Week Four: In Which There is More Modelling; Also, I Played Some Games

This week as far as progress I've made in the game goes, is a bit less than the last few weeks. This would be because I've mostly been working on other assignments we have from other classes; Sound & Audio, Graphics, some of the Game Design homeworks, and the beginnings of my first Business assignment. Despite all this, I have managed to work on a bit more modelling for the game. The basic layout of our level is now pretty much complete, I may go back and change some things from time to time, if something looks wrong, but for now it looks good. Our game was beginning to lag a bit, so I did end up going into the level and removing as many excess polygons as possible, which turned out to be quite a few, and got our game back to normal. I also began work on adding a tunnel to the level (it's not a requirement, but it does add to the level). I started out with a basic tunnel, but that looked a bit boring, so I decided to turn it into a giant worm, which looked much better. After building it, I was constantly berated with suggestions to add to it, and so I did, which ended up making it look worse, so I completely remodeled it again, with a final image in mind. I have also now been given the task to create a texture loader that will apply textures to .obj files, as before it was just applying them to objects made in OpenGL itself. I plan to look for some good information to get started throughout the next week and to, hopefully, get a large chunk, if not all of it, completed by the end of the break.

Just a quick texture for now; This worm will look more wormlike eventually

This week (and last week) I've been playing a few games, which I thought I would give impressions of. First off will be LittleBigPlanet, an exceptionally fun platformer (although now it's much more than that) that includes the tools to build your own levels. The game is very similar to LittleBigPlanet 1 but does add some new and very impressive features to make it stand out. In the original the game was completely a platformer, where you controlled the sackboy and could occasionally ride some vehicles. In LittleBigPlanet 2 there are many different types of genres to be played; I've played a top down shooter, an RPG, a racer, even a remake of the original Legend of Zelda. The fact that all this is available inside one game is astonishing, and I'm sure even more will be possible as the users learn the tools and make better levels. The tools to build levels have also been updated to help ease the process of making levels, but they still haven't worked out how to make levels with multiple people on the same console. As someone who likes to game with friends more often than not, this is great for offering up to four people on the same system, but if you want to build together, it will have to be over the Playstation network.

Another game I've been playing is Last Window: The Secret of Cape West. I don't have much to comment on it now, as I have only played about an hour, and my save file got corrupted so I'll have to build up the will to start again soon. From my brief time with it, though, I did find that it is a lot like it's predecessor Hotel Dusk, from the movement, to the graphics and the soundtrack. I don't find this a negative as Hotel Dusk was, and still is, one of my favorite DS games. The graphics consist of paper cutout-like characters and 3d backgrounds, which work well for it's novel-like gameplay. I can't comment on the story as I've barely scratched the surface but from my initial impressions it seems like it will be very similar to Hotel Dusk, in that it will be very heavy and important to the game, and will require much reading.

A unique art style that works really well

The last game I played, which really was a bad decision to buy, was Minecraft. It wasn't a bad decision because it sucks, but because I found it so addicting that I've lost about two nights of sleep since I got it. I had played a quick demo of the game before and I had seen pretty much everyone in our class play it at one point or another, so I decided maybe this game is really just that good. Like LittleBigPlanet, this game allows users to create anything they want in their world. The difference being this has full 3D range of motion, and the entire world is built of 3D cubes which you can destroy, collect and forge into other blocks. What makes this game so addicting is that the entire world is your sandbox, you can create, or destroy, whatever you want; you can play with your friends, or destroy their time-consuming creations, I've even managed to build a city both in the sky and under the sea. This being the only game I have on the computer, has managed to distract me from homework on more than one occasion, but I've already started cutting back on it.

- N. Gale