For my Journalism 130W course, I was task to make a feature story and gather four sources; two primary sources, and two secondary sources. I decided to make my feature story based on the gaming industry. Initially, I was going to talk to my professor from my concept art and storyboard class; Kevin Taylor.

My first feature story was about the artistic side of creating a game: game design. Believing that Kevin was apart of that side, I went to interview him, only to find out he’s apart of the game development side, which was a major mistake on my part! But, I decided to continue the interview.

I got to learn that there are a lot of parts within the game development cycle. lots of designing based on gameplay and iterations. The game is constantly changing as it develops and it would take hours upon hours.

I learned from Kevin that his specialty is that of Project Management. His view of project is “essential to the gaming industry and without it, a company can flop.” This goes for not just a gaming company, but every company and job all over the world. For the gaming industry specifically, there are many components in the industry and, like what Kevin stated, is an absolute must to keep a company alive and strong.

Some examples were talked about in our interview. I mentioned Telltale games. If we go way back to my first blog: The Fall of Telltale, Telltale had to let go many employees, as they went bankrupt. Only a few employees stayed to complete the final parts of two games. Many ex-employees were not given any severance and with all of those, It shows just how bad the management was in the studio.

We both agreed that that was poor management and it could’ve been something easy to solve, or if the issue was unsolvable, then they should have informed the employees, give them the severance needed, and then close the doors peacefully. But I digress. I was also given a small process of developing the game.

To make the process short and sweet, the process goes as this:

1. Come up with an idea of gameplay.
2. create a physical prototype of the game and playtest
3. Continue to change the game to make it as fun as can be
4. present the game to get it greenlit to digitize.
5. repeat steps 2 to 3 over and over until the game is good enough to present to. If it’s good, it’ll lead to full production

For full production, it is simply developing and constant changes to the game, playtesting, programming, and many other things that would them, create a game! However, not every game idea is perfect. Before going into full production, presenting the game might not lead to it being created, thus being scrapped. It’s best to not be overattached with the prototype, because if the game gets scrapped, it would hurt since you’re attached to the game.

Games could take as short as a week, to as long as years to be created, depending on the length of the game. AAA games normally take years for a game to be made and lots of employees work towards the game. For a smaller game, It could take some time as well, but would be considerable shorter.

I had a really good time getting to interview and because of him, I was able to make a strong feature story, a little on the long informative sides, but a good feature story nonetheless!

Just recently, around Sunday, April 28th, I was able to finish my 6th assignment of my concept art and storyboard class, which was making another storyboard, but with a bit of a twist!

The thing is, for this certain assignment, instead of getting a script and making a storyboard from that, I was tasked to take a scene of a pre-existing film and for the amount of scenes in a given part of the film, then replace the scenes with new scenes of my own, but with different camera shots/angles. I was able to take a scene from an anime called JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Here is my finished product:

I spent so much time on this scene and I am very proud of this work. I watched through the same scene from a video on YouTube. At first, I didn’t know which part of the scene to start and when to end. So I went in and quickly made small rough sketches of every part of the scene but at different camera angles and shots.

From that, I tried drawing them out on photoshop, making more sketches to that. I slowly then refined the work more, but I tried my best to not make things too perfect and clear like my last storyboard, and decided to keep the drawings a bit more rough.

As I was working on the fifth page of my storyboard, I noticed that my work was very pixelated because I had a low resolution as I was drawing. My professor told me and despite being able to up the resolutions for the rest of my pages, the previous pages were now a bit blurry as I zoom into it. That would be a little problematic with using this storyboard for my final assignment, but I’ll make it work!

I tried my best and hope that I would get a good grade on this assignment. For the last storyboard, I got a solid A on it! I’m confident that I’ll get a good grade on this as well. So many hours were spent working on this and even if I don’t get an A, I’m still proud that I was able to make another storyboard. Go me!

I managed to complete an assignment where I had to complete a storyoard ranging from 12 to 18 frames. Instead of taking a script from a movie, I wanted to create my own script, using the characters and environment from the anime My hero academia.

It took a good long while with creating a small story off the top of my head, but I’m proud with this small little story. The thing is, the Girl with the horns, Mina, wants her friend, Denki, to use his electric ability to lure their other friend, Jirou, over so that way Mina can mess with her. I worked a whole lot on this storyboard and spent many hours on it!

