Blog Post 11

On Monday we discussed what everyone did over the weekend and Jimmy provided us with some small advice about how to formulate a good portfolio. Hearing about these things (creating a portfolio, setting up resumes, etc…) is making me a little nervous, to be honest. I am not sure that I am quite ready to take on the real world yet. I do have at least another year to go at CSULA and perhaps my confidence will build in time.

After this, we all went over our nine game ideas as a class. To be very honest, coming up with nine different types of games was really difficult. At first I thought this was not going to be such a bad project because I have had numerous game ideas in mind, but when it actually came to jotting down the ideas and storyboarding the design of all the games, I realized that they were essentially the same game just formulated in a different way. I resorted back to the research we did for our games in class and I only got inspiration from about two games which was a mild disappoint for me.

Actually doing the work and designing the games, for the first time, I got into my homework assignment—so into it that I took the extra step and decided my games needed color. I believe color is what draws our attention the most and to try and pitch my idea with the lack of good visual aids loses the attention of my audience. I was an animation major and I was always entertained by the “punny” or witty things animators would put in animations. For example, only in a make-believe world will you see a game that is so ridiculous it’s hilarious (i.e. a game called Egg Splat where players guess which type of bird laid the pictured egg.) I had plenty of those game ideas, but being able to think about a logical game that can be marketed to people was a little challenging.

When it actually came to the discussion part of the class, I was slightly surprised at some of the game ideas that my classmates came up with. A few games really stood out and it made me want to play them, but for the most part, I was a little disappointed. I thought a lot of the game ideas would be fun and entertaining, but I guess with the lack of some visual aids and/or aids that didn’t make a lot of sense, majority of them didn’t stand out to me. Many were variations of other games that were just tweaked slightly, which for some was good, but didn’t work out well for others. Perhaps my expectations were too high, or I was the only one who kind of got into this assignment, but my excitement level plummeted into boredom really quickly.

I don’t know if it was just for this particular assignment that I was ecstatic about doing my homework assignment, but I sure hope I could keep up that level of excitement up throughout the remainder of the class!