A history of computer games, part two: 1980s - 1990s

Beginning of the 1980s was when game publishers really
started to grow, creating the likes of electronic arts that are still about
today. With these publishing houses came all sorts of interesting new types of
games, that were named genres. The genres developed were technically innovative
and were released fairly early within the 80's era of gaming. In most cases they combined different
elements of different genres to make, in a sense, a superior genre. For example
elements like puzzles, action and exploration would be combined to make it more
compelling and appealing. The legend of Zelda was a good early example of
this.
After the release of Microvision in 1979, Nintendo went
about developing the technology in handhelds in 1980. Nintendo improved LCD technology
so that battery life could be preserved for longer and increase their
reliability. Due to this improvement the handhelds would only need watch
batteries and could be made smaller.
As 1983 come to a close, the gaming industry experienced
losses more damaging than before. This
event was named the 'crash' of the gaming industry, causing bankruptcy and the
end of the second generation of console. A contributing factor to the 'crash'
was the development of poorly-designed games.
Between 1983 and 1985, the third generation of consoles
emerged, most popularly the Nintendo 8 bit Famicom. Multiple improvements were
made in the form of the controller. A joypad took over paddles and joysticks
with an 8 direction D-pad and with two
or more action buttons. This now became
the standard for consoles.
1990s, the decade of innovation, this is when the
development to 3D graphics occurred, creating the rise of the real-time
strategy and first-person shooter genres. Early 3D games contained flat shaded
graphics and simple texture maps. The gaming industry as a whole developed,
becoming more mainstream, teaming up with the music and film industry, bigger
budgets for games and larger development teams.
The top contenders were the sega saturn, nintendo 64 and playstation. It
was this point in console development when cartridges were beginning to become
a thing of the past after being taken over by CD's, however the Nintendo kept
the cartridge system, remaining one of the few in production at the time.
The sixth generation of consoles started with the
dreamcast in 1999and featured new aspects to consoles like internet gaming and
web browsing. The dreamcast was also the
first home console to display standard definition all the time.

Thoughts so far....

I've Just had a performance review before my formative one at Christmas and disappointingly it wasn't good. I think the course team are genuinely disappointed in the whole of the year for the amount of effort we've put it in.  The course team want to see more work from us. With myself I don't think its effort that I'm lacking, it's the fact I'm quite slow at whatever I do so it doesn't reflect on my work very well as in quantity. I focus too much on getting all my drawings looking good rather than doing quick sketches that are wrong and improving them. The course team have said it's about showing your working out and how you got to your successful final piece.

So to improve on this I have decided to do more still life in my free time, even if it's just my hand or something really simple, just continue to draw it over and over until I get it right. I may even start taking my journal to the pub for example, just to scribble while I'm socialising to build up a wider range of ideas for next assessment.  This course is a big step up from college so I just need to settle into the swing of things and I'm sure the speed of work will take  care of itself.  

I started my architectural project a few days ago now, I'm finding it really difficult to get the shape of the building I chose. I keep messing up the geometry so that when it renders there's harsh shadows on the material I assigned to it to check for problems. I'm trying my best to correct  them but there are so many vertex's  hanging about that don't do anything it's hard to find out what effects what. I'm debating starting again but times getting shorter so it seems a bit risky. When I open the UV editor it's such a mess that it seems like starting again would help but I'll see how  it goes.  The textures I got for this building aren't tiling great either, I've spent hours on them so its really frustrating to see your efforts going to waste.  

A history of computer gamesr: my personal gaming history

When it comes to my gaming history, I didn't really explore too much when I was younger. The first game I can really remember playing was when my dad passed down a small handheld game of space invaders, that was extremely simple with just a grey screen with black spaceships, a D pad and an A and a B button.  From this amazing device, I moved onto a similar handheld game based on the first Terminator movie, where you just shot robots that were advancing towards you.  After this, I moved onto a Nintendo Gameboy colour where you were able to explore the amazing world of Pokémon, not quite managing to catch them all. There was also the classic super Mario  that I always enjoyed playing and still do. I also remember cards you could get for the Gameboy that had roughly 50 games on one card, which was quite cool for a device as small as the Gameboy. Weirdly I think I picked one of them up from a holiday trip to Spain.

