Game art briefing day

So this was the first lesson back at Uni we have had, I have been really looking forward to coming back to Uni and get the ball rolling with work as I want to feel like I need something to do and it motivates me to do more and more work. We talked about what we would be doing in the module and were told that we have to get in to groups of three to work through this project, so we will have to do that at some point.

My first idea when Annabeth told us that we need to think of a cutscene from a game was one of my favourite games from a few years ago, Viking, this came to mind particularly because we also talked about a thing called a quicktime event where the character has to actually interact when there is an in game action cutscene happening and the player has to press a button to continue with what they are trying to do, weather it be trying to kill another player or enemy or simply climbing up a wall or something like that, but viking is a good study of quicktime events and ingame model cutscenes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJF-SHRCEDs - viking

We also talked about how games recently have been using the 'silent protagonist' as a character and the massive game franchise Call Of Duty came instantly to mind as when playing the game, the character the player plays as never actually talks, this is a good mechanic when it comes to immersing a player more into a game because the player can believe more that they are the main character when they do not have a voice of their own and the player can believe that it is them that they are being talked to.

When I think of machinima I instantly think about the youtube and home made player videos that I have seen containing home made stories from some of my favourite games, Halo 3 in particular has a lot of machinima based fan stuff because of the already in built level builder where a player can build their own environment and record from a floating camera, making it very easy to make and save your own videos, we also talked about the challenges of coordination and directing that is involved with making machinima as part of a group.

These notes are what I picked up from the first lesson this year back at Uni, I look forward to getting on with this project as I think I have a lot of ideas of my own, and experience, to input into it all.