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.