The next milestone in my gaming history was the Playstation for one of my birthdays. I have a lot of fond memories of the Playstation, playing games like Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu, time crisis with the huge grey gun controller and Fifa 98 with square shaped football players. The first game i got with the Playstation though was crash bandicoot which was always a family favourite, spending hours riding hogs, bouncing on papu papu's head and breaking boxes.  The next console I owned was the Playstation 2, I got it for Christmas and my parents couldn't pull me away from it all day. I think the first game I had on it was WWE smackdown, back in the days when I believed it to be real fighting. Playstation 2 was the first console I played that had an analogue stick, a big development for controlling assets, which gave your thumbs a bit of a break from the harsh edges of the D pad. My favourite games for the Playstation  2 was Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3. They really stick out from the ridiculous amount of games I had because there was a good degree of realism unlike other games, especially in snake eater where you had to eat to survive, and the stealth side of it was just so fun to engage with, you never got bored of it. 

From here I brought the PSP. This was a great console to play on the move and make long journeys a bit more bearable.  The graphics were a big step up from playing the Gameboy and are still quite good for a handheld console. Again my favourite game was Metal  Gear Solid, but on PSP it was a lot different, similar to a strategy game, where instead of free roaming  you had a certain amount of moves before the enemy had chance to move so you had to watch their behaviour and plan your moves wisely.

My most recent console is the Xbox 360. I also have the Kinect for the Xbox, which in my opinion has beaten the Wii hands down when it comes to fluidity of game play and graphics, plus reduced the risk of me putting a controller through my TV screen. My favourite series of games for the Xbox, is Assassins Creed. Surprisingly I'm not really a call of duty fan, I prefer to free roam, which I think Assassins Creed achieves tremendously.      

For future gaming, i would like to see myself putting on a headset and sensors to pick up my movement  truly making your actions the controller. I think for first person shooters that would be the ultimate experience. To dream a little bit further ,why not in the future create an idea like the film gamer, where you control an actual person through the scenarios of a game. Then when I'm probably no longer alive I think gaming will turn into a concept like Tron where life is just a continuous game that the majority of us get sucked into. 

Thoughts so far....

The first few weeks of my game art have has been one giant learning curve to be honest. To begin with I thought I had all the fundamental drawing skills within visual design to be able to cope with what we were asked to draw, but I was tested in more ways than I thought. I have covered areas like one and two point perspective, rendering techniques, crating techniques for vehicles and lighting methods.  I have visited the local canal, Bradgate park, a local museum to focus on dinosaur bones and the surrounding university area to look at perspective of buildings. Perspective is something that I have always struggled with, so learning useful tips about plotting off the vanishing points and following the lines with your pencil have changed my work dramatically.

My favourite task so far in visual design has been the dinosaur bones. It was a nice change to focus on something with a more natural form, and in my opinion they turned out to be some of my best work so far. The particular areas I have struggled on in visual design are the drawing of the vehicles, not so much the perspective but capturing the realism of the metal surface through rendering. I will have to work on this because I know I'm rendering too heavily. Overall though I think I have made a good start to visual design.

Game production on the other hand, was an absolute nightmare to begin with. On top of having no experience on 3ds Max at all, I've always found it hard to translate things into 3D and my initial models showed it. The first model which was a dalek, I was embarrassed to even open the file if there were people in eye shot. A second year helped me to start it off by showing me the use of reference images on planes. This has been a valuable technique ever since.  Looking on the positive side though, i guess i can only improve from here. The next model was a wheelie bin. I found  the modelling of this a lot easier than the dalek, but unfortunately it was spoiled when I made a disaster of the texture. I can see where i went wrong though, i need to focus on the texture more by setting it up better and using the texture space more efficiently. The next project is to build a house, I'm dreading it, but to get the result I suppose I'm going to have to knuckle down and put some serious hours in.   