I really wanted to make a My Hero Academia storyboard because I love the anime and I recently been drawing Mina non-stop, Making little doodles of her and also detailed drawings of her in different outfits. Needless to say, I really like this character. Also, I chose an anime because I’m more confident and used to drawing in the anime-esk style. I wanna improve my drawing skills and I believe these assignments are making me get more use to drawing the human body.

For scenes 11 to 13, I wanted to add a ounce of suspension. I try that by making the scenes shake and use a Dutch/oblique camera angle. What that does it shows confusedness, eeriness, and is used to lightly disturb the viewer. It’s easily done by tilting the scene around to the left or right, instead of keeping it straight. I had this idea of making the shots oblique ever since I was working on the rough sketches.

These are my rough sketches of my storyboard. That’s my main problem with drawing: I cannot draw the human body for the life of me. The proportions would look very off and I would use base designs of character poses to use to help me with proportions. For the rough sketches, I stuck with mostly small stick figures and small one-shaped bodies. I also did use mannequinization, meaning to create a rough body similar to a mannequin to get you the body structure of a pose.

Despite using a lot of references, it’s not even a bad thing to use references. Many professional artists use references all the time. They take aspects of the references they have to create something new with them. Though for me, I should learn more about how to draw the human body. Maybe if I continue with the art route with my major, I’ll take a class to learn how to draw anatomy. That would definitely help.

All in all, I’m really proud with this work. It’s not perfect, but nothing is perfect. If anything, I would’ve just spent less time refining it, since storyboards shouldn’t be this detailed. I’m working on another storyboard assignment so I’m gonna keep that in mind.

In my game design class called Consept Design and storyboarding, I was given a task to create a story board based on a script of a film of some sort. I chose to make my own script based on a show that I enjoy. It turned out to be a really good storyboard! As of now, You may not know what a storyboard is persay. well read along to understand the basic ideas of a storyboard.

Storyboards are a series of drawings that show movement and character actions that is would be used in a tv show or film. Normally it is somewhat rough sketched with a hint of polish into it. The main thing of storyboards is that it tells a story, weather it be a small simple story or a massive over-arching story. It also shows the camera angles for the shots as well.

This is an example of a storyboard. It’s an unfinished one that I made in class as an exercise to understand how to make a successful storyboard. Had I had more time, I would sketch out more designs of the character instead of a blank body. Also, the arrows used in this storyboard depicts camera movements, and also character movements. Blue arrows are for the characters and red are for the camera. There is also a small description for every frame mainly to describe what happens in the scene briefly. If say a character in a panel throws a punch, It is best to write up about him punching and also how the camera moves based on the punch.

This is an example of a good storyboard from the show: The Loud house. The descriptions show dialogue and info about what is happening in the panel. Another thing about storyboards, is that there should not be any color other than the color of the arrows and grayscale. Grayscale be anything from white, to gray, to black.

Another thing for a good storyboard is the type of camera shots and angles. Every storyboard should have something called an establishing shot/master shot. Those shots are essential to let the viewer know where the characters are and the environment. Without it, the storyboard would start off weird and would throw the viewer off. There are a lot of shots, ranging from wide angle shots that show a group of people, and from full body shots, to close up shots. There are many type of shots and angles. On the bright side, not all of the shots and angles are needed in one storyboard. Choose whatever looks best and go with that.

Storyboards are really interesting and simple to create one once you get an understanding of the camera angles. It’s really fun, and I was able to make a complete storyboard myself for an assignment that I feel really proud of.

For years, the Call of Duty franchise has been releasing games year after year. However, as the years went by, the fans of the games grew heavily divided, to the point where many problems arose. One thing being the way the games being released.

There is a cycle with Call of Duty games; three companies are tasked with creating a game within three years. Those three are: Treyarch, Infinity Ward, and Sledgehammer Games. Last October, Treyarch had released their game and are on the works of creating a new game that will be released three years from now. Infinity Ward will be releasing a game this year and will be doing the same thing as Treyarch. Sledgehammer will follow suit the following year.

