Assignments for DAYS

So the game design program at VFS has a bucket of assignments to go along with its 8 classes a term. Some are easier than others, but for the most part they all require quite a bit of work. Just thought I'd give you guys an idea of what kinda stuff I'm doing here! The following is the first assignment for each class.

Pre-Production: I had to do something called an "elevator pitch". The idea is that you step onto the elevator in your office, and there in front of you is OMG THE CEO. And for no apparent reason he/she says to you "Hey, you seem like a guy that has it all together. What kinda game would you make?" OK BE COOL, WHAT DO I DO WHAT DO I DO. What you do is give them the extremely condensed version of the game idea you've had in your head for so long you can practically recite it in zeros and ones. You have one minute to explain what the game is, and hit only the most important points. You then hand them the one page document you conveniently carry around with you detailing some game specifics, and then go on your way to get your shirt dry cleaned as it is now drenched in sweat. Ideally, your one minute talk and the contents of your document are so impressive your game gets made and makes your company millions, and you get a huge promotion. Everyone wins! Even the dry cleaner!

Level Design: Level design kinda threw us in the deep end. Our first assignment gave us a week to create a level for a 3d single player game, and then present the level for the class. It didn't have to be incredibly specific, but the general idea needed to be there, and you had to be able to walk listeners through your high-level vision. The biggest problem here was that we had to choose from a list of existing games to design for, and those games were also on the list our instructor gave us of best level designs of all time. "Oh, so you wanna learn how to throw a football? Cool, let's start you out running some drills as an NFL quarterback." That's kinda how it felt. So I made a level for Super Mario Galaxy all about magic mirrors, and the instructor seemed to like it. Touchdown?

Cinematics: I had to break down a dramatic scene from any medium. This was pretty much a basic exercise in identifying the different kinds of camera angles and movements and such. I ended up picking a scene from Breaking Bad, because the last few episodes were pretty recent on my mind, and it had a lot of great examples of the techniques we had studied. Here's the link, but seriously don't click on it if you don't want any Breaking Bad spoilers. This is from the second to last episode: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Game Theory: Our final in this class is actually making a board game of our own, so a lot of our assignments have been leading up to that. To start we had to write down 20 board game ideas. 10 had to be a theme for a game, 10 had to be specific mechanics. Themes are particularly easy, as I could literally just look around the room and say "Lamp. You're a lamp, do lamp things better than other lamps." Boom, one idea. And that's no joke, replace the word lamp with cupcake and that was word for word one of my submitted ideas. The instructor enjoyed it quite a bit. 10/10

Game Art: Let's just say that out there somewhere is a picture of Chris Pratt with Steve Buscemi's eyes and a Rocket Raccoon tattoo. That's kinda cheating though since I mentioned that assignment in an earlier post so BONUS ROUND our second assignment was to take the texture of an old building and make it "grungy" in Photoshop. This involved a lot of searching for things like "big dirt picture" in google and then overlaying some of the results on the building. The result was a slightly dirtier old building with some graffiti added. I don't wanna jump the gun at all, but between the two assignments I now know how to do absolutely everything in Photoshop. Or at least I assume so, because we have since moved on from the program.

Programming: So after studying computer science for four years, programming is pretty natural. We had to make a text-based dice betting game. I finished it up during the first class and basically became a TA after that. I sincerely hope that doesn't come off as arrogant, I genuinely enjoy being able to teach others. The instructor is brand new to teaching so a lot of people are struggling, and I'm just glad to help.

Storytelling: We spent the first class learning all about the 3 act structure, so for our first assignment we applied the knowledge. I took Borderlands 2 and identified the different elements that made it a 3 act story. It was nice because Borderlands fits the structure in a really obvious way, with major events marking each new act. But it isn't as obvious as saaaaaaaaay Diablo, which LITERALLY tells you which act you're in. I only mention that because a bunch of people chose that game for this assignment, which kinda feels like cheating a little. So I got to appear pretty smart without much extra effort aka the AMERICAN DREAM. AMERICA!