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.