Week Five: In Which I Play Lots And Lots of Games

This past week has been one of the busiest weeks I've had in the past while. I've not only been doing lots of work for the game, but also lots of assignments, and playing lots of games as well. First off my progress on the game. As you can see from my last few blog posts I've been working on modelling the level, and this week I continue with that. I have actually completed the modelling for the first track and have started some work on a second track. One thing I will have to change, though, is the scale of the objects in the track, they look good in Maya, but are way too huge when actually seen from our racer's perspective. I have also watched a lot of online tutorials and read some discussions to help me learn to use Maya's hypershader so I could texture the objects in the game. I managed to completely texture every object and have been exporting their texture maps which takes a long time. Once we can figure out how to load and apply these textures to our object our game, on a visual level, will be pretty much done.

A nice garden with a huge worm (From the perspective of the ship, too huge)

Now on to games I've played, which this week reaches nine or ten, I believe. Seven of these games were required homework for one course and, with the exception of one, I enjoyed them all. I'll start with the one I didn't enjoy; The Graveyard. The Graveyard is less of a game and more an interactive piece of art. You control an elderly woman who can barely walk and must get her to sit on a bench in the middle of a graveyard. The reason I didn't enoy this game as much as any other game is because, while I know it was trying to evoke an emotional response from me, I didn't feel any sadness, which made the game pointless to me.

The next game I played was The Path, by the same makers as The Graveyard. I only played a trial version but I would consider paying for the full one after my experience, and reading a bit more into it. In the time I played I controlled a little girl tasked with reaching her grandmother's house and told to not go off the path. My first time through I followed these instructions and finished pretty quickly. My second time through though, I wandered off the path. Instant;y after leaving the world seemed to lose it's colour and become quite dark and foreboding. I kept exploring though, feeling slightly tense, and I happened upon many interesting sights, what looked to be a scarecrow burning, and some strange designs in the ground. I also found that there were flowers you could pick, 144 of them to be exact, I didn't collect them all but I'd imagine something may happen if you do.

The game that I played that evoked the biggest emotional responses from me was definitely Passage. In this game you control a pixelated person in what looks to be a long corridor, You can move in all four directions but the more you move right, the more your score increases. My first time through I didn't realize I could move up and down and just kept going to the right, along the way picking up a girl, which my character fell in love with and they stayed together from then on. I continued walking until some point at which I realized my character looked different, that he was aging, my first instinct was to walk back to the left because I thought it would reverse time (Seemed logical at the time). I didn't notice any effect so I went back to the right. Eventually the girl I had picked up suddenly turned into a gravestone, I wasn't expecting it and it brought a tear to my. I didn't know what else to do so I continued on and then I died myself. I played this game a few more times, realizing I could explore up and down and find treasures, but in each playthrough after my first I decided to wait at my wifes grave for death to take me, it seemed right in my mind.

Somehow a game like this made me tear up... Good job

The game I had the most fun playing, which I probably shouldn't have considering the name, was Punishment 2: The Punishing. This game is a platformer that gets progressively harder with each level, which is expected, but there's one twist, each time you advance one level you must go back to the beginning and replay every level plus the new one to advance again. Yes, that definitely sounds annoying, but I find I usually have the patience for that sort of thing (I ended up playing and beating the game three times). The music is also there to add to the punishment, annoying little drum loops, that I'm sure would have got on my nerves had I not used my mute button.

The two games that I would say were most like games out of the seven assigned to play were Puddle, and Flywrench. In Puddle you control various liquids and must slide across the ground to get collected in beakers to pass each level. The game is fun, but I didn't find it pulling me in as much as any of the other games, and compared to the rest I found it quite short. Flywrench on the other hand kept me occupied for a while. you play as something I can't really explain with the ability to flap your wings, roll and change colour according to what you do. For me this game had a great difficulty curve, introducing more elements with each level that added to he fun and complexity of each level. The game also had a story to go along with it, but I can't believe that I've already forgotten it. I normally remember good stories, so this tells me that it didn't have much of an impact on me.

The last assigned game I played, and I would say my favorite overall was Spectre. In this game you travel through the memories of an old man, pick what you want him to remember, stitching together your own story. I loved this game for the fact that there are so many possible paths you can choose to go through, each of them lovingly narrated and really make you feel like your doing something important. The gameplay itself is rather simple, just a few minigames really, but that just added to the experience for me. The reason I enjoyed this game so much was because of all the story, I personally enjoy story over gameplay, but a good combination is always better.

This Game is filled with beautiful scenery and one of the best narrations I've ever heard

There are a few other games I played but as I'm planning on not doing much but work for the next week, and maybe snowboarding, I'll save them for next week. I believe this was one of the best homework assignments I have ever gotten in my life, playing games I actually enjoy. Anyways next week look forward to some talking about Fallout: New Vegas, Stacking, and Flow.

- N. Gale