Blog Introduction

Writing about myself seems a really daunting task but here goes. I’m Alex King and I come from a town on the outskirts of London called Dunstable. Throughout education, I had always shown strength in and passion for art related subjects whether it was art and design or graphic design, that was when it really dawned on me that I wouldn’t be a hundred percent happy unless I was working in an industry that involved art. Even though I have fairly strong drawing skills, I have always lacked 3D experience, so by joining this course I was hoping to build my skills more on the 3D side of things this year. This may be difficult for me at first due to having no experience what so ever on the 3D computer software, but after all that is why I am here, to work hard and develop myself as an artist. In the first year I would also like to build strong relationships with my class mates and lecturers so that i feel there approachable, as am I, for support when it comes to improving our weaknesses. Apart from gaming obviously, I enjoy the normal things a guy of my age enjoys, like music, going out, socialising and just generally having a laugh when I can. It’s good to keep a good balance between these and work so that working hard doesn’t seem like a chore.
When asking a game student what they dream to become when there older, I bet you get a lot of 'concept artist' answers, well here’s another one I’m afraid. I know it’s an extremely difficult field to get into but I'll give it my best shot. For me the most appealing thing about being a concept artist is having freedom with your imagination and drawing influence by simple observation, for example visiting a country with different civilizations then coming up with your own ideas loosely based on your experiences for a game or even film. The crucial skills for this area would have to be an exceptional imagination and a good understanding of perspective, emotion and mood to really capture scenes or characters in as much realism as possible. I think the whole aim is to produce a believable concept that would have as much of an impact on the viewer as a photograph or piece of fine art. 
At present I think I have the basics of a concept artist like the attention to detail, imagination developed through experiences in my life and a strong drawing style developed through years of fine art practices like life drawing. Having said that, my skills when it comes to computer aided work are very limited and I know that a large quantity of concept work is digitally editted. I also think that my personal experiences, when it comes to visiting new places and engaging with photography to document findings, could be broadened because it is a very usefull tool to improve my imagination and give me a better understanding of achieving realism within my work. I plan to improve my weaknesses by putting the time and effort into the digital and 3D elements of my work. To do so i will talk to second and third year students for support and advice and just practice regularly by modelling simple objects around my home.

A history of computer games, part three: 2000s

The first decade of the 2000s showed huge shifts in in gaming. Nintendo kind of faded into the background failing to hold peoples interest, Sega decided to pull out of making hardware in the gaming industry, Sony began to show its dominance and take the lead with the likes of the playstation and Microsoft, best known for PC software, made their own console. 

To kick-start the period, the Dreamcast was launched in 1998 and was the first console that came with the luxury of a built in modem for online gaming.  Every major console that has come out after this has had the ability to support an Internet connection or has had the option available as an aftermarket add-on.  This shows that the growing popularity of online gaming challenged companys to provide online services as this was becoming a deciding factor when it comes to console sales and popularity.

The next release, that over shadowed the dreamcast before it had even arrived, was the

playstation2. A year later Nintendo brought out the gamecube, but it wasn’t particularly a success

due to its lack of adult themed games and was deemed a bit ‘childish.’ So again, developers faced more challenges trying to provide for a growing adult audience, changing the trend in gaming and creating new types of games. Console gaming generally continued the complex and sophisticated adult gameplay trend, which Sony started. Even Nintendo, who were more known for steering clear of mature rated games, started to release games like resident evil to keep up with the public’s growing appetite for more complex gaming.  The popularity of greater realism and more complexity within games is still a huge demand from gamers today, for things like better graphics for a more intense gaming experience. The innovation that the playstation 2 started may be the reason it still sells steadily eleven years later.

