Semester Two Direction

Semester one concluded with my project of three separate documents containing detailed level designs for three different game genres. They included an action/adventure (God of War), an action/adventure (Legend of Zelda) and an unique concept themed around stealth and platforming (Camoleon). Starting the new semester, I need to decide on a direction to take my MA in. I am confident in my design abilities but my ideas are worthless unless I can prove they work and more importantly, are as fun in reality as they are in my head. For that end, I feel the focus on Semester Two should be finding a way to take my designs off the paper and into reality.

There are several options open to me, modelling software or game engines. To be honest I’ve always been intimidated by modelling/game engine software. I don’t like not having full control over my work and a machine often decides to ignore what you tell it and deletes things spontaneously. On top of that I don't have much patiences for computers, at least with my design work I know Photoshop will work if I want it to. Our tutor seemed to heavily push a game engine called 'Unity 3D' on a few of us. At the same time I have recently begun looking into the 'Unreal 3 Engine'. It feels like a bad idea to learn two complicated game engines at once, so I'm going have to make a decision on one of these engines soon.

I think it's important to consider my 'post degree' career, which of these engines is going to be more useful in getting me a job? From that perspective Unreal seems more logically, lots of the game developers are using the Unreal Engine to develop their games these days so it would be a useful skill to add to my CV. On the other hand Unity seems more 'indie' friendly and apparently offers alot more flexibility and creativity than Unreal.

I’ve always admired independent games but I can’t say I’ve ever really been into them that much, the aspect of video games that’s always appealed to me is being able to interactive with fictional worlds. Games have the potential to be one of the most powerful narrative mediums when they get it right. Sadly they rarely do, most titles are plagued with abysmal dialogue, zero atmosphere and clichés so overused it would make Michael Bay cry.

Developers still don’t appreciate the unique storytelling tools that this medium has and continuously ‘borrows’ from filmmaking (very often doing a poor job at that). Millions and millions of dollars pour into AAA titles, so why are so many games failing in this subject? It’s been really inspiring to see indie developers getting stuff right that big developers aren't. In a Semester One blog I mentioned what a great job Limbo (PlayDead Studio) did at creating such a strong moody atmosphere. Likewise, Amnesia (Frictional Games), is one of few genuinely terrifying games on the market. Amnesia has probably done more to evolve the horror-survival genre than any other big AAA game has done since Silent Hill 2. On top of that the innovation in the indie markets even the itunes charts is significantly more impressive than most best selling console games.

So whether to focus on a engine that the big developers use...or the small ones. I think the next step to take is to try both and see which I get along with best.