Three years to create a AAA game is a decent amount of time to create a game, however, for the Call of Duty Franchise, specifically the last two games, showed that maybe that isn’t the case. Many see the latest game, Black Ops 4, to be an upgraded version of its predecessor Black Ops 3, but with less features, with reused features and also no leaderboards, league play, a comeback record, and other features that should’ve been available during the launch. It is taking them months to add these features in it.

It’s the same thing with another game, being Infinite Warfare. For the longest of time, there were other features that were promised during its release, but only came months after the game released.

It’s starting to make me think of what would happen if each company gets another year to create a game. That would definitely make the games come out as finished as possible and would polish up things that could come out as buggy. Although the fans would have to wait longer for the game to be released, but it would come out with little to no problems.

Google Stadia: a new gaming platform that google is handling. Subject to be released this year, Google sots to create a new type of gaming to make things more convenient and easy to play.

One of the big things about Google Stadia is that it would not be like console gaming like PlayStation or Xbox, but rather something unique. It will stream AAA games on any device. From phone, tablet, TVs, and desktops. It’s highly unlikely for using Google Stadia on other consoles.

Google Stadia would stream games online with a paywall, allowing people to play in 4K 60FPS on any devise. Streaming things are becoming more mainstream. This idea is being used for players to have instant access to playing games on the fly, without going out to purchase the game, taking it home, downlowding the game on the hardware, and then just play. For Google Stadia users, once you get the option to play a certain game, you would be able to play the game right then and there.

Many people are taking this reveal just fine, but many questions and speculations are made. It is unknown to where it would just have a library of games where people could buy, much like steam. Others believe it could be similar to Netflix. Netflix allows viewers to watch movies and tv shows on the fly on any devise that supports Netflix. Google Stadia sounds exactly like that.

Also, there could be connection problems with Google Stadia, potentially causing input lag, among other things that will not make the game play smoothly. I do feel like this is a really good idea that will make gaming insanely more acceptable for others who does not have a gaming console or PC.

For Google to make their gaming platform the best, the biggest thing they would need to work on is to make sure to make the platform accessible for everyone like they were advertising, also to have a strong connection that would not cause issues and keep things playing smoothly. If it got released and everyone would not be able to play at first, there would be immense backlash. Would I buy it? Not right away. I would wait on it to see how it would be like. Though from how it sounds, I would definitely buy it.

In my animation and game development major called Computer Animation and Game Development (CAGD), I had completed a project where I created a character based on a world created within a group. We were given a few weeks to create our character. We had to go through multiple phases on creating our characters. And I’m here to explain it and show my results.

I mentioned this in another post I had made, but to start off, We had to create our character on paper. Coming up with the personality of the character and information of them, including height, jobs, age, gender, things like that. At this point, no drawings should be made. Just focus on the character’s personality and traits.

One the ways to create a good character is the use of something called a character diamond. Character diamonds can keep your character from not having too many traits to be an overly complexed character, and from having less traits to make the character simple and generic.

Here is some information of my character. Once I had gotten his personality made, I was able to gather pictures that could use as references. The images could be used to match the character type and personalities, also can match the type the world they live in. Once a bunch of reference images is gathered, then you can move on to actually draw some designs!

It’s good to make a good bit of sketches where the character is different from each sketch. No need to go above and beyond with the art. Just basic designs of the character would be great.

My character is a medieval brawler and my first idea was for him to be a badass fighter with a trench coat on. It was a lot more of a struggle to start off with his design, and I struggled even more with the second drawing. I didn’t really know what I was doing with it, but I wanted to have my character look more poor, since he grew up in a poor home. For the third drawing, I wanted to make him look like a wanderer with some battle scars. I tried my best to make it the best looking design as I could. And I really liked the outcome. Then I tried the fourth one to attempt to add a bit of armor into it.

I was aiming to work towards finalizing the fourth drawing, creating line art for it and using it as the final design, but my friend gave me a suggestion I should try: she said I should mix a bit of everything into one and see how It looked. I attempted it and came with this:

This was my final design. I loved it so much, I kept it and continued to work forward on the design process. I kept the same pose, pants, and head from the third sketch, the idea of a trench coat from the first drawing, band aid straps from the third and second sketch, and I had an idea where in the fourth sketch, he had a black skin tight shirt. I wanted to keep that within this final sketch, and with all that, this was created.

