paint the finished fleshed out figure, and I will bring it for display, as we have plans to recast and reproduce the figure for selling purposes.

DMA ART108 Blog post #8: Final Project

So for my final project, I have teamed up with Shunt to create a 1v1 video game. The rules and structure of the game is that the opposing opponents have to attack each other with spells to deplete their life bar to zero before dying themselves. Spells that shoot out from each player can combine and create special events in respect to the combination of spells colliding. Here are some of the art of characters for the game:

 As of late, we are still working out bugs and hotboxes, and as well as creating a correct perspective that simulates an isometric environment. It is essentially a grid matrix field that is divided in the middle to delineate player fields. This is a pic of the current environment of the beta arena, and will change in the near future for our final presentation:

DMA ART103 Solo Project proposal (For Steve)

So for my solo Final Project, I have decided to collaborate with a scale hobbyist friend of mine, Tom Marra. Essentially the project will work in the style of a commission; Tom has commissioned me to create a scale diorama for him as a personal addition to his collection, and since he believes in my talent as a sculptor he would like to collect one of my works as well.

SO the essential project will be a sci-fi diorama that Tom and I will design, and I will use my skills to try to create the product as close to the design as possible. Tom will be the chief designer, and I will be the producer. Our initial thoughts are to create a diorama of a mechanic that is performing maintenance repairs on its "Power-Suit," which are heavily inspired by real maintenance repairs done on fighter jets. For example:

This genre in scale modeling of "repair bay dioramas" is quite popular, yet extremely hard to successfully achieve, as it utilizes still life qualities and extensive modifications to achieve a believable and high quality look.

I will primarily document this project through pictures of the building process, as well as to show sketches of initial designs that will direct the path of the creation process. Due to Tom's professional career as a Google Web Developer, contact will primarily be in form of email and webcam chats, as he is a very busy person. But I respect his aspiration to become a better scale modeler, as it is a shared goal and I hope to impress him with my talents.

The final form of the project will marshall into a physical product for display. Tom and I have plans to enter the completed product into a scale modeling competition coming early December, so I can also showcase Digital photographs of the completed product in the competition setting.

ART 108 Blog Post 7: The Circle review

 So for this blog post I'll be primarily talking about my personal experience in the play adaptation of the novel "The Circle." I essentially went through the play without the experience of the iPhone application as my phone was too old for the software, but I was able to be immersed into the play's environment nonetheless.

For me, it was quite a strange visceral experience, as I was finding myself pulling away from the environment; everything in my gut was telling me that the play's message at face value was false. I found my self instinctively not liking any of the actors, as I was confused as if the actors thought we were complete idiots by giving us their sales pitch to "join the circle." Then I able to take a step back and observe what the play really is, how it was a parody on corporate identity and how to assumes new human resources by creating a blanket false culture to lure in interest. It was at that realization that I reach my final question after figuring the play's true message: were the actors acting badly on purpose, or were they just bad actors themselves?

From at art perspective, the play's message was delivered in a great matter. To immerse the audience in such an interactive environment in such a way that their realization of the play's parody message in actual human reaction is a great process to understand the message. I myself haven't read the book, but now I am compelled to read it to understand it more. I highly recommend this play to others.

DMA Blog 6: Playable Prototypes

So for my partnered project, we created the game "Cyborg Survival." Heres the quick download link

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4rt2j10v4wa2bnm/AAAFIha6gO2SetPECiYlqtexa?dl=0

Controls:
Arrow keys for left and right
Space bar for jump
"A" key for attack

The goal is pretty simple: Survive

Enemies will spawn left and right, and the difficulty will increase as time progresses. Stay alive by dodging and jumping left and right between platforms, and also using your singular attack to fend off enemies. Killing enemies will increase your score count. How long can you survive? Bwahaha



I enjoyed making this game with Brandon, it was my first time in experiencing the creation of a game and understanding 1st hand the specific roles, and as well as the nature of game development defined by meeting certain deadlines.

Blog Post 4 DMA 108

So for this blog post i'll be talking about the games that I played online during the past game lab session. Namely, i'll be commenting on 3 games that really stood out to me.

Wizard Wizard

So for this game, I found it to be really engaging and my kind of gameplay. I love platform games and I really liked the aesthetics of the game - dark, creepy, and mysterious. 10/10 would recommend

The second game I played was Mirror Mirror, which was a very simple looking monotone colored game that encouraged lots of thinking and strategizing from the player. Mirror Stage was quite a peculiar game, it had a mysterious and ominous feel due to the lack of instructions and its black and white color way, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Finally, prismatic shift was a great game. I enjoyed the shoot-em-up gameplay, and also enjoyed the inherent difficulty which encouraged repeat plays. Could use a bit more development in aesthetic quality, but nonetheless would recommend to play to others.

DMA 108 Blog Post 3

So for this post, i'll be talking about the creation of my short lived prototype board game and how it changed and evolved through each gameplay.

But first, a basic description of the game. What I essentially wanted to create was a game that was similar to Megaman Battle Network:

The gist of the my version of the game? A dedicated 1v1 fighting game that required special abilities and decisive movement in order to reduce the opponent's life points to zero. The playing field would be 4x10 spaced wide, with each space being a movable point. Players would draw from a deck of suit playing cards, and the suit and number of each card would determine the spell type and power, respectively. Like Meagan battle network, my game would dedicate special ability attacks determined by which cards you played, and I included the dice roll to add luck into the battle. The only original concept I created was my game would have "spell walls," which would block attacks and help create strategic interest and longevity to the game.

1st Gameplay session: In this session, I worked together with Shunt to create an interesting strategy game. This is how we collaborated on creating a game similar to Megaman Battle Network, as each of us had played and enjoyed the game much so. It wasn't so much as playing a game as we were mostly creating the game as we went along, so not much immersion was experienced. The core mechanic of the game played out in 2 parts, the design of life points and the design of special ability attacks. 

2nd Gameplay session: In this session, I attempted to play a full game with my brother. My goal for this session was to get as much critique for my game, but alas the game was all together boring for my brother, as he didn't want to play anymore 5 minutes into the game. His critique was that games with suit deck cards and dice shouldn't be super complicated, and that I was essentially trying to create a specialized crd playing game (i.e. yugioh or pokemon) emulated in suit card deck form, which translates into unnecessary extra rules and conditions that made the game hard to keep track of. The worst part was that I completely understood what he meant, and that I needed to simplify my game.

3rd Gameplay Session: For this session, I played with a computer science student. It was pretty hard to explain all the rules to her, as it was honestly a lot to digest in a few minutes. Seeing the lack of interest in her, I decided to oversimplify the game rules by making it into simply a "move one space and attack" sort of game, which ended in a very boring game session. I have a lot of reworking to do, as at this point I understood that the approach of my game was wrong, as I was trying to mirror a highly specialized game onto a simple interface that ultimately did not translate well.