2004 was the time when handheld consoles really took off. The Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP were brought out within the space of a month of each other.  In attempt to reclaim dominance over Sony, Nintendo developed their technology to a two screen system, which distinguished them from the rest of handhelds. The two screens, one for display and one touch sensitive was extremely popular. Nintendo continued to develop, bringing out the DS Lite in 2006, DSi in 2009, and DSi XL.

In November 2005, Microsoft brought out their Xbox 360 followed by the PS3 in 2007. These consoles were like nothing seen before.  Both of them had HD graphics, large storage and integrated networking.  They were the only gaming devices that could begin to rival PC's. They were huge developments in technology, becoming two of the biggest icons in gaming to date. Nintendo also brought out their Nintendo Wii shortly after the PS3, proving to be successful due to its motion interactivity and family friendliness , creating the big three: Xbox 360, PS3 and the Wii.

With the fast development in technology, there was huge strain put on companies in the shape of larger development budgets needed. This created heavy losses for some developers, sometimes causing entire projects to be cut.

In general, the gaming industry are under a lot of pressure. Like the majority of the entertainment industry, there is huge pressure from us as consumers for these companies to churn out game/ films etc as quickly as possible because we're anticipating a sequel that's bigger and better. To do so these companies use a high turnover of staff and expensive technology which they never cash in on with sales making game development a constant losing battle. 

A history of computer games, part one: 1950s - 1970s

Who decided to use computers to have fun? What was their background? Initially, the computer system that was used to play the later games and linked to military use was a simulation firing at airplane targets using buttons, knobs and cathode ray tubes. The first real sign of a computer being used for fun was visible in 1952 When A.S Douglas, a Phd student in Cambridge, created the first graphical computer game, a version of Tic-Tac-Toe. Douglas's Phd was wrote on Human-Computer interaction. The student background of gaming  was also shared by the next innovator of computer technology, when William Higginbotham of MIT made the first ever video game called 'tennis for two' in 1958. In the space of 6 years you can already see that computer gaming was beginning to grow inside the higher education sector, using technology that wasn't widely available to the public because the majority of early computer games ran on universities mainframe computers in the United States and were developed by individuals as a hobby. Again MIT continued their exploration with computers but this time designing a game that was meant to be played on a computer in 1961. This was by a man named Steve Russell and the game was called 'Spacewar'. The game put two human players head to head, each controlling a spacecraft .  The simple fact that the game was designed to be competitive by facing players against each other and distributed over the internet, shows me that spacewar was purposely built for entertainment , therefore in my opinion, MIT were the first influential group to use gaming for fun. Even before spacewars, MIT were showing rapid progression within computer gaming with mouse in a maze; where you could control a mouse around a maze to find cheese whilst avoiding obstacles, Hax; which used two switches to control graphics and make sounds and a simple game of tic tac toe using a light pen. The next step for the computers entertainment usage was to be transferred for display on a television set. This was accomplished by Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison. Baer and Harrison were also joined by an MIT graduate. Again education shows its influence when it comes to shaping the early years of computer games.   Development continued till a prototype could run several games like hockey, ping pong and handball in 1968. The early 1970s showed the first signs of video games being used to make a profit, with the first coin operated arcade machine installed at the Stafford student union in 1971. Also in 1971 a coin operated version of spacewar was made, this was a landmark in gaming because it was seen as the first mass produced video game that was up for sale commercially.  Now you can see that the production and use of video games has slowly moved away from the educational sector and starting to become more mainstream due to its availability to the general public through arcades.  From arcades, video games were then made available in the home in 1972. This console was called Odyssey which was released by Magnavox and designed by Ralph Baer. It was released in the USA and driven by big marketing tactics like adverts, starring Frank Sinatra, to boost sales. You can now see a definitive shift in drive to produce games and consoles, they were no longer being produced for a hobby, but to make a profit in the entertainment industry towards the end of the 1970s.