Masters Preparation: My Skills & Initial Idea

During class today we were given a small lecture about what we SHOULD be doing during our time on the masters course and a couple of definitions of what being a "Master" of a given subject means. A lot of it boiled down to making sure I get on with my work, put a lot of hours in, research properly and make sure I am overall, learning enough that I should be able to teach the tutors something new about my chosen subject in games design.

A highlight quote was: "If you aren't learning something new everyday, there is a problem"

A great way to summarise my goals for this year. Constantly learn new things in unreal engine, as well as build and expand upon my games design knowledge and theory. I will show my practical development through posts dedicated to figuring out problems and discovering new things in Unreal. I would like to accompany these posts with gifs and images, so you can see visually how my project is coming along. I will also conduct research into specific areas of games design and show my findings here through essays and reports.

As well as being informed about the course, we were asked to create this here blogger account (way ahead of ya) and answer various questions about myself to help visitors of my blog understand what kind of game designer I am and maybe even spark discussion with other students about our ideas for the year.

So without further ado let's move onto the questions:

What interests me?

My biggest interest is, obviously, video games. All i do in my spare time is play (or make!) video games. I love playing all sorts of games whilst carefully analysing them while I play. From this, I like to believe I have some good insight into what makes a game an enjoyable experience. At least I have my own insight anyway, game design is highly subjective and I'm always interested to hear how other people like their games to be designed too. 

Just for fun, here are some of my favourite games: 



Crash Bandicoot: N Sane Trilogy

Mario & Luigi RPG Series (I love them all!)

Spyro the Dragon

Kingdom Hearts II

Super Smash Bros 4

Rayman Legends 





What skills do I bring to the table?

Alongside bringing my own game design theory to the table, I'm also decent at blueprinting in unreal engine. It's incredibly satisfying to finally get that one mechanic to work that you have been working on for a while. Bringing a game into a playable state is what I live for, I'm hoping to get a playable prototype of my current game idea by next week. I'm constantly learning new things in Unreal, and I'm only going to learn more this upcoming year. I also like to design levels that are intuitive, and have a heavy emphasis on player exploration and discovery.

I really enjoy creating design documents on paper. Getting my thoughts down onto a readable, visual format is very satisfying to me as it's a perfect way for me to show off my development work as well as help people understand what I wish to accomplish with my various game projects. I can produce these pretty quickly, as I'm usually very passionate about my game ideas, so more development work the better.

I'm very dedicated to a project once I set off with it, so tons of hours of work will be happily put into it, increasing the overall quality and quantity of my projects. One thing I always like to tell myself is that I should treat my student work as if I'm already at a full time game design job. That means 8+ hours of work a day at least, with one day of the week being a rest day where I just chill out. You could be the best game designer in the world, but if "Richard" has worked for 40+ hours and you have only worked 10 hours, Richard's work will ALWAYS be better than yours, get to work.

What is my initial idea for my MA Study?

Over the summer I have had a huge urge to create a light, turn based RPG. Now when I say RPG I’m not talking huge, open world environment, fully voice acted cutscenes, thousands of different kinds of weapons, with 100+ hours of gameplay. That is excessively ambitious for just one person to produce. I’m talking about a lighter version of the RPG genre where many of the conventions and practices of the genre will be included, but will be implemented to be a lot smaller in scope whilst not taking away from what makes those certain conventions enjoyable to RPG fans. 

Why an RPG?

One of the main reasons I want to create an RPG is to further expand my unreal engine knowledge. A lot goes into making an RPG so I will have to learn many new things I might not have touched on before in unreal engine. Another reason I want to make an RPG is to have an excuse to create many different characters that I can have fun designing mechanically. Alongside this I can work on designing how they look and what kind of personality they will have. A project with many different characters gives me a lot of creative freedom to work with as well as giving me a basis for my research work such as researching into what makes a good character design both visually and narratively.  

Experimenting with my own narrative and character dialogue has always been an exciting premise to me but I have never decided to dive into it before. I’ve always focused on gameplay and JUST gameplay with most of my personal game projects. This time I would like to test myself by creating a good gameplay experience as well as creating a story and likeable characters that players can get invested in.  

For me, RPGs having a clean and original UI is super important. With UI you have to think about what they look like visually, are they accessible and easy to understand, are there appropriate and satisfying sounding sound effects on buttons presses and menu changes? Among other fine bits of details I might not even know about, or consider. Being able to research and build my own conclusion as to what makes a “good” UI will benefit me greatly for any future projects I develop. 

A recent standout for really good UI design is the game "Persona 5"
 it's stylish UI alone made it stand out from other JRPGS

You can find a separate blog post here, detailing my RPG game idea (Link Coming Shortly)

That's about it for the questions, I've rambled about myself enough. Very excited to get to work so I'm off now to start visualising my RPG. I hope people reading will enjoy the ride! 

Time to get back to work!

Another year, another attempt at maintaining a "professional" Games Design blog.
(This time I'll keep to it for sure)

After a fantastic summer of working in QA at the TT Fusion studio (and the Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy coming out) it's finally time to begin work on my Masters degree in Games Design at Uclan. I'm looking forward to getting back to what I love which is cooking up games for people to enjoy.

Working at TT Fusion was very fun,
and I can go back after Masters!

One of my favourite games <3

After an...interesting, induction week of being shown around Preston car parks we were finally given a rundown on what we can expect to do during our time here at masters and shown some great examples of work from past students. One of the quotes i took away from the talk was:

"A good masters project is being able to provide an original insight that will make you stand out as a designer and will make people want to listen and read your thoughts and processes into what you do, to use as encouragement into their own pieces of work"

For now I'm going to use this quote as motivation for the work I do this year. My goal will be to provide and build upon my own personal games design thoughts and opinions that will hopefully gather the interest of other aspiring games designers in the hopes that maybe one day, I could be a designer that other people can look up to.

Which brings us to another quote I took away from the talk. It was something along the lines of "Answering a question" and answering that question with well thought out research and practice. So since Friday I have been messing around with what sort of question I would like to answer. At the moment I have a couple of questions in my head that I could answer, an example is,

"What makes a player character so enjoyable to control?" - What goes through the head of the player whilst they jump, slide, shoot or perform any sort of action in game. How can controls be explained easily and intuitively through natural gameplay? How can level design be affected by what actions a player can perform?

This will be a good question because of it's vagueness. It's not a question that can be easily explained. There are so many different factors to consider that relate to the question. Game genre, control schemes, character design, animations, there can be so much research and theory to it that it would be a very interesting and enjoyable question to answer. One of the things I always look for in a game is if the character feels good to control, does the character have weight to them? Can they use their abilities in many different ways? Are they moving at the right speed? Does the player character look good from certain camera angles? My natural curiosity of the subject will drive me to research thoroughly and produce reliable theories that the vast majority can appreciate.  

Along with this question, I have been writing down an idea for a game I would like to create during my masters and relate it to my research work. I won't give it away just yet, but I'll leave a clue. It's about...

Clowns.