The next thing to do is to color, but I also had to work towards making head images of the character showing many facial expressions. Once those were created, everything would have to be colored in and then all I had to do next was to add the bio and some information of the character in something called a character design sheet. Character design sheets are used to show off the character, showing the many aspects and emotions expressed from the character. Character design sheets are used a whole lot in the animation and game development industries. So I was tasked to do so for the final piece within this class.

This was my final piece. I spent a long time to complete this work, prioritizing it more than other work even. One of the big things in an industry like the gaming and animation industries is that you shouldn’t get over attached to a creation. If the idea had to be canned or changed, one that would be over attached would feel devastated and even upset. I was, and still am overly attached to this design and luckily, would not have to worry about anything bad to happen to this design. I will continue to work towards this design to make it as best as it can be on my own time.

Every single game requires art concept designs. Art is a major thing that all games are required to have to convey their ideas. Art is used to create environments, characters, buildings, and more. The art gets converted through code and 3D, depending if the game is gonna be 2D or 3D.

There are a lot of aspects of the process of game development and I’m leaning towards 2D character design. All I really draw is many types of characters from cartoons and also anime. What is needed for creating a character are a lot of things, but here is an example of a character design.

This is a character design of a enemy within the game God of War. Many drawings made to show all the aspects of a character. A character design should show a full image of the character and some additional images where it shows emotions and things that make them unique. For example: if a character has a robotic arm, it would be good to draw just the arm in the character design sheet.

The more detailed into the character’s design, the better. Ultimately, in the gaming industry, this will be sent from the art department to the technology department. They would look into the character design sheet and get to know how the character is. They will implement the character into the game via programming and coding.

To create one of these character reference sheets, start of with a world where the character would be in. Then you should focus on their personality and traits. That’ll help with gathering information that’ll be used to create ideas on what you would be thinking your character should look like. That idea is called referencing. You would be taking many images of people’s art and anything that can be used with the potential of being apart of your character, and mash them together to use as a reference.

This is one of my reference sheets for a character I’ve been working on. Mt character is apart of a medieval world who is a nice, strong, and cocky brawler. I can use this to create a bunch of sketches just for one character.

For each sketch of the character, it’s best to make different sketches. Find witch one you like best and get in more detail with it. As you keep drawing, you’ll soon be able to make a character with a good character design sheet that can be used in the gaming industry.

Recently, in class, I’ve been working on a paper where I talk about a bird museum that was created on campus. I was really fascinated about how it was made all within a class. Students worked together to create said museum and it looks amazing. I wanted to explore and show the many birds within the video game industry.

1. Falco

Falco is a character from the Starfox series, who is based off of a red-throated caracara. Birds like him are identified as Raptors; also called Birds of Prey. Simply meaning that he and other raptors are carnivores and would hunt for prey. Falco is an ace pilot within the Star Fox Team and can be seen as brash, cocky, and level-headed. He’s also in the Super Smash Bros games and overall is a great character.

2. Revali

Revali is not related to Falco whatsoever; he’s from the Legend of Zelda series. More specifically: Breath of the Wild. He was a champion of his tribe, and was also an exceptional archer and flyer. He was prepared to fight against the main antagonist, Calamity Gannon, along with other champions. However, he was defeated and his soul was taken into imprisonment. Revali is an interesting character who, at first, did not like nor respected the main protagonist. That being Link of course. But as Link showed that he can be the hero that seals the darkness, Revali now respects him for his efforts, albeit it grudgingly.

3. Angry Birds

The angry Birds are one of the most known birds in video game history. So many games are made in the angry birds universe. Each bird are different than one another. The red bird is the normal average one. The yellow bird is the quick one. Blue makes two other clones, black is a literal bomb, white lays eggs, and there’s even more different birds. There are many games and even an angry bird Movie. Their popularity is still very large throughout the years.

Conclusion

I’m now fascinated by the many type of birds and want to work towards understanding them more and more soon. Birds are very amazing and important aspects of nature. There are an insane amount of history to be known about for just birds, and It’s amazing to see the many other birds in other games